Wrought iron Viking adze

it's been a little while since we've taken a look at any of the projects out of the master mirror find and i thought today maybe we would get back into this and i was thinking about one of the adzes in here and more specifically the smaller ads right here i thought that looked like a nice simple ads so i think we'll take a look at doing that it's shown in a little bit better detail here on plate 26 in the book with some cross-sectional drawings and this is at a scale of one to two so we need to make it twice the size that it's shown in the book one of the easiest ways to scale things like this is just with a pair of dividers so we can set our dividers and see if we can figure out what the the base stock size is here so we measure that and then we can just go to our ruler and that's 3 8 of an inch so that means double that is going to be three quarters of an inch or about 20 millimeters if you're in metric i'm sure the viking smiths didn't care what the sizes were that much they used the material they had in whatever size they had and made the appropriate tool and it was a little bigger a little smaller probably wasn't that big a deal now if i look at the shape of the eye and i measure the eye out what i find out is that it is pretty much exactly the size and shape of this thing that we made earlier that they have labeled in the book as an anvil and i never really thought this was much of an anvil it may serve as some small light duty anvil but i think this is a drift and it's exactly the size and shape of the eye in this ad so it very well could have been the tool used to make that and that's exactly the tool i'm going to use to shape that eye now these tools would have been made in wrought iron and today i'm going to go ahead and use wrought iron so a punched eye and wrought iron is not very strong because of how short this is right through here and the grain structure of the wrought iron that's going to split the odds of that surviving and long-term use are very slim and i doubt that they were made that way so i think the way to do this is an asymmetric eye where you set it up pretty much just like the bowtie weld except it's all off to one side and the weld ends up right in here somewhere so when you spread this blade so when you spread this blade you're not stressing the weld as much because it's up in here where you're going to do less work and down here is all the original material now in wrought iron it's all full of forge welds and seams anyways that might not make much difference but i think that's the way i'm going to go use that asymmetric eye and we can kind of look at how that's set up and to do all this i've got an old piece of wrought iron this is something that i got from somebody out of state i have no idea what it originates from or anything else it hasn't been the highest quality stuff and i suppose i should re-weld it and laminate it a few more times and refine it some more but we're going to see how it does for this like this it's about an inch and an eighth diameter i'm going to reduce this to that three-quarter inch size that the original shows before i start work so i'm going to cut a piece of this off turn it into a rectangular bar and then we're going to start working on the eye but that means it's time to light a fire and get to work [Music] [Music] the round bar was cut three and a half inches long forges out to about four and a half inches long is about an inch by three quarter i'm not trying to make exact reproductions i'm being inspired by the master mirror find and trying to make tools that are of that style but they don't have to be exact when i'm done because i want this asymmetric i've shifted everything over and that first line is an inch and a half from the edge here then three quarters and from that center mark the center of that space there i've come over here and i've gone two inches from there so an inch either side of that center mark and i'm going to put some center punch marks in here so i can find it again hot and these will all be obliterated before we're done forging so they're not going to show in the finished product i will then use a skinny fuller to come in at those marks and fuller down and then we'll draw out in between the marks and that'll make more sense when we get to that this is quite easy under the power hammer with just a quarter inch round rod but i thought i would do most of this by hand at the anvil now we've got a nice bar established i think these could have been spread further apart here because my pole is going to be way too skinny there i'm going to have to do some extra work on it so i think that will do for that next thing i want to do is i want to put a little bit of a bevel on this end piece here so that that forms our scarf when we wrap this around and i'm going to bevel from the side that has the pole not the side that will be the inside of the eye and this is just a short bevel that comes to a point nothing fancy and that will help us blend when we do our weld now i want to thin the section between this fuller and this fuller and that will form one side of the eye and this will be the other side of the eye we'll do that just by putting the fuller over the edge of the anvil and forging down that one from there and this one from here you can start drawing out some little ears if you want ears on your ads and the original does show ears on the bottom side only and which sides of the bottom doesn't make a bit of difference until you put the air on there no big forging here i'm just trying to smooth that out a little bit and turn it around to do the the other side exactly the same way so now those don't look perfectly symmetrical to me so what i do is i take a pair of dividers and i measure one and then the other one this one needs to go about a quarter inch further so i'll turn it around stretch it out a little further it's also just a little bit thicker through here i think so got plenty of material to work with if you need to you can draw it out with a peen a little bit better to do this on the inside though so it doesn't show on the outside and just use the flat of the hammer on the outside i see a little bit of a delamination inside that eye that i don't like but hopefully it won't hurt anything it's a little bit right there at the edge of the cross peen that's going to crack all the way across i hate this old wrought iron there's a little little bit of a crack forming here and it looks like it may telescope all the way out to here and this source of wrought iron just gives me nothing but frustration it's a lot closer to the right size though now i'm going to go ahead and fold this up i'm pretty sure it's not going to like it but yep broke right off and this kind of shows you how this is going to fold and break that is the downside of working with old wrought iron i have no idea what the history of this is if it was severely abused in use it was just lousy wrought iron to start with talking to people like peter ross he says that it often has to do with just the chemical composition of the wrought iron and some of the stuff that was more utilitarian just didn't have the refinement that you need for this kind of work i have another piece cut i'm going to go ahead and bring it up to the same point and i'll meet you right back here when i get it to that stage and we will see if we can go ahead and get this done out of wrought iron if i can't then i'll switch to mild steel and we'll start right back here with the mild steel but i'll let you know which one i decided to do in just a few seconds okay after a quick break i've taken the time to forge another blank for this and this one looks a lot better i don't see any serious problems with it it does have just a little bit of delamination right through here it's the same wrought iron hasn't had anything else done to it other than just reforge the blank but i think it's gonna be okay we're gonna fold it up and find out i put the long section down on the fire because it needs to move the most that way we should be able to get our eye now that eye is a lot bigger than i envisioned it being so i have way more material that i need here i think but we're gonna we're gonna finish it and see what it looks like i'm gonna get some flux way down in the joint there i also notice that my scarf section is wider so we're just going to have to try and forge that in as we do the weld should have taken the time to measure that now we want to bring that up to welding heat remember this side is going to heat slower than this side so start with that down but you may still need to turn it on the fire some remember wrought iron welds at a much higher heat than mild steel so this is where you want that lemon yellow color light quick blows i'll start forging that down just a touch more flux to make sure that everything's good but feels like a good solid weld so far back in the fire this is why i like to make my tongs out of mild steel these got red hot but i can't quench them because these are commercially made and there's some kind of an alloy so they will get brittle if i quench them so i'm going to find a different pair of tongs so these cool down no reason to keep working after it starts to drop below welding heat or at least not on the weld it's a good time to start refining some of this outer shape here i'm going to start drawing this down if it gets a little bit too cold i'm going to quit the last thing i want to do is share my weld but i think the weld itself is good i think the next thing to do here is going to be to try to clean up that eye a little bit so we'll turn it back around we'll put the drift in and see what we ended up with i'm going to start just by cleaning up the back where the pole is a little bit and it's kind of crooked so we're going to have to draw out this other side which is okay because it looks a little bit thick you want to drive that in too far because you could shear the weld if it's not as good a weld as you might like you kind of get the idea there i'll do that some more and keep drawing this side out i'll probably go to the pin of the hammer the next heat and put the drift in from the other side also if i heat this with that eye down it'll be hotter and it will move more than the other one it's getting a lot better we still need to keep drawing this side out a little bit more it looks like hopefully that drift or anvil as they called it will finish the job if not i'll have to go to something bigger i'm alternating which side i put the drift in each heat and i think that's where i'm going to quit at least for now it's a hard thing to hold on to there now the original this is pretty much square on the end and it's got a fuller mark so i think we'll do that before we turn this around i'm going to start by reducing this in size this also makes our pole much bigger than it was so we may not have needed to leave as much material as we did initially beginning to think maybe starting with half inch thick bar might have been sufficient that's much closer to that square dimension that i see in the book i'm going to put that fuller mark in there that'll definitely need to be re-drifted again after that but just lightly for now i'm going to do a final drifting when this is completely finished and the blade is done so that'll do for now now we're going to turn it around and we're going to work on this other end and hope i can get a long enough blade out of it and for that i'm going to switch to this four pound double diagonal pin so i can use it as a drawing hammer this way the other way it spreads we may end up using that if we need to spread the blade but to start with i just want to draw it out i mostly want to make this longer but i'm also going to let it start to spread and we may have to spread it intentionally here in a little bit because it isn't spreading very far so we'll go to the other side of this now you can see where my original weld is coming out there and i've got just a little bit of it opening up so i'm going to re-weld that not very much of it is opening but just that little tiny bit [Music] that looks like it sealed down pretty well that's all we're going to do for right now i think the next thing is to put our cutting edge in i'm going to use a piece of w1 for that so first thing i want to do is draw out a taper this way and bring it to a sharp edge for the scarf that is way more than i need but we can cut it that's not the hammer i want there gives me a mark i can find again this is a little bit too big so i'll do some trimming on it after we get the initial weld done but before i worry about welding i'm going to clean out my fire a little bit a nice clean fire is critical to forge welding and my coal tends to be pretty dirty so i want to get these clinkers out there's a big one there clinkers all the impurities the flux the scale off your iron dirt and other junk that comes with the coal which is part of the problem with this coal just getting that one big one out is going to make this fire burn hotter and cleaner i'm going to go ahead and heat up the adds head looks like my camera battery went dead for this next segment so we're just going to look at the second camera that does not have as good of audio sorry about that but that's the way things go when you got a blacksmith running the camera i can balance this in the fire and not drop that off of there this is the way the old guys would have done it much more difficult thing than putting that little tack weld in i don't guarantee i'll get away with it if i lose that cutting edge i'll go to the tack weld out gently and give it just enough to make sure it's stuck it seems to be stuck a little bit more flux and then we'll get a little bit more serious about it and once it's good and welded i'll come back and i'll trim that junk off the edge there i got that w1 a little bit hot you see where it crumbled there at the edge so that's all going to have to be trimmed off as well that's a that's always a risk with different kinds of materials but i can trim all that burn stuff off and it's not going to hurt us any so we'll take a minute and trim this and that other side doesn't need much trimming it ended up getting worked in pretty well just a little bit there and i think we'll have it it also grind all that junk off of there now looking at this this is a lot wider than i think the original is i think it's narrower through here so we can draw out some in that dimension and pull this blade out a little longer it's still plenty thick through here so we can pull some more out there we're going to do that stuff next and we'll do it at a welding heat so we keep refining our welds as we do this without burning up our cutting edge anymore i'm going to go back to this diagonal pin because it'll have a similar curved profile to the horn and that way i should be able to get nice even surfaces on there lots of re-drifting of that eye after this but that helps a lot this is the smaller of the two adds so it's not too far off but i think it could have been longer in either what case it's still going to be a good usable tool i don't see any further sign of our weld opening up so the next thing is of course to turn it back around and try and fix that eye i screwed up so bad this is the usual routine you do all the rough forging on the eye but you still have to come back and straighten it later now when we fix this weld we push some material in here so i have to be a little bit careful not to get that real misshapen i may get in there with a file before we're all done and clean it up that way looks like the eye's a little more open on the underside so that's where i'm going to start my drifting here so that's a lot better take one more heat and then i think it'll be filing or die grinding in there this time i'll come down from the top i think we're going to drip this one more time after i do whatever cleanup i decide to do i mostly want it straight before i get to that point but i do think that's all i want to do with the drift right now it wants to drift crooked because of how odd that went together or so that cleans that eye up very nicely still has a little imperfection in there but it's certainly not going to hurt anything i still think i can get a little bit more stretch out of here and maybe a little spread there not a lot because it's getting kind of thin i just like it to be a little closer to the size and shape of the one that of the book work over this big fuller here try and leave a nice smooth transition this adds is also somewhat curved perhaps not that much i'm going to see if i can spread that just a little bit more not getting much out of it but just every little bit helps i'm just going to use the cross pin and try to get some more spread here bring that back up to near welding heat again as i refine that this is not the time i want to crack anything that little bit just makes me a lot happier with it i think i'm going to dish it a little bit this way give it some sweep and i'll talk about that a little bit at the very end why i decided to do that i don't think the original was done that way i think that's really all i need to do there one last look at the eye and i think we're done put my touch mark in it i'm going to let this air cool and normalize again and then i'm going to do a little grinding on the ears and make sure there's no cracks or open weld seams at the cutting [Music] edge [Music] me [Laughter] i'm going to quench about the last inch inch and a half i'm going to clean that up with a bit of brick here see if i can see some tempering colors run i'm not seeing any colors run there i'm just going to put the back end of this back in the fire and see if we can get the colors to run that way i'm looking for kind of a bronze the peacock color there is about the temperature i want it's starting to move there so i'm just going to watch it now i don't know if you can see that in the camera at all probably not then let's go back to the water now i'm going to quench the whole thing and there is our hardened and tempered ads head this has been a very educational project so far i don't do a lot of work in wrought iron for those of you who are new here i usually use mild steel and it's just what i'm accustomed to wrought iron is a different material and requires a little bit different skill set and attention to some details that you don't usually think of in mild steel like working it at a very high heat and not letting it get too cold but i think this is going to be a successful tool everything behaved well during the quench it's got those little flaws in there that i really don't think are going to hurt it i'm going to go ahead and put a handle on it i'm going to use it do some carving with it now i talked about putting a little bit of a curve in here or a sweep like a gouge would have a sweep and i did that because i typically use adzes for hollow forms i could do a little bit of green woodworking bowl carving spoon carving not a lot but that's where i typically use an ads and that's where this one will most likely be used also out of habit i always put the cutting edge on the inside because that's what fits best in that situation and that means you have to have an outside bevel and therefore it's it's still better for an adds being used on an inside surface if i put the cutting edge on the outside that means the bevel would be on the inside then that would be better for planting a flat surface or hewing a flat surface like we're finding boards and things like that and i think the original was that way there's no indication it had this curve so i've gone off the map a little bit and i might make another one that is a little bit more faithful to the original but i probably won't do a video on it although there is a much bigger ads and i will plan to do a video on that at some point in the future what do you say we make a handle for this thing i have a piece of oak this is a brushy oak that grows around here i don't know what kind of a handle it's going to make i've never tried to make one out of it but i thought we would give it a try today you [Applause] so yes so i wouldn't recommend gamble oak or scrub oak is a good carving wood i suspect it's strong enough for a handle but it's just cranky well in the interest of time i went ahead and took this up to the belt sander in the shop and finished cleaning that up but you could do it all by hand if you want to take enough time to do it and i would get better wood if you are this has a lot of knots i didn't see but i think it'll be okay for such a small tool i've also cut cross wedges in here this direction because sometimes with forged welding if you wedge too tight this way you could start to open that weld up i'm pretty comfortable this is a good weld i'm not too worried about it but it's not a bad idea to wedge it front to back instead i'm actually going to do it both ways and i like to put just a little bit of wood glue on the wedges also try to avoid steel wedges if i can no big deal if you like them but i'd just assume not have them if i could avoid it there we go now we're going to let all that mess dry and then i'll trim it all off well in spite of a few little rough spots during the forging this really turned out to be a pretty darn good little ads i think i'm going to be real glad to have it i don't think i'll be doing too much hand carving of this scrub oak it's awfully tough to work with but in the long run taking it to the belt sander did result in a decent little handle and i like the geometry of this ads it's going to be ideal for doing spoons and things like that so all in all i consider this a complete success i do hope you enjoyed the video if you did give it a thumbs up if you haven't done so already i would love it if you hit that subscribe button down there feel free to stick around watch a few of the other videos share the videos with your friends if you would like to provide financial support for the videos here at blackbear forge there are links down in the video description for both paypal and patreon those are merely donations in the meantime i hope you have time in your day to get out to your shop be safe wear your safety glasses and we'll see you for the next one you

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 225,393

Keywords: Blacksmith, blacksmithing for beginners, black bear forge, john switzer, Blacksmithing, Blacksmithing project, how to blacksmith, blacksamith shop, blacksmith forge, learn blacksmithing, wrought iron adze, viking adze, wrought iron viking adze, forging an adze, forging wrought iron, forge welding, forged, adze, bowl adze, carving adze, making tools, making woodworking tools, mastermyr, mastermyr adze, viking tools, making viking tools, mastermyr chest, mastermyr find

Id: 7e_GCb0DwEs

Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020