Blacksmithing at Home

by Paul Marstall

My wife and I were watching some videos on how to make some leather stuff, and she mentioned at one point that to really do justice to one design she would need a skiving tool. This raised all sorts of questions, the primary one being, “What the hell is a skiving tool?”; followed closely by, “What the hell is ‘skiving’?”

Well, as luck would have it, one of my favorite YouTubers (the wonderfully-named Torbjörn Åhman) recently made a video on how to make a half-moon leather knife, and it turns out that the steps could be largely replicated by an amateur like me using stuff I have lying around at home.

check link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9weLiq1OksI

The blade is made from an old 10” chop-saw blade that I had collecting dust in the corner. Chances are that I will find a reason to need the blade now that I’ve ruined it, but that’s the chance you take. I had three abrasive cutting wheels for my angle-grinder, and it turns out that I needed all three of them to cut out the shape from the high-carbon saw blade. But I just made it and didn’t need to break curfew for an unnecessary trip to Lowes. Next was some profiling on my wonderful 2x72” belt grinder which I basically just barely finished kitting out before the virus hit last month. Got everything most of the way to where I needed it, then I went to the heat-treat.

I don’t have a heat-treating oven handy yet… OK to be fair I have a 50% constructed home-made one. But it’s been 50% completed for almost a year now. I’ve really got to get off my butt and finish up, but where will I find the time?

That’s sarcasm, right there above. It can be tough to convey in prose. But I’m being very droll, honest.

So my heat-treating process was a butane torch and a jar of canola oil that I collected after we did some quarantine fondue the other week. All I needed to do was to get the edge of the knife up into the orange range, then quench it into the oil. After that I sanded it down so I could see the metal and then heated the middle of the blade until the edge was starting to turn a golden color. Then I dipped the whole thing in the oil again.

The worst part of the process was that the oil smells of garlic and beef, and quenching glowing metal in it transferred the delicious smell to every corner of the garage. And I had not had lunch yet.

After that, I spent a couple hours grinding and polishing the blade to about 2000 grit or so. I put a 10-degree bevel on one side (a “chisel grind”) and smoothed over the transition to make the leather-cutting a little easier.

Next came the handle. I had one last piece of stabilized maple burl left in my pantry, so I grabbed that and threw it onto the little penmaking lathe that my dad foisted on us the last time we visited. He’s got like seven lathes and only really uses the great big one, so he’s been trying to get me to take one home for years. I’m glad I finally relented. A couple hours of lathing later and I had something I was fairly happy with. My original plan for the bolster was to take a piece of brass or copper piping and hammer it into shape like what Torbjorn does in his video, but I found a copper pipe-cap that was just about the perfect size. After mangling the piece with a Dremel tool for a while, I threw it away and pulled out another one. I screwed that one up too. But the THIRD one turned out OK.

Assembly was simply throwing a bunch of 5-minute epoxy at strategic spots and then cleaning up all the other spots that were covered in epoxy but weren’t supposed to be. So there we have it. A blacksmithed blade that never got anywhere near a hammer, forge, or tongs.

Find me on Nova Labs Slack: @Pat Marstall

Flatline Forge Presents

by Gari Jimenez-Lugo

How can someone bring an 18th-century blacksmith shop into the 21st century? A multiple camera video setup, of course! Gari is currently isolating at the Nicholas Creek Forge workshop and is going to be hosting a series of virtual blacksmithing classes in the near future. Classes will cover a wide range of skills and skill levels. A few class subjects include Power Hammers, Forge Welding, Knifemaking, and a few other things that they’d like to keep secret until the class is announced. Gari Jimenez and Carter Hundley are both experienced demonstrators and journeyman smiths that have worked together on various demonstrations and events for a few years.