A quick tomahawk/trade axe. 

I don’t see why not. It’s always good to work with scrap.

Cheers.

I did that back in the day, Rail spikes aren’t really ideal. They take a lot of effort to drift without help, and the narrowness at the eye makes the head more likely to work loose.

@@MalcolmPL yep

I've had a couple commenters asking about trade knives. I did a series of videos last year where I made a hunting knife. A trade knife would be more or less the same procedure, the only real differences being the omission of the wooden mallet step, and the subtleties of the grind. Anyway, forging videos tend to do very poorly. So unless I get inspired, I'm not going to do them very often.

Edc is not a thing in Canada.

It’ll do for twenty minutes work.

Not a problem.

Fire hardening makes wood more brittle, so there isn’t much point for certain applications.

@@MalcolmPL Thanks for replying man. Again, love the channel.

This is not the same axe. The eye doesn’t need to be perfectly aligned. Some axes were made deliberately offset for certain applications.

If you're not adverse to spending a few dollars, Most cities have a metal supply store for welders and the like. Mild steel bar stock isn't that expensive. Aside from that, you can often find a lot of cheap scrap at yard sales. You could also go talk to someone at a scrap metal recycling place. Some of them are happy to sell for cheap. Though some are not. If you want metal for free you need to go for a lot of walks in the country or in industrial districts. I've found all sorts of things by the side of the road. One option is to go out by the rail tracks and look for spikes to flatten. When they do maintenance, they just throw the old spikes on the ground. Something else you can do is save up worthless bits of metal like bent nails and galvanized steel panels, and then go trade them at a metal donation bin for a similar weight of good metal.

@@MalcolmPL sounds like a plan of action.

Cheers.

Your local farm supply store will sell coils of fencing wire, I think this stuff was 18 gauge, you don’t want 14 or thicker as it is too hard to tighten, you don’t want thinner than 20 or it will burn through. You also don't want galvanized wire as the fumes when heated are mildly toxic.

In that both our voices are simultaneously high and low pitched.

@@MalcolmPL That, cadence, as well as some of the jokes and references made in other videos

Historical steel contains a significant amount of silica impurities from the less efficient smelting process. These impurities act as flux when welding, reducing the buildup of forge scale and allowing for cleaner welds.