Great Vid, What ever you did to get it to recommend out, keep it up & you will grow quickly with your delivery & knowledge being fun but informative 😃👍👊
It's good to see I'm not the only one failing at forge welding axes. A faw tips for ya, 1 heat the metal slowly, by slowly it means pumping more and more air in to the Fire, over 15 to 20 minutes. 2 if it looks like it hot enough, it might not be, it's got to be bright white not yellow, but white, 3 have fun, don't put your self down for not having it work out right first try
I forge outside under an oak tree, no roof is good if you have some trees for shade. Here in South Carolina we have lots of tall trees and me being at the bottom of a hill also helps reduce sun. The light you get is very similar to mine… its not ideal, but it works as long as you’re not in a field with direct sun exposure. thanks for sharing
RU-vid recommended this out of nowhere and I gotta say this is some really good stuff. The only thing I'd recommend is to try to figure out a better microphone solution. If you aren't perfectly in line with the mic or if you're banging at the metal it can get really hard to hear.
From one blacksmith to another, great video! This came reccomended out of the blue and I'm glad it did. I'll definitely be checking out more of your vids. Totally agree on the shout out to Christ centred Ironworks, great channel for budding smiths. I'd highly recommend Black bear forge too.
I partook in a smithing class myself this past fall. While I yet know little of the trade, I knew all too well what the sparks meant 🔥 This was a great refresher for my smithing knowledge. I thank thee once again good sir! Please send my regards to the family of that unfortunate cameraman 39:33.
Nice ! I'm glad youtube recommended me your yt channel, your primitive forge setup is really nice! One note i'd have about forge welding, after making more and more complex damascus blades, i always had spots of scale in my pattern (i dont grind the plates, i just fold them and put the ingot back in the charcoal), but what i've noticed is that welding hot will actually help you so much in cleaning your steel, simply beacause above yellow heat, forge scale becomes gooey, and with the borax it will get expelled very efficiently. Some parts of your axe aren't welded beacause of scale, and a hotter intitial weld could have helped with that. Also, dropping the borax on top of the billet or item or whatever is kind of ineffective, from my experience at least. i watched the old timers carefully and japanese smiths, and they tend to sprinkle their flux directly on the welding surface just before welding. Basically clean up with water explosions, brushes, whatever, then sprinkle your flux (don't need much), and then fold. That should give you a wonderful and clean weld ! I don't know if that's the camera but the quench looked very very hot, and i suppose you're well aware about how brittle hot quenched steel will be , even after tempering, compared to cherry red quenched steel. Otherwise, that was a really nice video !
Thanks for the forge welding tips! I'm not the greatest forge welder, and I probably did over flux. Yes, in this case it was the camera which made it seem hotter than it was. 👍
Normalizing is the process of refining the grain structure in your steel and relieving the stresses that naturally develop when you change its shape. It's done by heating the piece of steel up to critical temperature (roughly 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, or non-magnetic temperature) and letting it cool in the air, not speeding up the process by quenching blowing on it etc. It makes the hardening more effective and prepares the steel for its future quench.
