One of my favourite Walter Sorrells’ videos. I like the idea of recycling old stuff into new, beautiful things. In fact I like that much more than making things from new materials.
It was Walter Sorrell’s videos what inspired me to try and build my own belt grinder.
Whilst the blade was the most time-consuming part, in a project like this there is still a lot of metalwork to be done. Once the handle is turned, next step is to make a bolster and a guard, and fit all these four parts together. Precision is important here. Not precision as in adhering to measurements from a drawing, but precision of how the parts fit together. I have made myself a set of measurement from the game 3D model that I aim to get near to, but I will not fuss about getting them exactly.
The bolster I have made from a piece of pipe of unknown origin that has almost the exact diameter that I actually want to have. It is also completely free of rust, which has made me suspicious whether it is not stainless steel. No matter, I have simply cut off a piece and polished it.
I did not polish it on the belt grinder all the way through the finest belts, but I stopped at around Trizact A16 and I went straight tot he buffer after that. Only I did not use the felt wheel straightaway, but a coarse sisal one with coarse polishing paste, then a felt wheel with medium polishing paste, then felt with fine polishing paste and finally felt wheel with jeweler’s rouge.
In order to be able to work with the piece on the buffer safely I have hammered it on a round dowel. During the polishing I took care to turn it in different angles against the wheel in order to get slightly satin surface – buffing in one direction only makes mirror polish and I did not want that.
The bolster is not completely round, but very slightly oval. I wanted to be able to feel the edge alignment of the dagger when held in bare hand. To further help with this I have also filed a fine grid of grooves on each side of the bolster. With that done, I could affix it to the handle. For that I have coated the relevant part with hot hide glue, stuck the bolster on there and hammered a few wooden splinters between the bolster and the handle to center it properly and to hold it in place.
With that done I had to shape the tang on the belt grinder so it was continuously ever so slightly smaller than the blade and square the shoulders (those were round prior to hardening because a sharp edge could lead to the tang breaking of in quench). To protect it from scratches I have covered the whole blade with masking tape. When the tang was shaped, I have affixed the blade in the vice with additional protection of a wet rug, and I shaped the hole in the handle to fit by the previously shown burning technique. I had to be careful for the heat to not overheat the blade base, but to be hot far enough to get a fit where the bolster was mere 3 mm from it.
Next piece in this jigsaw was the guard. I wanted that to be between 3 to 3,5 mm thick, but I had no suitable piece of steel that was not pitted too much. In the end I had to cut a piece of a structural steel V profile that was way too thick. I have spent rather more time on truing it and grinding it down to desired thickness than I wished to. Unlike for the bolster, I had no good and comfortable way to hold on that small flat piece of steel safely, so I nearly ground my finger tips off. Luckily only fingernails got slightly chewed and I have learned how to do this safely later on, when I was polishing it. I have to finish the supporting table for my belt grinder in order to do these finicky things.
When ground to slightly above the desired thickness, I have punched the centre and drawn the design of the guard. I like to make my own tools, and I have indeed made my drawing needle, but I wimped out and bought the compass. The work required to make it might be fun, but it would be way too much time that would definitively be spent better elsewhere.
Next step I have just drilled a 4 mm hole in the center, 0,5 mm smaller than the maximum width of the tang at the blade base. In order to transfer the outline of the blade base onto the steel I have poked a hole with the tang into a piece of paper – Lipton tea box was the right thickness and firmness.
Cutting the hole for the tang I have done with a fret saw. In the past I broke a lot of blades whilst doing this, but it seems I have finally learned how to do it properly this time. I broke none and it was done in lickety-split. Note the aluminium covers for the vice jaws. These are important, because I need the piece to be held firmly and safely, but I do not wish the hardened jaws of the vice damage the soft steel of the worked piece.
After cutting the rough outline of the hole came of course the most difficult part – fitting and shaping the hole to fit the tang precisely. This took the better part of an hour with fine and diamond files, and another hour or so the final shaping and polishing of the piece to the same finish as the bolster.
Here you can see the face of the guard. The other side, facing the hand, has rounded edges. I was thinking about doing that, then I was thinking about doing both sides flat and in the end I had no choice because before I figured out how to polish it properly, my hand slipped and I chamfered an edge that I did not want to chamfer. I was lucky – the result is comfortable even against bare hand and it looks good. I might however take some more time for polishing this piece. A few hand courses with coarse hematite might be needed, right now it shines a bit like a bare arse among the bushes.
Here you can see the parts assembled. Of course there is a lot of masking tape covering all the bits that I do not want to get dirty or scratched, and most of the focus is on the mess that is my workbench. But you would not expect me to show you pretty pictures at this stage, would you?
The dagger of Ciri in The game Witcher 3 has handle turned from some yellow wood. Looks almost canary yellow in the game, but orange in the extracted 3D file without the in-game lighting. There is only one wood that I know that has such color – Osage orange – and only when freshly worked at that, it ages to dark brown. There is another wood that has very nice yellow (vanilla) color both fresh and aged, and that is Black elder. I would love to make the handle from black elder, because it is beautiful hard wood and it is a pleasure to work with. Alas, I do not have a piece big enough. So I had to go with Sycamore maple which is pale yellow and ages to slightly darker yellow.
I begun by cutting an approximately 50×50 mm rectangular block on my circular saw. Dried maple wood is unfortunately not only very hard, but also has very small pores, so it tends to burn on circular saw. There is nothing that can be done about it except to work slowly. Unfortunately I only had this one piece of big enough maple wood at hand and it had a very deep split at exactly the wrong place, so I had to shorten it to 120 mm, 6 mm shorter than I wanted to based on the proportions from the 3D game file. But since I am not aiming for exact replica and I will make slight changes to the design of the dagger anyway that should not bother me. But it does, go figure. I can gain a few mm on the bolster and on the rondel later on if I decide it needs to be done.
Next step was to turn the handle. This is where I can show off with my Poor Man’s Lathe that I have built twenty years ago. Unfortunately I did not have too many opportunities to work on it yet, so my experience with wood-turning is extremely limited.
First came fixing the piece of wood between the points of the lathe. On the left the drill holds not a drill bit, but a special piece with a central point and three screwdriver like flattened teeth to hold onto the workpiece. Normally I would hammer it into the wood, but sycamore wood is very hard. I had to pre-drill the holes. On the right there is a round tip that goes into a depression in the wood. It helps to put a bit of grease or a few drops of oil on this point, otherwise the friction can and will burn the wood and it will smoke.
Second comes turning the wood down to a cylinder of the maximum diameter the final piece is supposed to have. On this part it is important to work with slow rotations because the workpiece is not yet symmetrical and on high rotations it would vibrate and it could potentially fly out of the lathe and smash window in best case, or throat in worst case. Neither of these lessons have I learned first hand, and do not intend to. Better safe than sorry.
So easy does it, no rushing, slowly chipping on the edges until there is a symmetrical cylinder rotating on the lathe. Then the speed can be increased and final shape can be formed. Since this is hard wood, the angle of the chisel blade to the piece is held at close to 90 degrees and I was more scratching than cutting the wood. Trying to get a continuous cut on completely dried hardwood like this is asking for trouble unless one is very, very good and experienced at it – in best case the chisel bites in deep and no matter how sharp it is, it tears of a splinter instead of cutting, ruining the piece. Worst case the leverage could damage the chisel or tear it from one’s hands and… I shudder to think about it. I learned the first lesson here, but fortunately not the second one. For the same reason also the chisel support should be kept as close to the workpiece as possible the whole time.
When turning the shape I first turned town the part for bolster as precisely as I could under the circumstances (the circumstances being that I have no bolster prepared yet). then I turned a piece of handle down to the final width and lastly I turned the middle. Apart from the overall width on both ends I did not do any measurements and I turned the handle down to a shape that simply “looked” right to me.
After that I could remove the chisel support and could polish the piece with 80, 120, 180 and 320 grit sandpaper. This I have done partly on lathe by turning the piece and partly in hand sanding lengthwise in order to remove all visible scratches. Sycamore wood is very hard and can take very good polish, but this piece will get dirty yet no matter what I do, so there is no point fussing about that too much yet.
Last step is making the hole for the tang. I do not have a drill bit long and thin enough for this, so I drilled as far as I could and I burned the rest through with a piece of steel of approximately the right shape held in a vice and heated up with torch to red heat. This has produced an awful lot of smoke and took a lot longer than I hoped for. Not an enjoyable work, if you ask me. Not particularly safe one either. Even with the door open wide the whole room has filled with smoke hat stung the eyes even through protective welding goggles.
Towards the end, when the burnings from both ends met in the middle and actually made a hole throughout the whole handle, the smoke spouting out of the end could be ignited for a short time. That was fun to watch and a bugger to make a picture of, with burning torch in one hand and the phone in the other. I have managed only this one picture, where the flame almost goes out already. After I made hole through, I have closed the gas valve on the bomb and put the hot torch on granite stone on the table. Thus I was finished for the day with nearly thre hours of work done. Two hours later I went back to to check nothing burns and on finding my shop smoke-free I could go to bed.
Next step will be to find suitable pieces of steel for the bolster and the guard, and shaping them together with the hanlde – and the tang – so everything fits together.
Matt Easton in his capacity as an antique swords collector tells the fascinating story behind one of his swords – who its original owner was and why he (probably) requested this non-standard issue blade later in life. To me personally is this one of his best videos.
After many hours and a few more due to setbacks (scratches, aaaargh) I finally got to the point where the blade was polished with the 7.000 grit paper. This is very fine mirror polish, but it looks a bit, well, strange, unnatural and artificial. There are different options for how to deal with this and I decided to go for buffing.
Buffing is an abrasive process that uses some very fine polishing compounds on some soft carrier (cloth, felt, paper, leather – all are usable and all have their advantages and disadvantages). In this case I have first used very fine commercial polishing compound applied to a felt wheel. Since I do not have space for a set of specialized buffers in my workshop, I have to do with a drill held firmly in a vice.
Buffing a blade on a wheel can be dangerous process, I think more dangerous than grinding. The main thing to keep in mind in this regard is that the cutting edge orientation must be opposite to how it is held during sharpening – that is, the edge should point in the direction of the movement, not against it. Forgetting this is very, very dangerous, since the blade can bite in the soft wheel in an instant and be hurled in random direction with great force. A care has also to be taken near any and all edges.
Buffing with the commercial compound has produced very fine finish very quickly, but I was still not satisfied with it. It looked too artificial, machine-made. Luckily enough there is an even finer abrasive at hand – jeweler’s rouge. Nowadays I could buy half a kilo of ferrous oxide for mere 2,-€ (with 4,-€ shipment, ha!), but since I have no shortage of steel dust and rusting iron, I am making my own with a process that I devised when buying stuff online was not yet a thing. Not to save money (it is actually the exact opposite), but for fun. I have used all I had yonks ago, but I have just finished making a small batch from the steel dust ground from my previous dagger and it came handy this time.
I do not have a separate buffing wheel for jewelers rouge yet. So I lightly dusted a piece of cloth from an old t-shirt soaked in WD-40. Emphasis on the word “lightly”. Jewelers rouge is very mild abrasive and if it is clean enough, it will not scratch the blade too badly even if not too precisely ground and sieved. But it is good to use the cloth as a sort of final sieve and work the abrasive slowly through the cloth to the blade, and not apply it directly on it.
Theoretically this buffing can be done at home while watching a movie, because it takes a looong time and is boring as hell, but if you do that, you have to be careful. Do not be tempted to scratch your nose or touch anything, that stuff is vicious. It is not dangerous, but the very fine red dust is very strong and vivid pigment and unless you are extremely careful, it gets everywhere and you will have pink fingerprints on everything you touch. Pink switches, pink door handles and definitively pink soap bar. Oh, and if you forget to wear respirator whilst grinding the stuff and sifting, pink bogeys.
I have spent approximately two hours running the oil soaked red rug along the blade and the blade is finally and definitively done to my satisfaction. Next step is to find materials for the guard, bolster and rondel. And a fitting piece of wood for the handle.
Matt Easton and Tod Todeschini got together to make a really interesting video that also pertains to my current project in work.
The breadth of Tod’s skill and knowledge is incredible. When I grow up I want to be just like him.
I am not done with the polishing yet, since the hardened layer was too thin and I had to start all over again with hardening. This time i made it during the day with controlled temperature. And also a different hardening mixture because the thinness might have been caused by phosphorus in the steel, which inhibits dissolution of carbon. I shall not go into technical details here, maybe another time in another project, but the result is twofold – the dagger has now really, really hard surface, maybe too hard, it eats abrasives. And it has a few discoloured spots, which I was trying to avoid by using charcoal. It is a beautiful blade nevertheless so I had to solve the conundrum how to keep it from scratching. I cannot just lay it on the workbench, because there will always be abrasive grains from angle grinder, sandpaper etc. and highly polished surface gets unseemly scratches in a blink. So I decided to start on the scabbard.
I intend to do proper, wooden scabbard and for this I have set aside a piece of fast growing poplar (Max 4 (Populus maximowiczii x P. nigra)) that I grow in my garden for firewood. It is very light, porous and soft wood, feels in hand like balsa but does not split or break very easily – it tends to keep hanging on threads. That makes it an ideal material for a scabbard. Since it is a modern fast growing hybrid, it is not authentic material, but it is closest to authentic material (P. nigra) I can get my hands on straight away. The piece I have here is from a four year old tree that I harvested this spring.
Cutting a rectangular block with a draw knife and a plane, cutting the block in two halves and facing them, all was a matter of mere minutes. The wood is extremely easy to work with.
A scabbard must be tight enough for the knife not to fall out with its own weight, but not so tight as to make it difficult to pull it out. So I had to cut half-blade grooves in both halves (I also took this opportunity to use my belt grinder to sharpen all my chisels and carving knives, it was long overdue in any rate). For this a bit harder wood would probably be slightly easier to work with, because with wood this soft I had to be really careful not to cut too much. I did however cut a little more than for a perfect fit, because after the grooves were cut, I had to rough the halves with a hacksaw blade for greater surface and therefore better glue adhesion which takes about half a mm off. There is a special type of plane for that, but I do not own it and even if I did, this is too small surface for a plane. The hacksaw blade is an old and tried trick. Only because the blade teeth are asymmetrical it is important to turn the blade around in order to get symmetrical grooves, or check the direction of the teeth and make them match.
Thus prepared wooden halves were then glued using a hide glue that I cooked from sinews a few years back.
I do not like working with hot hide glue, but not only is it a medieval authentic material, it has one huge advantage over modern glues – it can be redone and repaired with the help of steam over boling water multiple times, so any mistake can be corrected.
Not that I ever make mistakes that must be corrected. The mistake I did not make and therefore did not have to correct this time was forgetting that since the scabbard is hollow, the warm gooey snot gets squeezed not only on the outside, where it is of no consequence, but also on the inside, where it constrains the already tight fit. I also most definitively did not make the scabbard too tight the first time so it was nigh impossible to get the dagger in and out. But after a few days and multiple attempts … What am I saying. After I glued it and clamped it over night it was fit and ready.
Later I left it dry naturally in the sun for a day and I heated it with hot air pistol with the blade inside so the wood forms better around the blade and also to dry it as much as humanly possible. After that all that remained was to cut it to proper length and chamfer the edges. Now I have safe storage for the blade during final polishing and a piece of work done at the same time.
Since I am currently in the process of making a rondel dagger like knife, I think it is fitting to hear bit about rondel daggers from someone much more knowledgeable than I am.
The long pause was no pause at all. I worked on the blade every evening and but I could not give it more than half an hour to one hour a day, so the progress at this stage was very, very slow.
After the hardening came tempering, which is rather easy and dull process. I wanted the blade to be primarily tough, not overtly hard, so I gave it two half hour courses at 200 °C in the baking oven. This has removed a lot of the hardness and almost all of the brittleness. It should be easy to sharpen and maintain sharp but it should not snap when hitting something hard. With a kitchen knife I would lower the temperature to 150 °C or perhaps perform differential tempering.
Next step is polishing. This is by far the most time-consuming and dull part of making a knife. Here are all the belts on my belt hanger. Before hardening I went all the way from left where the pink ceramics belts are (P40-P120) through middle blue-green zircon-corund (P120-P320). After hardening I gave it one more pass with zircon-corund P320. Very thorough pass, because the blade was slightly pitted from the failed hardening attempts. After that came the last third of the belts, which are Trizact belts (A65-A6, which is equivalent of P300 to P2500). There are six Trizact belts, and each took approximately one hour. Had I more experience I could perhaps speed it up by 30-40%, but it would still be a lot of time – I want the blade to be as near perfect as I am able to make it. So at each stage it is important to remove absolutely all scratches made by previous belt.
Of course thick blue marker helps here as well, because otherwise I could get easily confused about which facet I am working on. As I learned when doing my previous dagger. To be able to see the marks from previous grind, one does alternate the angle – that is for this facet for example I was grinding diagonally with the point down, so next step will be with point up. Were the facets perfectly straight and not wobbly at all from the beginning, the process would be fast. Alas they were wobbly and I made them wobbly in the process in decreasing degree of wobbliness untill I reached nearly straight towards the end. What I learned here is that I really, really need speed control for my belt grinder, because during polishing slower speed of the belt would speed up the work – I would get better control of the blade and most importantly, the edges of the belt would not make divets and scratches so fast as they do. However even as it is it is working well, but requires a lot of skill that I do not yet have. A lot of eyeballing was involved.
Today I finished on the grinder but I am still not done. For a mirror-finish more work is needed. Kitchen knife would get a few passes on a buffing wheel at this point and that would be it. That would give it nice mirror finish but the scratches from the trizact belts would still be somewhat visible. For this one though now comes excessive use of elbow grease. I will work my way through a series of wet polishing papers P2500 all the way to P7000. For this I use my trusted gizmo that has seen me through multiple blades already. A piece of hardwood board held in a vice, with leather strap glued on it. On the leather I can lay a strip of sandpaper. Sometimes I rely on the adhesion between the wet leather and the sandpaper to hold it in place, sometimes I hold the paper in place with the help of two springs and something made from fence wire I cannot put a name to.
After that I will be done with this phase and I will be able to perform the last step in making a blade – signing it.
I still have not resolved how to do that. I used to have my own maker’s mark consisting of my stylized initials. It was very easy to etch or engrave and I would love to continue to use it. But by purest of coincidences that very same mark was a few years later independently designed as Bluetooth logo. We’ll see what I come up with.
When working in US some twenty years ago I borrowed from the local library in Ketchum (ID) the Ed Fowler’s book Knife Talk: The Art & Science Of Knifemaking. Unfortunately I did not have time to read the whole book so I basically just skimmed most of it and therefore I do not remember all. I can recommend the book with good conscience though, because I did read one chapter in full and remember its title and contents well – “Knifesharpenophobia”. I consider that a sign of good and persuasive writing.
I have remembered about this book and this particular chapter recently when I was obsessing over properly hardening a blade for a knife that in all likelihood will never be used to cut anything harder than a mushroom or perhaps some soft wood during a walk in the forests. And maybe not even that.
In the past I have made knives from improperly hardened steel. Not that I wanted to, I did not have much choice. I did not have high-quality knife steel available just a few mouse clicks away, and even if I had I was so poor I could not afford it. And I lacked a lot of the knowledge I have now so I could not improve the steel I had.
Two of those knives are occasionally still in use (by me) whenever I go to the forest.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size
I let you in on a little secret: They cut perfectly well. With the second one, made from low-carbon structural steel, I was able to do even quite a lot of wood carvings and heavy cutting/chopping when I was camping in the past.The first one is made from some unknown martensitic stainless steel that I was not able to harden for unknown reasons.
However the softer than normal blade did not impede work in the slightest. All that was needed to do was to sharpen the blade a bit more often than is perhaps usual and it was much quicker to sharpen than other blades. Just like Ed Fowler says in his book:
…Granted, edge holding is a fine attribute for a knife. The problem is, knives that seldom need sharpening generally are usually too hard to sharpen when the time comes to sharpen them…
I could not agree more.
I think that for anyone who starts to learn the knife making trade it is vitally important to keep in mind the fact that for thousands of years people were perfectly capable of hunting, cooking and fighting with blades made from soft metals like copper, bronze and wrought iron. Sure, steel was the ideal material of choice once discovered, but untill the invention of blast furnaces it was hard to come by in larger amounts and it rarely had consistent properties.
I hate it when I come across some smug knife maker who berates some young beginner for forging or making knives out of the steel they can get their hands on. Some people even feel the need to hurl derogatory epithets at knives made from rail spikes or structural steel. I wish they stopped doing that, because it accomplishes nothing except maybe discouraging a future master from pursuing further the hobby they enjoy. Obsessing about the frequency of sharpening and edge retention is not necessary for a beginner, I would even argue the opposite. And why the aversion to knives that need sharpening? Well, I let Ed Fowler have a say again:
…What is knifesharpenophobia? …I define it as an irrational, excessive and unnecessary fear of sharpening knives. This is a malady that strikes fear in the hearts of all too many knife lovers and users.
And to make the point even finer you can watch this video where it is demonstrated that properly sharpened flat bar from 5,-€ low-carbon structural steel can cut just as well as 100,-€ katana:
I normally do not like to watch sports, but I liked this very much. Somehow these fencing matches look interesting and much more real than modern fencing or over-choreographed Star Wars jumping matches.
In the very first minute is a moment of two opponents sizing each other up, both deciding to wait for the other to strike. The tension in there is very intense, palpable even through the screen.
Very interesting is also the match that starts at 12:47 between a very diminutive woman and a huge bulky man. Lesson to be learned here is unfortunately that in these competitions size does matter – to my amateurish eyes she does not seem any less skilled than he does, but she just does not get within striking distance before he does. Longer hands mean longer reach and longer reach means huge advantage. So everything else being equal, the bigger guy wins. I certainly hope she did not feel discouraged. I am not fan of competitions for this very reason – it is not only a test of skill, there is always a lot of variables outside of anyone’s control that can affect the outcome.
And the most memorable point is that in the last match a sword breaks (32:39). What is interesting about this is that it does not break at the striking point, but just near the handle, at the strongest part. Given that this sword was made from modern steel with modern technology one has to wonder how often did swords break in the past?
I lied to myself when I said that I will continue even though the blade might not be hardened properly. I just could not do it. Even though the knife will in the end be just ornamental thing, a wall hanger that will never be used, I could not bring myself to making a knife with improperly hardened blade. So I had another go at it. Fail again, the steel was still soft and it was not only surface – I tried to break of the tip and it bent and straightened as if it were copper. So I had another go at it, using water as quenchant – a big risk because in high carbon steel this can lead to the blade cracking or even exploding into bits. Fail again, it remained soft.
At this point I had to reconsider. I was convinced that I did everything correctly, testing with magnet for the austenite transformation etc. and I am already relatively good at assessing the temperature by the glow color, so I did not think the failed quench was due to wrong temperature. The quenchant also could not be the problem, since I hardened three blades in it without problems and one at the same time as this one failed.
So I surmised the problem lies in the steel. Perhaps it was surface hardened file and when I did the test with ferric chloride I had all the hardened steel ground off already, so it could not show in color. Or perhaps I burned off the carbon due to the not-so-well functioning protective coating. I consider the first option to be more likely. Anyway, I could throw this blade away and start anew, or I could do what I mentioned before – surface harden it.
Theoretically this makes for a very good dagger, because under the hard and brittle surface remains soft and tough steel, which means the dagger would not break easily when hitting something hard – like an armor. But it is a long process that burns through a lot of charcoal with results unsure. And the layer might be too thin and get ground off during polishing.
I succumbed, knowingly, to the sunk cost fallacy and decided to go for it in an attempt to save the blade. This is what I have done:
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
First I have cleaned the whole blade thoroughly with angle grinder and a twisted knot wire brush wheel. After that I also scrubbed the whole blade with abrasive pad (similar to Scotch-Brite, only different manufacturer). Whilst doing this I noticed that the blade got slightly blotchy and pitted, so there was definitively more material burned off than I am happy with. Inevitable after three failed quenches. Theoretically quench could be attempted infinite amount of times – but practically the blade would burn away pretty soon.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Secondly I took my limited supply of stainless steel foil and wrapped it around the blade forming a little trough. Not wanting to perform more than one experiment in one project I did not experiment with the hardening material and I used powdered charcoal. Any organic material would do, really (sugar works extremely well I might add, and in the future I intend to experiment with bone dust and various mixtures from easy to get chemicals), but they give blotchy, coloured surfaces, and with charcoal I had a best shot to get evenly hardened and evenly coloured surface.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
After filling the trough about halfway with the powder I crimped very tightly the edges, folding them twice and pressing the folds together in a vice. It is important to get the package as air tight as possible. But the tang was not packed in, because that was supposed to remain soft. Thus prepared package was now ready for heating. For this I have used my improvised setup build from fireclay bricks, but without forced air supply (a fancy way of saying I left the vacuum cleaner in the workshop). I filled the fireplace with charcoal, buried the package in it, lit it and left it to its own devices over night. Under an impromptu cover because it was raining.
The next day the package was burned through near the tip, a bad sign. But the charcoal dust was still all in there and it did cling to the blade very nicely – I had to scrape it off. A good sign. But I decided to repeat the process once more just to be sure.
Today, after I returned from work, the weather was again good so I could have another shot at quenching this cursed thing.
And it is a success. The blade is hard as glass on the surface and there are no cracks that I see after cleaning it with wire brush. I hope no hair thin cracks shows later on.
Tomorrow the blade goes into the baking oven for heat treatment 150°C half an hour. Maybe two courses.
As I was saying last time, I have given my belt grinder a complete overhaul.
Since now I knew that I can do it and it will work, I was not so stingy about spending money so I bought for about 50€ a few beech wood profiles 50×50 and 50×30 mm, some new ball bearings and a few other thing.
First thing I have done after that was to remove the belt support and compeltely dismantle the idler wheels. I have rebuild them. Instead of using threaded rods throughout I used about 100 mm length of a 10 mm rod on which I cut thread on the ends – on one side just about 1 cm each side . This has provided better fit with the inner opening of the ball bearings. I also shortened the inner spacer between the ball bearings so that I can sink in the nuts inside so it and the rod are flush with the wheel edge.
This has allowed me to to fix the wheels on the future idler on only one side, so I fixed them perpendicular to 50×30 profile and after that I got distracted.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The distraction was the spanning wheel, which I did not intend to rebuild. But changing belts was a bit awkward – I had to pull on the lever with left hand and change the belt with the right hand. And I got an idea on how to improve that. So I have built out of plywood a gravity latch that falls into position when the lever is pulled beyond certain point. That frees both hands to put on the belt comfortably and without hassle. When the belt is on I lift the latch, the spring spans the arm and after I let go the latch end lays on the top of the spanning arm without restraining it.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
With that done I returned to the idler. Whilst I did spend some money on good materials, I did not spend too much time with planning except in my head. So I was still working by mostly piling stuff on other stuff making it up as I go along. I did not bother with precision too much and relied heavily on epoxy to fill any gaps and I added dovels and sometimes screws for strength
The only thing that I actually have spent some time to make precise was the parallelity of the wheels.
On the idler I prepared two screws with wing nuts for fixing the platen, and on the other side are two screws for fixing the support table (not seen here, but the positions are the pale circles in the lower half).
With that done I have cut two platens out of an old U profile that was rusting in my garden for years. Here is the final setup with all threee options visible. Left is setting for 20 cm hardbelt, middle 12 cm hardbelt, 10 cm slackbelt and right is 24 cm slackbelt.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
After this was done and tested – which I have done by truing the platens by alternating them as support/workpiece against each other on the grinder – I gave the whole thing a new coat of paint. The machine blue and the detacheable idler arm pale grey.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It is Amazing how a simple paint can improve the looks of things, isn’t it? I am glad to say that it all works as intended.
Next step is to make second detacheable arm with changeable wheels of different diameters, for hollow grind an fullers.
