So, I texted my friend Kitten and said, “Hey, I made a spear. Do you want it?”
She replied, “Wait, are you, a white guy, asking me, a black woman, if I want a spear?” (pause) “Of course I do!”

I’m stupid about many things, when I get focused on a project and/or its outcome. The problem I have is the same as I had when I do any art: my house quickly fills up with output and I have to get rid of it or die in victorian clutter. I don’t want to end up in some police report as “apparently a shelf of swords fell on him.” Anyhow, that’s the real reason I periodically auction off a knife or a bowl or whatever. Actually, I don’t know the financial status of FTB right now, maybe I should check and see. But as it happened, I decided to throw down an “iklwa challenge” with Mike P, another bladesmith, and I’ve been finished with my entry for a while and his is still on the bench, 9 months later. I know he is doing some ambitious stuff but only vaguely.

The other name for an Iklwa is an “Assegai” – it’s the basic Zulu short spear. Chaka Zulu was credited for popularizing a short stabbing spear and shield combination and deploying his troops like somewhat-less-regimented Roman infantry. Mike and I had been going back and forth about the idea of doing gladii, but Iklwa seemed like a more reasonable starting point. (as the size of the work-piece goes up, the size of the smithy necessary to produce it goes up dramatically) in general you don’t really want to be smithing on something you can’t lift with your left hand, unless you have an assistant. But, of course, I wanted to make sure that any spear I made was tough enough to fight a Tesla Cybertruck and win. So I started designing.

From the beginning, I was thinking that it was going to be a heavy thing, as suitable for chopping as for stabbing. That was erroneous, of course, but deliberately so: a formation of spearmen with shields would not be chopping anything. In fact, period correct Iklwa are long and thin, sharp on the edges to aid penetration, but not heavy enough that chopping a panzer tank would get any notice from the crew. Mike and I had some fun discussions about that, concluding that (as usual) a lot of the construction and usage of blades was gated by the availability of good steel in low-tech conditions. The world history of warfare does this amazing technological change-over in the 1900s when steel becomes so cheap nobody hardly bothers even making iron anymore. I told Mike that what I was going to do was imagine a somewhat naive Japanese bladesmith encountering Zulus and attempting to make something they’d want. In the end (spoiler!) I made something probably a samurai would also find too heavy. I just can’t stand the idea of something I make breaking.

A lot of this metallurgy stuff is about figuring out how to put the right metal (the hard stuff that holds an edge) in the right place (the edge) and the other stuff where it’s supporting the edge. So, my idea was to make a billet of what I call “suminigashi” (water-texture paper) and some high carbon low-layer bars for the edges. The low-layer bars would be straight vertical grain and the suminigashi would be twisted and would show all kinds of cool interior action because some of the metals I layer in there are things like mild steel, which etch to a fetching soft white. Look, it’s a spear. It’s supposed to be dramatic, right?

The handle is also another problem. The traditional “most of the world” way of mounting a spear-point is with a socket, which, if you think about it, is a fairly small region of metal to take the shock of a Panzer IV. So I decided to go with a stick tang, like a Japanese Yari spear might have. That comes with problems of its own, namely that you’re using not so much wood up by the tip of the spear and you don’t want the tip to splinter sideways – this tends to drive the thickness of the shaft up. It also tends to make people like me think of using exotic hardwoods that are brutally heavy, or filling the wood with chopped fiberglass and epoxy. Because when you try to stab the tracks of that Panzer IV, you don’t want the handle to disintegrate before you do. So I hit upon the idea of a tightly fitted handle with lots of epoxy, and reinforcement rings to keep the sideways splintering problem to a minimum. We’ll get to that later.

So I laid up the billets, flattened them, clean ground them, and welded them into a mass about 7″ long by 4″ wide. Then I took an angle grinder and cut a deep “V” into the suminigashi about to the middle of the billet. Then it was back into the forge to draw out a tang, and then get it hot enough to weld shut the open front end of the billet and shape it into something spearish. I was a bit off with the V-cut since I eyeballed it, but the metal closed up OK, the tang got long (about 24″ of 1/2 x 1/2″ carbon steel near the point, and I had something that I was pretty sure would be noticeable if it was waved under someone’s nose in a threatening manner.

Then comes the process of cleaning and shaping and more cleaning and shaping and sanding and polishing and whatnot.

It was around somewhere in there that I realized that a big 6″ x 48″ woodworker’s belt sander could be equipped with a metal-cutting belt and could do a fine job of creating great big flat surfaces. Who wants great big flat surfaces!? Me! Me!

So here’s a test-etch on it before I started really getting into precision grinding.

One of the purposes of a test etch like this is that the ferric chloride will get, and stay in, any crack or bad weld. In 2 days there will be a revealing rust-spot. Here you can see how the twisted suminigashi core is holding the vertical stacked edges. You can also see by the haft of the tang, how I drew the entire blade’s material down into the tang. What you can’t see is that, for extra strength, I also put a few twists into the tang before I squared it off. Realistically, I know I am joking about stabbing armored vehicles with this thing, but the metal ought to be damn tough. The cloudy regions in the suminigashi are mild steel, which is not prone to cracking under stress. Someday maybe I’ll make a bar and waste it to see what it can take but – not today.

My original plan for the handle was to laminate some bamboo, until I discovered that that is an extremely fiddly job suitable only for the fly-tying set and for Japanese craftsmen. Instead, I grabbed a 3′ block of bubinga which I had in the stockroom, and cut it lengthwise, inletted it, laid it up. In the picture above you can see the retaining rings I made to keep the wood from splitting sideways. Making those was really interesting – cut a small 4″ long by 1/2″ piece of damascus from something, heat it and wrap it around a mandrel, then bring it up to welding temperature and try to get it to stick. I got the hang of it pretty quickly and even made a few bracelets. [wearing damascus steel bracelets or rings is a bad idea because if you snag them on something, the part of you that is wearing them will tear apart long before the steel does]

The thing on the side is the “skull duster” or violent counter-balancer. Since the point is heavy, I thought “let’s make the butt heavy too!” so the thing can be used as a sort of evil pugil stick quite unlike a stabbing spear.  As it happened, when I went to assemble the whole thing, the butt was going to be too heavy, so I decided on another pattern for the counterbalancer and just ground away at it.

When I welded up the counterbalancer I made a low-layer count bar, cut it into four, cleaned it and basket-weave stacked it, then very carefully welded it because, why not? Meschies-toi et saches la vérité am I right? Anyhow, it came out great. Grinding curves straight into the face of it made for evil points, which are also appropriate on the butt end of a thing like this.

That illustrates the guard assembly. The guard is a simple disk of twist damascus, hammered out, sitting in place to hold down the ring, which is 1/8″ welded twist damascus, fitted tightly over the wood. It won’t really stop a panzer but it’s kind of over the top.

One of the things I really liked about how this turned out is the bevels are machinist flat, and to sharpen them, I only needed to do a tiny little secondary bevel along the edge. In case it hasn’t sunk in, yet, that is a beefy chunk of metal. A samurai or zulu would probably wonder if it was for hunting rhinos. By that point I was simply lost in the fun of the thing.

When I say “it’s too heavy” I mean it weighs about 3lb overall. A katana typically comes in around the same, and so does a yari Japanese spear. Traditional iklwa are a little lighter but not much. In my opinion they are lighter because the availability of steel kept them from higher-order stuff [example iklwa].

I did a kind of basic internet-bladesmith-style video of the spear in action [here] against a defenseless melon. Unfortunately the shots where I had the melon wearing a MAGA hat didn’t come out so well because the MAGA hat helped hold together the melon.