Some important things:
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Some important things:
The sword-making process consumes grind-stones at a fairly amazing rate. Yesterday, I spent most of the day going back and forth on a coarse water stone, and ended up with a much smaller water stone.
Other than “drive over night and get to the airport at 3:00am” the flight out to Portland was uneventful.
(Learn From My Fail)
I’m going back out to Dragonfly Forge at the end of this month, and I plan to do like last time – I’ll post notes as I go along, stream-of-consciousness style.
My skills at drawing are so bad that when I draw a stick figure, people think it’s a doodle. So I use prosthetics to sketch designs and see what I like and what I don’t. This is intended to be a bread-scoring knife for commentariat(tm) member jazzlet.
Electrochemical engraving seems to be pretty easy: you order micro-screen masks from tustech [tus] and they appear remarkably quickly. I sent them a large PDF of the badger logo Ieva did for me and they had the masks in my mailbox 5 days later.
I had the idea of using a small stainless steel hatchet as a cut-off tool for forging. It seemed like a good idea – stainless is not very sticky and it’s pretty tough stuff.
Some closeups of metal using a Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. The depth of field of the lens is very shallow, and it’s a pain to hand-hold.
Doing flat-grinds on a belt sander is an eye/hand skill you never completely forget. But you can get rusty. So, I’ve been working the stiffness out of my muscle memory, while experimenting with my whole tool-chain to see what works best, where. My tool-chain has gotten vastly more powerful and complicated since I was in high school, making “prison shiv” style knives with just a file and a bench grinder.