Playing with fire..........

by Gunner , St Louis, Friday, July 04, 2014, 20:03 (3737 days ago)

Too old to play with fireworks, so I decided to play with something more adult……
My dragon’s breath forge : )

http://gunnerblades.com/ShopPics/tomahawkforging.jpg

As a extension of my knife making, blacksmithing is taking on a bigger role in the shop. Not only interesting but opens up a whole new area of sharp things like tomahawks. And what is the best metal to use???? Who knows, you ask five people you are most likely to get five answers, but most will tell you to start off with rail road spikes, they are cheap, if you get off your butt and walk the tracks looking for them or open the wallet to buy some, usually run six for $10. Since I work around rail road terminals I went the cheap route.

http://gunnerblades.com/ShopPics/rrspikes.jpg

Before I could start I needed to modify my old set of blacksmith tongs and build a couple more while I was at it. OK I cheated a little and bought a couple sets of Ken’s Custom Iron “Quick Tongs” sets to make this task easier, along with a set of his new Bolt Tongs....http://kensiron.com/quick_tongs.html

http://gunnerblades.com/ShopPics/tongs.jpg

The ugly ones at the top are my home made tongs that have been reworked several times but they worked pretty good handling the spikes. Which is important when the spike is glowing orange and you are beating on it with a three pound pein hammer.

Tongs done I shifted my attention to making a tomahawk head, selected a spike, cleaned it up on the belt grinder and jammed it into the forge. Proceeded to heat then pound the spike on the anvil, lost count how many times I reheated the spike. At first I wasn’t heating the spike enough making the hammering tougher, finally heated it longer and that made hammering easier, actually to easy, over pounded the blade part, thinning it out too much. Then focused on forming the handle eyelet, at first I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew but finally got the eyelet slit cut with a chisel, then everything went to hell, quickly I might add…….

The chisel became stuck in the tomahawk head, I then spent the next half hour pounding on it to remove it from the head, in the process this happened…..

http://gunnerblades.com/ShopPics/brokenvise.jpg

Ruined a chisel, broke the vise and screwed up the eyelet hole, off center and not nice at all………

http://gunnerblades.com/ShopPics/tomahawkhead.jpg

But all things considered not bad at all, only my second ever blacksmithing project, and it at least looks like a tomahawk head, more importantly it was a good learning experience for me. Called it a day, cleaned up the shop, then threw a couple of strip steaks on the grill for me and the dogs, they were more happy about the steaks then the tomahawk head, but that’s ok with me.

Gunner

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