Who I am, what I'm about.

[harken]

Jeez These are another level. Stunning work!

 

[drrayeye]

And another from a different ingot with a little more alloy to give it some full hardening depth.

AMAZING!

 

[Geigs]

So nice.

 

[DanielC]

To Segway from another conversation to an area more appropriate, this is a decent video I put together in 2015 for one of our smelts. It was the first use of this particular source of Magnetite, and were not yet aware how "dry" the ore was, and needed silica addition for more slag. During these years I typically recorded all of our smelts. Some I edited and uploaded to YouTube, many others exist only on SD Cards. It was also when we transitioned to doing live feeds of our smelts on Facebook, and eventually that's all we typically do. Live feeds.

Also this was titled as a How To, when my intentions were really just to show it in general.

 

[DanielC]

Here's another working steel I have made. The final product never made it to knives to be sold.

 

[ethompson]

And I now know what I'll be watching while spending an hour with finger stones tomorrow...

 

[DanielC]

We were even 1 of 10 teams from around the world who participated in an international effort to smelt a special ore from Ireland which contained a lot of Manganese oxides. This was the Woodford Furnace Festival 2020, and each team was sent around 100 pounds of this special ore. One of the teams was lead by none other than Akira Kihara, the master smelter of the shimane Tatara. Instead of live feeding however, they had a whole production film their smelt. I can dig that video online.

 

[DanielC]

Here is the video from Akira Kihara's efforts to smelt the Irish Ore in tandem with the rest of our teams around the world:

 

[DanielC]

Some of this compels me to look back at a knife I made several years ago. It's a full polished sanmai blade, but the core is rather special. The very center is a western W-2 steel, sandwiched between Oroshigane I processed with 9 folds. Carbon estimation at that fold, under the scope is .9-1%C. I further sandwiched all of this between plain iron. The grind is my old full flat grinding style, not really at all what I do today, so a little more lasery.

At the time I thought there would be a little more carbon and I wanted to infuse the W2 with more carbon through carbon migration. They turned out to be more or less the same.

Blade set crooked in the original handle with epoxy, so I've forever just held onto it, testing stones on it. Plan is to bust the old handle off and set a new one on. Might reprofile a little bit as well. Then repolish.