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4 proper cleavers forged out.

The forge worked great! More heat at a lesser flow rate. It needs a door for the front to help preserve the heat even better. And I'm still having trouble with freezing the propane tank, especially when I start from a low state.

One of my new sheaths tore on the pricking irons. I don't think it can be saved.

The other 8 worked perfect:

Cleavers! 2 rough ground out, ready for heat treat. 2 more to finish tomorrow.

Finally got the resolene on the sheaths. It protects the leather, and prevents dye bleed off.

Just have to sharpen them, and they'll be finished. Then it's on to do the other 9 (+1 with the torn sheath).

Lost a day fixing my truck when I discovered that those fucks at dodge decided to make the tie rod end, upper ball joint, and lower ball joint nuts all have different sizes. That fucking engineer who came up with that horseshit should be chained to a garage and made to fix dodges for the rest of his life. For free.

Anyway, to salvage the day (because I'll have to spend ANOTHER day this week fixing the truck), I got the handles epoxied by 8:30 pm.

The rush is that I've got the gun show starting on Friday. If I really buckle down, I can get these suckers finished by then. Or maybe I can finish them during the gun show. 3 days of sitting around will give me time to do something.

The show was a bust. I broke even, if only just. But I did finish 9 of the clinch pick sheaths while there.

But I did encounter a problem. The ash wood handles shrank a little bit. The regular axe heads seem fine. But the tomahawks seemed worryingly near the top. Maybe the Ash slab was "dry", but when I ripped it down to smaller portions, it dried further?

So I used my circular wedges to tighten them up.

I could rehandle these things, but I'm selling them for cheap and didn't want to do that.

Quote from storch

Flare the tops on the next ones

Oh yeah. These ones were flared. But I cut them with about a half inch extra wood on the top. But the wood shrinkage gobbled up the difference to the point where the axe heads were all the way up to the top. You can see the old burn line from when I burned the handle. That was where the head was TIGHT, after slamming it down the haft and even banging on it a few times to drive it further.

The next ones will have a LOT more meat on the top. Both in width and length.

Welp. Failure.

astromech Wanted me to try a CuMai billet to make a Copper Infused Cheese knife. Having never done this before, I was hesitant.

He also sent some files along for me to play with. I think I'll normalize them (remove the heat treat) and grind off the teeth before I forge them this time.

First step: Normalizing the billet. It was not that big, and I was worried about having enough material. The key to this process is that I'm not forging a knife to shape like I normally do, I'm just making a bar of the material, then grinding the knife out of it.

The first normalize cycle didn't go well at all. Even before I put it on the fire, I could see copper inclusions in the welds.

And while it started to cool down from the very first normalizing cycle, the welds and the base materials started to show cracks.

While it never got above a red heat before, I made sure to heat it slower yet.

(Pic out of order)

It was clear that the copper was coming out when forging it. I tried to press on anyway.

So I tried to flux it up and forge weld it skipping the copper entirely.

But failure. Ultimately the few cycles at heat without the protective welds around the outside scaled up the interior pieces way too much.

Last pic taken later in the day.

I'll try the full CuMai process I've seen others do and get some steel and copper myself. But I've got a laundry list of stuff I have to do (Trade Axes, more kitchen knives, choppers, more camp knives), so I don't know when I can get to it.

Quote from Finger

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I go for BLO for my axe handles. I've seen other makers basically use a giant tub and literally submerge the whole thing in the linseed oil.

Though I am surprised he didn't mention burning the handle before oiling / waxing.

Camp Knives always seem to be popular, so I'm making a few more.

First 2 rough ground:

One more small one to grind, then 2 longer knives.