Very nice work Mathew. The perfect personal carry knife for a viking. I like it. Good job.

Brion

Beautiful work.

The detail on the handle and those fittings is awesome.

The pattern in your blade is really interesting the long horizontal surrounded by the vertical imprints makes me wonder how in the world you accomplished that,

Great Job!

Matthew-

Great looking knife. Are those twist bars stacked then welded and ground from there? How much forging to shape do you do after the blade bars are welded together? Or would that distort the twists and patterns too much? I'd be really curious what thickness and other dimensions you could give on your starting material. Thanks for posting your knife.

Jeremy

Jeremry-

the original stack was about 1" sq and 6" long of the following 1095,15n20,1095,4340,1095,15n20,1095 if I remember right the sizes on the bars 1095 1/8" 15n20 0.78 4340 1/4". This was drawn out to 3/8RD or so and twisted. the bars were then flattened and restacked. the top bar is a tight twist, next a very slow serpent (overlapping 90Deg twists, this stretched a bit more than I expected and appears almost straight) and a reverse direction twist, the edge bar is left over from another project it is about 25 layers of L6 and 1095. this was drawn to 3/8 rd and twisted then flattened to about 1/4" thick. these patterned bars were then ground clean, restacked and welded. the billet was then trimmed and (cutting the tip of the bar at an angle distorts the pattern less when the tip is forged out) forged to shape. I forge as close to shape as I can , but with this kind of flux welded blade I do leave a bit extra. After forging the profile was forged in as was the tang, bevels and distal taper. the edge was around 1/16" or so with the spine around 1/4 at the base.

you can tell in the pattern that I removed more from the edge in grinding than the spine by what part of the twist are showing in the pattern. the top of a twist shows as lines as you move closer to the center you get first a star pattern (the beginning of this you can see in this blade) and then a kind of checkerboard look near the center of the bar.

This blade is a little odd for me as I normally start with much larger billets. This one was welded up in a class I taught on pattern welded seaxs last spring, as we were doing all of the drawing with hand hammers and sledges I made the billets smaller than I normally would. The billet just hung around until I was demoing at an open house for the school I teach at (Brookfield craft center) last Oct where I welded this guy up and forged it out.

MP

Thanks for the explanation of your process. I've seen similar seaxs and really wanted to try the stacked method used. I recently got some old wrought iron and would like to integrate that, as well-maybe the spine, then some twist bars and an edge of higher layer. Maybe someday I'll get one to turn out close to as well as yours <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//smile.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />.

Jeremy