I challenged myself to blacksmith a knife in 2 days.
I was hesitant to choose this challenge because this is the type of stuff I do at home, and I thought it would be too easy, I was very wrong.
My plan for the forge was simple, have air constantly blowing on a contained wood fire to make it hot enough to get my metal to working temperature. I was fortunate enough to find a battery powered blower, and Eric had a battery for me to use, so I had everything I needed, at least I thought I did.
The forge was running for a quite insignificant hour, and then it stopped, and that’s when I ran into trouble. I tried to fix stuff and replace stuff but could not do much because I had to stay by the fire. I was hungry, I was stressed, I was angry, I was wishing I chose a differant challenge. By the end of the first day I had made very little progress and thought I might fail.
The next day I quickly redesigned my setup, got it working, and got to work. heating up, hammering away, heating up, hammering away, repeat. I was getting close, what had been some sort of railroad spike was now a rough knife. I got some help from someone so I could twist the metal in the handle to make it look pretty. The last step of forging was to heat treat the metal to make it stronger, I did this by getting it red hot and dipping it in water to quickly cool it. Finally I was pretty much done!
While there are a couple more things I need to do, its close to done and I’m pretty happy with myself.
