Finished the seax this afternoon (save for a little oiling and the like):

Grip day:


I also oiled the grip pieces (after the picture was taken).
Tomorrow should see this piece finished (Lord willing).

Inlet the grip and bone spacer and shaped and polished the spacer:

Shaped and polished hte hilt fittings today:

I did the inletting on the lower guard and the upper guard/pommel:

Here is what I have been working on the last couple of days:

I still have some cleaning up to do in the blade and then on to the hilt.

Marquenching

I got a question about marquenching and what it means. Basically Marquenching is taking a blade that is heated to above the critical point (somewhere around 1500f depending on the steel where it is converted from pearlite in to austite) and quickly cooling it (in either a low temp salt pot or in hot oil) to below the "nose" (a term comming from heat treating time/temerature charts) or to below approximately 900f in less than about 2 seconds. then holding it at around 400-500f until the entire blade is the same temperature. when the blade is removed from the hot oil it is very plastic and can be bent almost as easily as if it was 1500f. This allows the smith to straighten out any minor warps that occurred in the quench. As the blade cools the crystal structure of the steel changes from austite into martensite (the hardend steel) as the crystaline structure changes it creates a very faint high pitched ringing sound known as "singing". If the blade "sings" it means that the marquench was successful.
Here is a short video of the prosess:

Here is today's and yesterday's progress on the sax. I re-ground the blade, giving it more taper and a slight distal taper as well (it felt to "dead" in the hand before). I HTed it using a marquench and triple hot/cold cycles. Today I polished it out to 800gt.

Tomorrow, Lord willing, I will be finishing the polishing.

Nijmegen sax

I have been commissioned to make a (rough) reproduction of the Nijmegen sax c. 500-600AD.
Here is the original:

And here is my working sketch:


I have the blade forged and rough ground and will (Lord willing) be polishing and HTing on Monday.

Nebojsa's Seax, finished

Finished the Seax. Here is a link (click the image)to the gallery page.

Finished the seax this after noon and will be taking (much better) pictures next week.

Computer trouble

My computer has been having trouble and this morning it tried to commit suicide by drowning itself (a wayward glass of water landed on it). I will see if I can get it running again, but if not then it may be a while be fore I can post.

Thanks for your patience.

Here is where I am on the sheath.
I have it formed, the sheep skin lining glued in and the throat stitched.