BLADESMITHING | How to Forge Without A Power Hammer | Basics

Hey y'all, I've had a lot of you ask about doing a blade, forging a blade without the power tools. Well I know most people don't have a power hammer and a press but I also know that most of you don't have a forge or an anvil but for your sake I'm going to show you some techniques that you can use in your shop to forge a point, forge a blade and everything you need to do to get the blade done. I'm using a rounding hammer, one side's rounded off, the other face is flat. It has some radius here, some fullers on each side all the way around so I can go flat, smooth the blade out or I can use the edges to define something here. This is for moving, this is for smoothing. I'll be using something called a half on half off face blow. That means when I'm when I'm moving this steel very rapidly I'll use the rounding side and half of the face of the hammer will be on half of the face of the anvil. Not because I'm trying to do a glancing blow or anything, I'm not doing any glancing blows. I'm hitting directly into it but I may turn the the hammer angle a little bit because I want to move this steel. Basically I'm pinching it in between the anvil and the hammer. I don't use the horn for that technique because the horn is unsupported and for me and my experience in bladesmithing this is great for bending stuff, maybe doing some radius. I have another anvil that I do some forging but it's on it's in between where the horn and the body of the anvil meet. But I use the the edge for doing some extreme moving of steel like some massive metal mashing mayhem. So that's what I'm going to show you. We have an inch and a half by quarter inch thick 80 crv2 and that's what we'll be using to make this blade. Next heat will smooth it out. Sorry. So what I've done is I've gone back and smoothed it all out and refined my profile a little bit. Now what I'm going to do is decide how long I want this blade and I'll begin forging the edge bevels out. Now I'm ready to start forging the edge. So I began right at the area where my edge starts the choil and I'm just using the round side of the hammer to pull that steel out. All of the initial forging is rough. Once I pull all the steel down inch by inch then I'll go back and make it smooth. I'm not trying to forge the whole length of the blade and realistically I don't need to have the whole piece of steel hot but because I'm using propane that's just the nature of the fuel propane the whole blade is going to get hot. So round side one inch at a time. Very different from the hammer. Hammer I'm going lengthwise with the hand hammer just no power. I'm just going one inch at a time pulling all that down and then I'll go back and refine it and make it smooth. I do not try to forge smooth the whole time. I don't find that to be necessary. It's something I used to do but I found a better way so I'm sharing you on the master level. I don't want to show you something that I did that I don't use anymore. I only want to share what I use right now. That's going to change because I hope to get better. I hope to learn new techniques and every time I do I'll be able to share them with you. All right also I'm forging in one spot. I'm moving the steel. I'm not chasing this all over the place. Now the steel is going to move because I'm hammering on it but I'm trying to just have it in one spot. All right the idea is I'm hitting one spot moving the steel. Now the steel is going to want to slide around and move around. I'm pinching it of course. It's rectangular so when I hit one side it wants to move away from me and I'm hitting it pretty hard. Hit it as hard as you can accurately. The way you develop accuracy is one spot, one spot, one spot. That hit me on the back of the neck. I'm moving it back and forth a little bit because I'm getting out here where the tip is. Probably the most important thing here is how your anvil is mounted. If you notice I have a steel three-legged stand. These legs are on about 23 degrees and no matter what surface I set this on it's going to be it's going to be even. I don't care about level but it will be even. It won't rock and bounce around. Second thing 100% pure silicone. I silicone the anvil to the stand. That eliminates something. There's a petting house notorious for singing. You don't hear it. You don't hear it singing. It's not it's not killing my ears. The other thing is it's silicone to the floor so it doesn't move. It's not going anywhere. If you use a stump that's fine. Bury it about three or four feet into the ground and you'll have the same effect but if you have a stump and it's sitting on the ground it'll bounce all over or if you have two by fours or blocks it'll bounce everywhere. Works kind of like a shock absorber when you do that but silicone the anvil to the base. Silicone the base to the floor. Not moving. There's probably a more complicated technique. There's probably more difficult techniques but I found this to be the most simple and direct way to basically ground my anvil so that I can forge and not have to chase the anvil anywhere. Also kill the sound. Also it just moves steel like go back and work that piece. I'm working in the center at first all the way down bam bam bam bam bam both sides. Now I'm going to go back pull that edge down. During this process you may find that your preform changes like bends somewhere out of control. Get it back into shape. While it's still thick you can get it back into shape. Always keep the anvil clean. Wear safety glasses. All right now we're going back in. Edge. When you start running out of heat get it hot again. One of the neat things about the 80CRV2 is you can forge it down to those dull red colors. You're not really moving steel when you get down there so don't go too far. But when you start doing your finishing and your planishing you can forge it into the black heats. That doesn't make it magic that just makes it smooth okay. But this steel responds well to that. It has a fairly high vanadium content. Makes it very tough very wear resistant and very fine grained. All right so now I want to go back and even this out and start making it smooth. And then right here where it's humped I can leave that for when you go and do your handle and forge your handle out. It's okay if it's already got a drop in it you can straighten it out if you want. There's no rules about that. Not really any rules about any of it except keep it hot and hit it. Hit it accurately. Doesn't matter how hard you hit it just hit it accurately. I'm gonna do a little bit of profile tuning right here. So if you make a missed blow, a misplaced blow and you get a piece that sticks way out you can see how thin it is. Don't try to forge it back in the steel. If it's too thin you'll just get a fold over and a cold shut. Just grind it off. Just grind it up. This is forging. We're forging for effect. I use that a lot because I want to get a certain shape. I want to forge to a certain shape. One of my first knife making gigs was I did these knives for Sporting Classics so I had to forge 150 knives. I didn't do them all at once. I did about five at a time but I would forge them to get the shape and I wanted to fit my pattern and sometimes they'd be a little bit bigger but that was always better than a little bit smaller. So I would forge it and I'd nail it sometimes and sometimes I'd make a misplaced blow. Boom. So I'd have it too thin but it's okay you grind it off. Some people don't like what I just said. I don't care. When you are trying to get better and better and better at this then you forge a lot. You don't take one blade and beat on it and bang on it for hours and hours and hours and hours. The idea is to as few heats as quickly as you can get to the shape that you want. The whole purpose of forging for this type of steel is to get the shapes that you want and the cross sections that you want and the tapers and everything that you want without grinding and stock removal. So that's where we're going. I always try to get that scale off. It'll just come back and hit you in the face. Now I'm gonna go smooth here. I've got that one little piece but that one it's important that the edge is centered. Here's another thing. Don't put your ricasso area up on the anvil or the area in my case it's going to be the handle. I use as little of the ricasso as possible because I find it useless and I'm not going to say how useless it is but I don't care for it. So I'm not going to forge with this area that will be the handle or your ricasso on the because it'll all it'll make it off to one side. So I'm trying to work this so I only have this blade the choil area or on a chef's knife the heel on the anvil on the anvil not like this. I mean I can get up here if I want to straighten this out bam but I'm not hitting the blade. So right now we're just going to go back and smooth this knife out. So we're going to do some details. I'm actually going to do a little trick where I'm going to I'm going to get really tight in on the plunges so it's easy to grind and they're already kind of set up but I want it to be straight. One thing you can help and you've seen me do it in my other video is using the vice the leg vice to straighten the blade okay. So I want to make sure I'm flat here on both sides and I am so now I'm going to start focusing on this plunge area right here. Gotta turn that I'm straight into it but I'm turning the blade nice and tight right there all right all right now we're going to just keep smoothing this out. I hope this is helping. My whole goal with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all these different accounts is I don't care about you seeing my work or knowing who I am or knowing what I do. I care about sharing the craft with you. I want you to be a maker. I want you to use this as your art. I want you to enjoy it. It doesn't matter if you ever sell any knives but be a maker. Enjoy the art of making. Enjoy that. That is that is one of the most satisfying things in life is to be able to create something in your mind. Hey I had this idea. I want to make a knife. I want to make a kitchen knife. I want to make a hunting knife. I make a sword. Whatever it is I want you to I want you to have that that ability that's in you to make bring that out in some way express that in some way uh if you don't forge blades maybe you do something else maybe you you know you do macrame maybe and that's cool because there's a lot of paracord that's basically if you you do paracord that's macrame or paint or draw or sculpt or ride motorcycles all these things are creative expressions and I'm just trying to get that across to you uh don't believe everything you see but what I'm sharing with you is what I've learned over 30,000 hours and I just want to I want the world to see this as an art and a craft and I want you to be able to enjoy it oh all that off so we're getting really close that part's irritating looking so let's fix that all right a little more tuning up and we'll be done so I'm going to use uh less heat now I'm going to kind of watch it I just want to make it straight and smooth I'm looking for a flat that's why I'm wiggling this around and if I see a deep a deep dent or something I'm trying to just want to planish it out I really just want to make it as as smooth as I can edges centered pretty classic style you can keep dinking with it as long as you want I said dink d-i-n-k I don't know what that word really means but I'm using it to express the idea of continue to fool around with something until maybe you did that too much so don't do that just enough so I always say when you get to the end stop now I'm planishing I'm not hitting it very hard I just want to make it smooth I want to get a nice even finish and I want to make it straight there's uh no magic in hitting steel at this temperature the idea is just to get it smooth I'm not I'm not grain aligning or edge packing none of that's happening only thing that's happening is smooth and centered all right so what you can do next is cut your hand your handle off you're gonna make a full tang or a hidden tang that's totally up to you and you'll figure out how much steel you need in this case this will be a full tang so I'll cut it off at four and a half inches flare it out a bit and taper it very simple forging I'm going to leave that out of this video because you've seen me do it on a power hammer and you've seen me forge the blade so use the same techniques half on half off face blows even if you don't use a rounding hammer that's fine you can use a cross peen or straight peen they work great also the peen is for moving steel dynamically the flat side is for smoothing steel so I hope you guys enjoyed this video you know subscribe leave your comments give it a thumbs up a thumbs down tell me what you think all right have a great day