Forging an Arrowhead: Plus Digressions

My first self-forged, and somewhat hefty, arrowhead, or perhaps crossbow quarrelhead. How did I make it? Let me show you. There will be digressions. Step one, stick a wide bit on the end. Put about an inch of metal onto the ... anvil, and whack it, until it jolly well knows who's boss. It's my first, and it took me a while, and a fair number of heats. If you're good, you should be able to make an arrowhead in maybe one, two, three, about four or five heats, something like that. It certainly took me several heats more than that. But it's only my first, so I think I have an excuse. But what I don't want to have to do now is make another 400 of these. And of course, if you were making arrowheads, you would make an arrowhead, followed by an arrowhead, followed by an arrowhead, followed by an arrowhead. And on it went. We're using an 8mm diameter rod of mild steel. So after flattening into a rough fan ... shape, and get the other end, and start drawing it out sideways. I didn't get very far there because it started to cool. But now it's getting so much flatter, and it's already quite hot, it'll reheat very quickly in the fire. There are some other interesting things that I could talk about that are present here. One of them is this. It's a lump of rusty steel. It's a lump of rusty steel that was brought out of the Danube. This is ferric noricum. It is a trading ingot that the Germanic people from that part of the world traded to the Romans. And the Romans would then make stuff out of this steel. For example, the gladius. This is a gladius blade, which is a special gladius blade in that it has been made out of a lump of ferric noricum. So metallurgically, this is about as authentic as you can get. So it's made out of an actual piece of metal from the period. And it's got a LEGX stamped on the blade. This is the earlier sort, not the Pompeii sort with the parallel blade. Well, you can see the shape of the blade, it's the earlier, more of the Hispaniensis sort. The thin metal also cools quickly. Look how during this zoom it goes from bright yellow to, no, it's dull red already. And blimey, blacksmiths are very noisy. Now I've got a flat end on my rod of steel. Another production here is with this Celtic style sword. Which looks a little bit odd in that it's got no crossguard, nothing here. So presumably it was used in conjunction with a, if this is complete, in conjunction with a shield. And I can say that it's very light and very manoeuvrable. I find this handle a little bit too thin. Which means I don't get quite the grip on it that I would like. It rattles about in my hand. I would like something a bit fatter to get a grip on. But I can say that it's very manoeuvrable and very, very stabby. This will be pretty handy in a fight. Right, so now I don't want to heat up the thin bit which heats up very, very quickly. I'm trying to heat up this thicker bit here to do the shoulder. So I'm going to put the thin bit through the main hot part of the fire. Leaving the hottest part of the fire playing on the thicker bit. I added a waist because I was sticking to the design that I'd been shown. Does an arrowhead need to come into a waist before the socket? Mightn't a simple conical socketed spike work just fine? Does anyone really know? Made it a bit wonky. Straighten it out a bit. Right, is that enough for shoulder directly? I reckon so. Okay. I want to show you something quite gruesome, so brace yourself. This is a gentleman's stabber. This is a rondel knife. You can see it's got buffalo horn and silver wire, which is rather pretty, making up the grip. If I pull it out of its leather sheath, you'll see something unusual. It's triangular in cross-section. Triangular things like this, making them longer straight, are really difficult. If you're trying to hammer something out on an anvil, you put the flat bit on the flat of the anvil and hammer from the other side. Which means you'll end up with something square-sectioned if you do that. But this is triangular. Something of a challenge for any smith. And it's got a really, really wicked point on it. And a very thick stem of metal behind it. This is for stabbing people. Look how thick the blade is. You couldn't chop onions with this. It'd be rubbish. You couldn't whittle with it. Really, this edge down here is not much use. It's the point that does the work. So if you're wearing armour, I get up close to you and I just work that point under some gap. And then I use this thick bar as a lever to work this, so that I can get the point into a bit of you and I stab. This is for working into joints of armour. And it is horrible. I mean, there's one purpose this has, and that's killing people. So however you might try to make it look pretty, with your twisty buffalo horn and the rest of it, it's evil, nasty purpose. In my eyes, at least, I find it difficult to look at this and think, oh, the work of beauty, because it's, yeah, it's for stabbing people. The rondel. Curve the flat bit. Oh, that fire's getting really hot. I'm right-handed, sorry. Come through here and I go in, in, in, in. That's it. Okay, didn't do a very good job of that. Never mind. I'm using a much longer rod of iron than I was last time, which is quite good because I don't feel so much heat in my hand. There we go. Now trying to roll in and close up the socket. So here I am, finally closing up the socket and working a bit more on the waist of the arrowhead by whacking it against the side edge of the anvil. I really am taking a lot of heats. I might narrow it slightly. Good idea, all right. Who is this man also having his first go at an arrowhead? More of him later. This helmet is so heavy. I'm amazed by how heavy this, this helmet is. I bought it mail order, so I didn't know quite how, I mean, if you were to say, look up there, and I would go, oh, what, what? It's pulling me backwards. And the strain on my neck to get my head back vertical again is extraordinary. I think this is too heavy. I don't think I've ever worn a heavier helmet than this. This is, yes, but if you kept this on for any length of time, what neck muscles you'd have, or a broken neck. Not sure which would come first. Anyway, I'm here because it's sponsor time. And my sponsor is Audible. Yes, Audible, the purveyors of the greatest collection of audiobooks and spoken word, in the English language at least, material in the world. And in doing my research for this I thought, well, I'll just type in words like forge, and hammer, and anvil, and Vulcan, and blacksmith, and so forth into the search engine and see what I get. And that way I discovered that there really are an awful lot of epic fantasy series, of which I'd never heard. But anyway, actually what my eye fell upon was something that possibly you should give a listen. The Gulag Archipelago, or as it's more commonly pronounced, the Gulag Archipelago. And this has been described, I don't know how fairly, as the most significant book of the 20th century. I don't know if it is that, but it's certainly a contender. And it's written by a guy called Solzhenitsyn, a Russian, who had earlier written A Day in the Life of Ivan Donozovich, which I can remember studying at school when I was about 13. And that went on to win the Nobel Prize. That was published in 1962. And he got away with it. He was able to publish it even in Russia. But the Gulag Archipelago, on the other hand, was a much more difficult book to get published. They were clamping down on that sort of thing in this later time. And I think there's a film, actually, there's a film to be made about the writing of the Gulag Archipelago. It was an offence in this time to have a copy of such a seditious book, so that he could never be caught with an entire copy of it. He only ever worked on a little bit of a chapter at a time. And he had to visit friends, and go to all sorts of places, and hide little bits of the book all over ... Moscow, I think he was living in. And one of the typists, there was a typist working for him, she got questioned rather severely by the KGB. And she ended up giving away the location where a lot of the manuscripts were kept. And so the KGB got their hands on those. And she was found hanging in this stairwell outside her apartment a couple of days later. Some people say, was it suicide? Well, I can't help feeling that if she were wanting to commit suicide, she probably would have done that inside her apartment, don't you think? Behind closed doors where no one could stop her or see her, rather than in a public place such as the stairwell, as if it's as a warning to others, outside her apartment. It's almost as though she was murdered by the KGB. Anyway, he couldn't get it published in Russia, and it was smuggled out and published in the West, almost immediately translated into lots of languages. And I realise I've gone off on a massive tangent. So what's the book about? It's a history of what are sometimes called the Gulags. Strictly speaking, they were labour camps run by the Gulag, or Gulag offices. The Gulag offices were the people who were organising, it was the organisation which ran the camps. There are about 423 of these little camps dotted around the Soviet Union, and that's the archipelago, these islands. And essentially they're like Nazi concentration camps. You get a load of people who you consider to be undesirable, you round them up and put them in these places from which they're not allowed to escape, and you force them to work. That's what they were, they were labour camps. And they started in 1918, yeah. So the ... Russian Revolution happened in 1917, and 1918 already the liberators of the common man were systematically oppressing the common man. And they did this until 1956 officially, although actually they carried on a bit beyond that. The system is sort of still in place, which is a little bit scary. And something like 14 to 18 million people were at some point in one of these camps, and about 9% of them died. And it was a story which shocked the Western world. Because there were an awful lot of people who were apologists for the Soviet Union saying, oh, you know, everything's fine, communism's great, blah, blah, blah, don't listen to the propaganda, etc, etc. But when the Gulag Archipelago came out, then that was a rather difficult one to just explain away. Oh yes, of course, sacrifices had to be made. Yep, so the Gulag Archipelago. I won't say it's a book that's full of laughs, but it's certainly a significant work. This particular edition that I saw had a forward by Jordan Peterson. That might attract some of you, that might put some of you off. Because I know a lot of people think that Jordan Peterson isn't so much a lecturer and academic as a political movement in a single man. But never mind, that's just a forward. The main book is the thing, Gulag Archipelago. Why didn't you give that a listen? Well, you might think, well, can I even afford it? Well, you could, because you could have a free trial. You could go to audible.com stroke lindybeige, and then get a free 30-day trial period, during which you can download one complete audiobook that is yours to keep forever. It could be, for instance, the Gulag Archipelago. Or you could text lindybeige to 500-500 with the same result. And then, yes, you could also, whilst you're at it, you could have unlimited access to the Audible Plus catalogue, which is loads of stuff. It's not audiobooks so much as, oh, you know, all the other stuff, including Audible Originals, which is stuff that they've commissioned themselves, and it's unavailable anywhere else. So there you go. It's an opportunity for free stuff, for knowledge, to try out perhaps a new and unfamiliar format. Audible. Now, about that mysterious stranger. So joining us here is Yule. And Yule is wearing some very interesting and specific attire. This is not random attire that he has simply ... This is not a look that he has come up with entirely himself. This is quite a specific look. Let's take a ... let's take a close look at it. He's got big boots and he's got big wide bell-bottoms on his corduroy trousers. And he has lots of pockets. He has lots of pockets and they have leather reinforcements. And one of the things in these pockets, you see there, is a twisted stick. And, oh there he is, the twisted stick. Okay, and you see he has an old-fashioned waistcoat and jacket with double-breasted, two rows of pearly buttons, and an old-fashioned shirt. So what does this mean that he is? This tells you what sort of a person he is. I'll give you a big clue. He's German. Have you got it yet? Yule, what sort of person are you? Well, it would translate to journeyman in English language. Right. This is a very old tradition, about 800 years old. Used to be all over middle Europe. Now it's basically only left alive in German-speaking countries. And this tradition involves four traditional tradespersons that have acquired or finished an apprenticeship in a traditional trade. Right. You're a carpenter, aren't you? Yeah, I'm a trained carpenter. And then I decided to do this traditional journey, which people have been doing for hundreds of years. And it's pretty much the same nowadays. And for me, it seemed like a very interesting way of traveling and suited my lifestyle quite well. And I wanted to explore more of the world and gain more experience in my trade. And yeah, it's all about traveling and working. So yeah, I'm now three and a half, four years into the journey. It's a mandatory amount of three years in one day. That one day is very important. It's very stretchable in my case. So you travel over the world, being a carpenter, using your skills to earn a living. Yeah, that's a very nice way of living, actually. But there are certain rules, one of which is that you can't actually accept a salary. Is that right? No, it's quite a common misunderstanding. It works in various ways. I can't really say what I normally do, because every day is quite different. Yeah, it's never really the same. So I work a lot. Maybe half the time I'm working, half the time I'm just traveling. Right. Because it's about both. Is there a maximum amount of time you're allowed to stay in one place? Yeah, you could say three months. Yeah, three months. But it gets boring before that. Anyway, yeah. So the working situations can be from working in a company, earning a regular wage for a bit. Right. Yeah, staying somewhere in the company. So there are about 500 journeymen at any given time. And if someone wants to get hold of a journeyman, is there some way? What do I do? Do I open the window and yell a special yell? Well, you can't make them come. It's just coincidentally. If you want to offer work to a journeyman, then maybe you should give them a lift. Okay, so if you see someone dressed like this, and you need some skilled work doing, you could give them a lift, offer them a meal. But is there no website? Is there no central get-in-touch-with-a-journeyman.com? This tradition is really a word of mouth. And you can't really read much about it because we just pass it on. And that's actually very important. This is also what keeps it alive. And maybe what fascinates people about it. Well, thank you very much indeed. Yeah, no worries. Okay, I think I can proceed from there. We have a socket. So now I want to put the near shoulder on, which I will do. How do I do that again? I do it from like that, and then I'm working it that way, yeah? Is that right? Okay. It's going to be square section, so I'm turning it 90 degrees every now and then. Sorry about the sniffling. I did this better the first time. Now to cut the whole thing off the main rod. I never got any good at this. Don't know why. About there-ish? Yeah. Okay. Copper-headed hammer against chisel. Turn, repeat. Whoops, that slipped. Stay in one place, yes. Am I going to do it in one heat? No, I did it in one heat. Two heats, drat. Okay, come on, this time. Very nearly there. Yes. Grab and then just... There we go. Okay, these pincers are designed specifically for holding an arrowhead. You see, you've got an asymmetrical pair of tongs. You've got the long bit for going up the socket, and the flatter bit for grasping the outside of said socket. Nice thing about this stage is that I can plonk the bit I want hot into the fire, leaving the socket pointing towards me so I can see down the end of it. And then I can actually see, as soon as I get some glow at the end of the socket, that tells me that the pointy bit, the bit I'm trying to work on, is hot enough. Oh, and we're nearly there already. In which case, I shall need... Hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer. Where's the hammer? Slightly too far, in fact. Okay, so the whole thing's slightly wonky. And now it's straight. Possibly one more heat to get it a little bit more drawn out than that. But that could do, actually, there. But I'm going to give it one more heat. Sorry. Okay, number two. Putting the sharp point on. In medieval times, they had big hand-cranked grinding wheels for this.