My 3 minutes of fame. Estonian TV station called TV3 has a series called “Töömurdja”, which is about all kinds of strange occupations people have. 23 June 2008 show was about me being a swordmaker.
Link to the archived show – Töömurdja Viljo Marrandi
Currently only in Estonian, but I hope I can get the video source and create english subtitles for it.
Quietly, peacefully, without much noise Internet gained yet another new website. Its name is Knives and Engraving and it is about… Knives and Engraving! Who would’ve guessed, right? Actually the full name is “Custom knives and hand engraving” – main reason is to make search engines happy-happy.
This is a website for our small business. Currently there’s not much more to see than was in http://www.marrandi.ee, but I have some nice plans with it and it needs much-much TLC in the future. Actually the new website is English cousin for Marrandi Metallehis.
AND. Last week I got myself a brand new toy. Canon HV20 HD videocamera. First quickie video is up in video section of our webiste – check it out Workshop Tour.
If any of you, my dear readers, have ideas of what you’d like to see videos about, then let me know. Currently I have 2 ideas I’d like to make video about. First is a short overview of how one knife is made (maybe even with damascus blade, who knows) and second is about engraving. Something like my post Engraving process, but in video.
This Sunday was very productive – we managed to create our first really good looking damascus billet and to electro-etch our logo.
“Secret” behind getting a good damascus pattern is just choosing the right metals. This time I spent quite a lot of time digging in steel specs to find out which would probably create good patterns (which have enough or at least some chrome or nickel in it to create light lines etc.). After that I had to find out which steels are available locally – not many, unfortunately. What makes this difficult is also the fact, that all my info is coming from American books or forums, so I’m quite acquainted with US steels. So then I had to figure out which US steels have Russian on any European maker analogues. The damascus you see on the photo is made from O1/W2 steels. The pattern is nice, but as I found out (later, of course) that it might create problems during heat treatment. We’ll see that soon enough.
Electro-etching. Basically what this does, is to create any mark on metal. In our case it is our logo. The stencil was ordered from one company in US (again!). We got 6 stencils, each should be able to create about 300-400 etchings. The etching process itself is quite simple. You place the stencil on the metal, one wire from DC supply goes to the knife, other is in ‘etching pad’. This pad is just a piece of metal with cotton over it. The cotton is made damp with electrolyte and you just dab the stencil about 30 times or so. Metal is eaten away where there are holes in stencil. Following photo is just an example etch made on ATS-34 steel knife.
Actually, after the DC etch it is necessary to etch a little bit with AC too. Reason is that when DC removes the metal, AC creates black markings. AC makes the metal go from steel to etch pad 50 times a sec, and somehow leaves a black mark.
It’s been a while since my last post, but nothing really interesting has happened during that time. About a month ago we started making 5 new katanas and now they’re almost finished, only handles need to be wrapped and sheaths to be made.
During past few weeks I’ve researched about steel bluing processes – both hot and cold bluing. During this research I bought sodium hydroxide, potassium nitrate, hydrochloric and nitric acid. And finally about a week ago I found out how to get really nice black mirror like finish. It’s actually quite simple – melt pure sodium hydroxide (it melts at 318°C) and heat it to about 500°C (until stainless steel pot is red-hot and glows magically) and put the metal piece in it. Keep it there couple of minutes so it reaches the same temperature as NaOH and viola, it’s done. This process creates really strong oxide layer on the metal, so it should prevent rusting and make it stronger overall. Time will show if this is really so. And by the way, if 500°C sodium hydroxide splashes to your skin, this isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. Kids, don’t try this at home.
Here’s little overview how the process looks like in our shop.
Hand guards (tsubas) are waiting to be blued.
Hot bluing process close-up.
Tsubas are drying/cooling after bluing. Here the left one had to be redone, because for some reason it had brown oxide, not the needed black.
Polishing guards. Here is half polished tsuba, I think you can see the difference of before and after polish.
And this is how it looks already mounted on sword (it’s our older style sheath, with bronze rings, new ones are with brass and look much better).
And here are the new swords that are finished real soon now.
Little close-up of rings and details, as you can see all details are not yet polished, but those which are look real nice.
If anybody wants to buy one of these, then let me know.
Last week passed very quickly. I mean really-really quickly. This happens when you do something you really like – you just get lost in the process and forget about yourself and world. Your mind is focused on the very thing you are doing. You are not checking your 3 email accounts after every 10 minutes to see if someone wrote you and you don’t check Google Reader to check out if any of the 20 blogs you’ve subscribed to has some new posts. And if something new accidentally pops up, then it’s even better excuse not to work and read it.
This happened to me very often when my job was boring. For some reason I just couldn’t find the excitement in programming anymore. Of course there are still many things/areas I want to learn in programming, but this can’t happen in some government office job.
Anyways.
Last week passed very quickly. We are getting very close to finishing our first bigger batch of practice swords. They’re katanas. They’re practice swords for us (we practice the making) and for clients (they practice some kind of sword art). In the beginning of week we finished the blade sanding – now they’re sanded with 150 grit paper. After that we started to make all those little details that go with sword. There are about 5 copper details to make and some of them require soldering together. So all in all about 50 pieces to cut out, solder, sand and polish to mirror finish. I hope they’ll be finished in a week or two. Then I’ll post some photos here too.
In the mean time my father made two knives to find out how 2 processes work. First is pattern welding 
(also called Damascus) and second is temperline creating (called hamon in Japanese sword). Good thing is that these processes are actually very simple (once you know how to do it).
This is the temperline knife. Blade length is 11cm.
This is Damascus blade. Blade length is 7cm.
And here is big closeup of Damascus blade tip. Different layers of metal are nicely seen, there should be about 30 layers.
One thing I really like about this blacksmithing is that there seems to be just endless opportunities to learn something new. Just like with computers. When you’re programmer and doing some larger projects on your own, or even with team, there are many levels of abstraction that you have to keep in your head and figure out how to solve different tasks at different levels. Say you want to build e-commerce site. If you’re on your own, then you’ll install server (linux, *bsd, solars?), you must choose DB (postgres, mysql, sqlite, oracle?), programming language, templating language. You must think how incoming http request is routed inside your system, where is authorization, where, when and how data is asked from DB, at the lowest level you must decide which algorithms to use and so on and so forth. You are server admin, DB admin, programmer, user support and secretary. You know the drill.
Now let’s say I want to make a knife. First I must know which steel to use, which depends on where certain knife is used. Should it be stainless, shoud it be flexible? Tool steel, high carbon, low carbon etc? Is knife used more for cutting, which means it should keep edge very well, or is it used more likely for chopping, then the edge can’t be very hard or it’ll break. Then there are unlimited number of skills I could use – forging, heat-treating, grinding, filing, sharpening, sheath making (leather, wood), handle making (also wood, ivory, titanium (which can anodized to get color effects (and from parens you can see that I like lisp))), engraving (buttcaps, locks etc), chemistry (bluing steel, electro-etching etc). Choices are unlimited. And actually every little piece of that process in itself can be and is an art form where people learn all of their lives. So I guess it’ll keep me busy for few years…
Yesterday I had some spare time (we’re doing our first batch of katanas right now, so this takes majority of my time) and I used it to practice forge welding – success was 3 out of 4 tries. And to practice my hammering skills I made this in half an hour, or thereabouts.
This second image is from series ‘before and after’. Here you can see how out of nothing something can be made. Fascinating.
One of the required skills for blacksmith is forge welding. This is also basic skill for making pattern weld, also known as Damascus steel. Basically you take two pieces of steel/iron make them very-very hot, when they almost melt, beat them together. In the end you’ll have just one piece of metal.
When we first tried to do this we just couldn’t get the pieces to stick together. Maximum of 2mm was welded, no more. And there was no way to know what was wrong. Too cold? Too little flux? Mouth too open, or what? As it turned out the old coal was crap. Two days ago we bought almost 1 ton of ‘special’ blacksmith coal (it burns much cleaner, no smoke and that ‘romantic’ sulfur smell) and with it the welding just works. Oh what a great feeling it was when the first piece stuck together!
Here’s a picture how forge welded piece of steel is really one piece.
No welding lines or anything. Perfectly one piece.
To practice my hammer skills I made a knife blade out of this piece. But as the steel was low carbon it didn’t harden enough, so the blade is no good for usage.
Today afternoon my father made a 32 layer Damascus knife. After it’s polished and etched we’ll see what comes of it.
For the last month or so we’ve set up our workshop. And it amazes me every time we have to buy something just how much stuff you need to set up one normal workshop. With programming it’s easy. You buy computer for $1000 US, install linux and bunch of free programs and you’re ready to go. There’s not much you need to pay for on regular basis besides Internet connection, if you work from home.
Now try to start blacksmithing from scratch. You need quite big room for your own, cubicle will definitely not do. You need forge, either coal or gas, anvil, hammer, grinder, belt grinder, drill, drill bits and lots and lots of other stuff. If you want to be competitive you really need power hammer. New one will cost around $5000 US and more. We are really lucky to be in post Soviet country – lots of old equipment is still around and no one really needs them. So we got huge power hammer for the price of 2 iPods. It looks like this:
And for example this little 3 ton thing was with the price of just one iPod:
I mean, even brand new anvil alone costs 3 times as much. Of course no one says you have to buy everything new, but you get the idea. Besides buying all that stuff you need to build lots of custom things, for which you again need tools like arc welder and many-many more. Ok enough of that.
Here’s what we’re actually producing:
And here is our first successful forge weld in process, and yes, it really does spit out all these sparks.
It looks nice, but it also can give you a new meaning of hot.