Sting 3 - Forging and Grinding

Did some final tweaks on the wakizashi forging, and moved the tang shoulders forward on the hobbit sword. Having some issues with the ends of the edge bars shearing and tearing up the wrought in the tang, so I've cut away the problem areas and now heading out to finish the forging...

Tang forged out, and the first side of the blade ground down to bare metal, bar a couple of spots. It's at about 8mm thick at the forte, tapering down to about 5mm at the tip. I'm at the point where I need to take it to my other shop and get it on a wide flat platen to establish some true flats to work off before I do much more to it. I haven't touched the profile with the grinder yet. Need to find the centre line and establish a completely symmetrical profile...

Latest Forging

I rough forged in the profile on the hobbit shortsword, and started to grind down the surface to clean metal. So far the welds look good, and I still have plenty of thickness. Once I get it close to clean, I'll finalise the profile forging, and do a bit of beveling to develop more width in the edges (which will give me a little more wiggle room when it comes to truing up the profile with files). And I still need to move the tang junction forward by about an inch and a half.

Also forged a wakizashi while the forge was getting up to full temp...

Sting 2

After some thinking about how to approach this, today I forged a point on the wrought iron core, and then upset the first inch and a half of the edge bars to develop a bit more mass at the tip, forged them down to points, and roughed in the curve to match the core.

I then hot fit them to the core, ground the mating surfaces clean, and wired them together. Finally, I forge welded the whole lot together. (Slideshow below.) This one fought me all the way, and while I think it's now solid, I won't know for sure until I forge in the profile and do some aggressive forging on the bias to flatten and taper it.

I also managed not to burn myself until literally the last second - putting down my tongs, I brushed the tip of the hot blade, which I'd set on the anvil after normalising, along my forearm and across an old scar...

Sting

Someone on the Bladesmith's forum posted a design based on Sting from the Rankin and Bass animated Hobbit film from the 70's, and I decided I wanted to take a run at something similar, so today I fired up the forge, and knocked down 11 inches of 3/4" square wrought iron into a flat bar, 5/16ths x 1 1/4" x 15", and forged out a couple of 5/16ths square silver steel edge bars from rounds.

First time swinging a heavy hammer in about 3 months, and now I'm knackered, but it's a start. Shooting for a 14" leaf blade, with a wide shallow fuller. Blackened wrought guard and pommel, with copper accents, and a carved walnut or ash handle...