Had a visitor today

Luke Swenson, a knifemaker who usually does stock removal blades, came and visited me at my shop today. He'd had an evil scheme to try his hand at forging a big blade for himself, especially after seeing my Zombie Killer KITH quasi-wakizashi.

This is where we started:



And this is where we ended:



In between was a little of this:











This was the fourth blade he had forged. We did this Neo-Tribal style, with very little stock removal, mostly with files, and really needed very little profile clean-up grinding. The blade is about 12 inches long. He did the majority of the work with my guidance. I rolled the socket handle while he observed, and I showed him how to use the tempering tongs, then handed it over to him.

The blade was triple quenched in veggie oil, selectively tempered by eye using tempering tongs, and then Luke was going to run it through a tempering cycle in his furnace at home. We skated a file off the edge after hardening and flexed the blade pretty good by hand after tempering.

Luke commented that he had not really cared for socket handles before. He had intended to make this a stick tang construction with a wooden handle. After seeing some of my socket handles and feeling them, he decided that he'd like to try one after all. He's very pleased with how this knife has turned out.

More pictures when the handle wrap is done. I'll get a closeup shot of the nifty Spanish notch he filed.

Check out his website: http://www.swensonknives.com/