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User:Stever/Projects/rondeldagger: Difference between revisions
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[[File:daggeroverview.jpg|thumb|250px|Rondel Dagger mounted on the wall at rLab]]Over the course of 2020 I made a replica of a Rondel Dagger that's found in the Royal Armory collection. This project started as a growth from the [[Workshops/bladesmithing|basic bladesmithing workshops]] as I was expanding my skills and planning out the
The first stage in making the replica dagger was to forge the blade, this is made from what I believe to be EN45A Steel that came from a steam train suspension spring that had broken in use. It's one of the harder metals to forge that I've encountered so far and has a very high hot-hardness. Still [[Tools/forge|our forge]] was able to heat it enough to make it workable and over the course of 2 days it was forged into the shape of the blade blank and with a long tang to fit it into the handle. The very high silicon content of the metal which makes it so hard to work also had advantages here as it helped it to resist oxidization and prevented it from loosing too much carbon to harden later.
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With most of the parts now made it was time for a test assembly. The first stage of the process was "burn-in" the tang of the blade by heating it up to about 400C and then pushing the handle over it until the heat burns the opening wide enough for the tang to fit snugly. This had to be done before the final hardening of the blade as otherwise the heat from this process would ruin the temper of the blade and make it impossible to sharpen properly.
All the parts now at their final sizes, it was time to harden the blade so it could take a proper edge, only problem was we didn't have a tank large enough to quench the blade in to harden it, so I got hold of some thick walled aluminium pipe and using some aluminium plate we had laying around and the [[Tools/
New tank fabricated it was back to the forge for the blade to be normalized and straightened (and re-normalized, and re-straightened, and re-normalized and..... you get the idea). Once the blade was stable and relieved of all internal stresses it was put through a process of grain refining which changes the structure of the metal to adjust the size of the crystal grains within it. Doing this maximizes the strength and toughness that can be achieved without lowering the final hardness too much. In the final forging process the blade was then heated to 900C, held at that temperature for a couple of minutes, and then plunged into the oil. After hardening the blade was cleaned up and the scale removed using the [[Tools/polishingwheel|buffing wheel]] before hardness testing. Testing it with the [[Tools/hardnesstester|ultrasonic hardness tester]] revealed a final surface hardness of around 53HRC which is a good hardness for this type of blade being hard enough to take a good edge but still tough enough to withstand hard use.
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