User:Stever/Projects/rondeldagger

Over the course of 2020 I made a replica of a Rondel Dagger that's found in the Royal Armoury collection. This project started as a growth from the basic bladesmithing workshops as I was expanding my skills and planning out the intermediate bladesmithing course. I'd seen images of a rondel dagger from the Royal Armory collection dating from 1371-1399 and with an interesting octagonal guard and pommel and thought it would be an interesting project to make a replica. This project wound up using more of rLab's tools on one project than I've ever used on a single project before.

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 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.