User:Stever/Projects/rondeldagger

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 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.

Once forged into the rough blade shape it was cooled and annealed to make it soft enough to work and then the large linisher was used with a zirconia belt to form the blade into the final shape of a rondel dagger, which has an unusually thick and heavy blade that tapers along it's entire length. Hand filing was used to shape the transition between the blade and the tang so it would sit snugly into a handle.

With the blade shape finished attention turned to the handle which is made up of identical pommel and guard sections and a hand-grip. The hand-grip was made from some (probably) teak that was around the lab which was drilled out with a 5mm bore all the way through then mounted up on the wood lathe. The grip was turned down with finger grooves spaced to my hand, then sanded with increasingly fine emery paper until it was completely smooth, it was parted off and then treated with 8 coats of danish oil, sanding between each coat to give a smooth but still gripy surface.

As the original, being an archaeological find, was a little short on detail I decided to improvise a bit on the guard an pommel piece and take inspiration from other daggers from the same period to fill in detail where the original was lacking. These 2 sections were made from a sandwich of the same teak(probably) used for the hand-grip in between 2 sections of octagonal stainless steel with 8 rivets holding each sandwich together. Stainless steel obviously wouldn't have been available but given that these sections are in contact with the hand when held, and I don't have servants to polish them every time someone touches them, stainless seemed a sensible choice!

The teak was cut on the table saw and then reduced to target thickness of 4mm using the planer (very carefully, working with material that thin on it is rather hard!). The stainless steel was cut to approximate shape using the metal cutting blade on the band-saw and then mounted up in the boxford CNC milling machine. It turns out that stainless steel is quite challenging for the boxford to work with, but given enough time and care I was able to have it produce some of the octagonal sections needed to make the guard and pommel, in fact it had to make quite a lot as it turned out the assembly of these sections was quite challenging and I messed up several attempts before getting it right.