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 to the original makers 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. The timber was cut to approximate size and them clamped up with the octagonal steel sections and drilled through so that everything aligned perfectly. Then came time to rivet the whole assembly together......

I forgot how much I hated cold-riveting by hand back when I was trained, it's a horribly tedious process with many opportunities to go wrong! On the first attempt I made the mistake of attempting to put epoxy glue between the wood and metal to ensure a strong bond, it turned out this was unnecessary and wound up just making a huge mess and ruining a couple of bits of steel and wood. In fact it seems throughout this project, every time I deviated from the techniques that the original medieval smiths would have used, things started to go wrong. I guess maybe people who spent literally their entire lives learning how to do this and getting good enough to work for kings might have known what they were doing.... who'd have guessed.....

After another couple of tries and another couple of failures I did get a guard and pommel riveted together correctly and neatly, and then finished them on the large linisher again to leave a flat surface next to where you grip and the rivet heads exposed on the outside as a decorative detail. The edges were finished and beveled also on the linisher and the flat backs then sanded down with emery paper up to 400 grit using a granite slab as a flat surface to ensure they didn't get too uneven. The teak was then oiled with 8 coats of danish oil and wax-polished. The holes in the center of each were then gradually opened out using needle files to fit the tang of the blade in a process that took about 4 hours.

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.