Honed And Ready: First Men-Inspired Homemade Bronze Axe

[ArristanTheOld]

Success!



Relatively speaking anyhow... It's not quite perfect, but obviously much closer. My molding sand needs a moisture adjustment before I am ready to attempt another bronze axe. Too wet for attempt 1; too dry this time.

[ArristanTheOld]

Well, looks like all my pictures here got photobucketed. My apologies for anyone trying to read this thread... Since PB decided to take everyone's free hosted pix and hold them for an exorbitant annual ransom, I've been focusing more on shooting videos that taking pictures of my castings.

Here's the latest offering: How I cast my brand new Dawn Age First Men's Valyrian Bronze Axe! (part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbpdYm6EjHM

And here are some pictures of the finished axe:







Note, it's actually aluminum bronze... But if the Valyrians had aluminum, this would be the type of bronze they would make with it! It's an interesting alloy (to a metallurgy nerd like me anyhow).

The channel link in my sig seems to be broken too... if you're interested in my videos of backyard metal casting combined with ASOIAF fandom in any/every way I can come up with, the channel name to look for is Tobho Mott.

Part 2 is in editing now, there may even be a part 3 as I have way too much footage.

Hope you guys like the new axe, I got a demonic weirwood in my front yard that's been giving me some bad looks, so it's gonna taste that bronze real soon! I'll film that too; who knows, maybe you guys'll get lucky and be able to see me getting crushed by a falling tree...

[ArristanTheOld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kKGjRgig9s

Linked above is the part 2 video. I did not have to make it 3 parts after all. Part 2 shows:
- ASOIAF nerd-bomb intro (AKA 2 painful minutes (including skinchanging action) of setup for an Aziz-level awful axe pun)

Then the boring stuff:
- axe-grinding
- peening
- "sharpening"
- sanding

Then the fun part:
- axe-throwing (including some close-up shots of notable GoT baddies taking a bronze axe to the face)
- tree-chopping (not the aforementioned demonic weirwood)

Hope you guys get a kick out of it! This video represents me trying to take my 2 big life-consuming hobbies (asoiaf fandom and BYMC) and smoosh them together into a big pot of glowing hot golden coloured molten metal goo, then pour it all back out to see if the resulting alloy looks any good... not entirely unlike when Khal Drogo used his medallion belt to crown Viserys. Except more figuratively. Except also not...

If you don't get a kick out of this, oh well, at least all the homies on the BackYard Metal Casting forums seemed to enjoy learning what a nerd I am!

[ArristanTheOld]

So, dumbass hack that I am, I tried to sharpen my new Valyrian bronze axe better with an aggressive belt-sandering, and wound up annealing it. Went back out to test it and although it was much sharper, the testing absolutely mutilated the edge! Annealing is when you heat up a metal until it loses its hardness, whether it was hardened by heat treatment or cold working or whatever. I should have known better. I even saw it change colours, like when you watch a bladesmith tempering a knife - it went a darker gold first, then purple. Bad!

Then I repaired it: ground off the ruined part, redid the work-hardening, and re-sharpened it using just files and stones.

Now it works better than ever! A much more compelling visual example of the effectiveness of work hardening than the testing I did at the vise in the previous video.

New video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elaJ7CB8-YU