Swords

[Leaunoir]

I know this is a knife forum not a sword forum but My freind has a problem with tempering a sword hes forged out. he has pounded the bevel out of the blade the blade is almost two inches wide and is relitivly thin so when it is heated up the sword bends under its own weight at charry it cant hold itself up at all. it is double edged so we cant clay coat it and we have run out of ideas.

thanks a million

[Ray Rogers]

The first thing that occurs to me is to try to hold the blade vertical when you heat it. You probably can't get your forge working vertically but it was a thought.

Second idea: attach a much thicker piece of steel to the blade. It doesn't have to be blade steel, even mild steel will do so long as it is thick enough to support itself and the blade when both are heated to non-magnetic. The blade can be attached by simply wrapping iron wire around the blade and the supporting bar. It will take longer to heat and it will slow your quench a bit but it should still work.........

[Dementia]

this is not really a problem of how thin or wide the blade is...
when you start to go into sword making its one of the troubles you have to work at.
even rapiers i have tried to quench will try to droop.

if you wanted you can turn your forge on end or you can try that swoop technique.
when i first did heat treating of swords i was doing a kind of swoop when i drew it from my forge ... if you pull the sword from the forge and quickly get the tang above the blade you can quench it and have minimal warping.
enough that you can either grind it out or bend it slightly when its still warm.
so its kind of a drag and swing motion.. not really giving it a chance to bend.

but i found that the best way to do it is to attach a mild steel rod onto the steel and bind it with iron wire.
you dont want it super tight .. it should stay on there good enough. if its super tight it can pull on the swords edges as everything heats up and expands and shifts

from there you can get it into the quench without having to swoop or anything else for that matter.
(though some people will do it out of habit)

you want to make sure that the rod isnt made from something thats going to quench along with the sword.
if it goes through the quenching process it might warp and therefore pull the sword into a nasty warp too.
but with the swords that i have been heat treating lately i was using a rod about 1.5cm in diameter.
and it is for sure non hardening steel.

ps - a fuller forged into the blade will help keep the rod in its place.

hope this helps.

Dion.

[Stormcrow]

You can clay-coat a double edged blade. I haven't done it (haven't even clay-coated a single edged blade), but I've seen it done more than once.

Something I ran into when I hardened my one sword I've done so far was warping when I tried to edge-quench. It happened six or seven times. Finally I built a verticle quench container and qenched pint-down. Problem solved.