[Don Halter]

I've been teaching someone how to make a japanese styled blade for the past couple weeks. He's done a nice job so far. I've made an o-tanto along side him as well. Tueday night, we'll be quenching them. I splurged and got a digital camera last week with the 3-minute video option. If I can figure it out before Tuesday, I'll do some video of the quenching of a couple tantos and add it to my Japanese blademaking page.

[Don Halter]

Some days just wern't meant to be. We'll, we did the tantos last night, and I took video. I was going for an interrupted quench...and I got it. It was interupted by me yelling some explicit words just after losing grip on the blade and dropping it into the quench tub, which was a plastic cooler! Then, to top it off...the *mystery* steel we had so far doesn't show a hamon or any other activity. It has a misty one back almost onto the handle that goes from the bottom up to the spine in ~45* curved line and it looks just like what O1 gets when differentially hardened. The blade seems to have through hardened, even under clay. This would lead me to believe it was possibly an oil-hardening steel. Except, if it were, mine should have cracked in 10+ places when I dropped it into a brine tank! It's a really nice shaped blade, and was a teaching/learning project for myself and the person I was teaching, so I'm not too upset. Just kind of disappointing since a lot of the work was done on the claycoating and such to try and get some rather complicated designs. I was shooting for a Dali and got *nude by picasso* instead! :P

Not knowing what steel you have always has risks. Since this was the first ever blade for Shaun, we just used a *hunk O toolsteel" from the scrapyard. I get in 20' of 1065 and 20' of 1084 tomorrow, so no more mystery steel. I will have some nice pics of claycoating and heating and such. I haven't looked at the video, yet. maybe I'll start a series of "What not to do" videos!