1 Day, 7 Knives

This day was a good day.  We (and by "we" I mean Vinh) made 7 knives in one day.  We did the handles in the morning, and then in the afternoon we finished the blades.  Let me explain to you how much skill this takes.  First of all we used only about 2 bags of charcoal for the whole day.  That means when you take the knife out of the fire you have to know what your going to do with it, and then you have to do it without messing up.  If you do mess up then you just have to start over again, therefore wasting charcoal. 

To put this in perspective for you, I just forged my first knife yesterday.  It took me most of the day and I used an entire bag (maybe more) of charcoal for only one knife.  Vinh makes it look easy and effortless, but it takes lots of skill and practice to do this kind of work.

So here are a few pictures of the day.

We cut this piece of steel in half using a chisel (or "Hardy Tool") planted in what is called the Hardy Hole

To start you find the center of the piece you are working with and you use the edge of the anvil to start the separation of the blade and the handle. 

Here two handles have been hammered out and are ready to be rolled; a thats been forgotten in most places.  Vinh learned while in Vietnam.

Vinh uses this other Hardy Tool (that he made) to finish shaping the handle.

Here are all 7 knives with their handles complete.

Now this blade is much bigger than the others you see in the pictures, but because it is thinner than the rest, it is actually much harder to work with for many reasons.  Some reasons are that the metal doesn't stay hot for long at all because the much colder anvil sucks the heat out of the knife.  Also, with a thinner blade, its much more difficult to move the metal and flatten the blade.

Here you can see just how thin this knife is.

Another one not so thin.

Notice how the blade didn't get any wider, just longer.  This is due to using the straight side of the hammer to "draw" the metal out. One of Vinh's rules is that you must use a hammer with a straight side.

This is not a coal.  This is a brick from the forge.  They rest on the bottom to protect the actual forge from getting to hot and melting.

The tongs get pretty hot over time, so a dip in a bucket of water cools them off and makes lots of steam.

And here they are.  You'll notice that one is missing!  This drove us nuts because we were certain there were seven so we spent maybe half an hour looking around the forge to find the missing knife.  We finally gave up after searching everywhere and then the next day, Vinh kicked it right infront of the forge!  It was buried under the all the dirt and almost impossible to see.