First inlay on a knife blade.

[Daniel Houwer]

My First intarsia (or inlay) in a knife blade.
I made this blade from a left over bit of laminated steel coming from an ax.
It’s engravement is based on a scramma seax made around 900ad. I know it’s a bit sloppy work but I am a bit sloppy the last year. My luck is that the original engravement looked just as sloppy if not more.
In runes I wrote the name of my wife on one side and on the other side are the initials of our Historical Metalgroup Kinheim.
The inlay is silver and 18kt gold. I thought about entering the tutorial competition but cant find the time to take the time to do a proper job. Lost the time somewhere along the line.
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d51/danielhouwer123/IMG_2430.jpg
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d51/danielhouwer123/IMG_2431.jpg

[Tom McArdle]

Nice work! Did you cut the grooves before hardening, and inlay after hardening/ tempering, or did you inlay before the hardening?

A very nice piece!

Tom

[SVD]

Daniel

I agree - the slightly imperfect inlay makes this piece look better than it would if it were flawless. More in keeping with the style of the overall piece.

Wouldn't work if it were bad, but slightly impefect... :thumbsup:

[SpiderCurt]

Hello Daniel
I find your hobby to be very interesting and when I manage to work up to it I hope my first attempt at inlay looks as good as that. Since I was not familiar with the term scramma seax, I did a bit of web searching to find out about it. Unfortunately, MSN, Dogpile, LookSmart and Vivizimo returned no results at all. Clusty returned a link to this thread. AltaVista and Yahoo! returned two links one was a link to myarmoury.com and the other was to a previous post you made on making a handle for a scramma seax with 5000 year old oak. Google returned 3 results, two of which were books from 1884 and the third being your previous post. How does it feel to be the Internet's leading expert on scramma seax?? :)

[SVD]

Curt

Try a search for 'norse blades sax' - spelling on things tends to be a bit... variable but I pulled up a lot of good hits with that search string.

[Daniel Houwer]

Tom, thank you. I wouldn't dare do the inlay before hardening. I think the silver and gold might either melt out or fuse to the steel or a bit of both.
Platinum might take such treatment but I will stick to the first approach.

Yes indeed, a different name for the same thing. Sax blade will do fine too.
I can blame it all on the historian of our group:yesnod:
He is a bit of a purist in some ways. Must be old spelling, but he has read to much to easyaly disagree on such matters.
I am just there for the fancy metalwork.

Thanks Steve, that is a nice excuse. I like it. I did scrutinize a european sword once wich had a brass inlay and that one really looked rugged.
Must have a picture somewhere.
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d51/danielhouwer123/digitalfotos211.jpg
http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d51/danielhouwer123/digitalfotos206.jpg

Thanks for your comments!

Daniel

[SpiderCurt]

Thanks for the tip guys. I found more than enough on scramma seax to satisfy my curiosity using the suggested searches.

[Daniel Houwer]

Hi Curt,

Probably too much if it isn't your thing!

[SpiderCurt]

Hi Daniel

I was fortunate enough to have a very good History teacher. This teacher showed that once you get away from the dry school text books History becomes a fascinating subject. It seems to me that an amazing amount of knowledge has been lost over time. A good example of this is the iron pillar in India that has been standing for over a 1000 years and still hasn't rusted.

[Daniel Houwer]

Hi Curtis,

I see you have chainged your avatar!
Wich one is you? :lol:
Great to have good teachers.

Our teacher was Thijs v.d. Manakker. He taught us to build and run smelting furnaces about 12 years ago for about 5years. Then whe started our Historical Metalgroup to be able to do things ourselves.
The funny thing about a Bloom is that the iron doesn't rust a lot. The ore whe mainly use is the dutch bogg ore. whenn reduced in a smelting furnace this gives a sponge or iron with a lot of slaggs (molten sand) in it.
While compressing this "sponge" a lot of slag gets beaten out but a lot of it remains as well.
Allso vivianite (mostly in the bogg ore) give's some phosphor to the metal.
This and the slagg and the lack of too much carbon make the metal pritty rust resistant. (so whe where told through the years by metalurgissts and so)
The Iron pillar was made with smelting furnaces to. They did not use melting furnaces back then. So the metal will contain a lot of slag, litle carbon and some phosphor. The thing that puzzles me is how they got this huge thing together! They must have had a much better source of ore then we have here today. They must have burnt a complete forest to reduce an even bigger forest into charcoal to be able to make enough iron for this one pilar.
They think there have been a few more.

Indeed interesting history. I would really like to know what kind of furnaces they used. Must be in the order of tatara size and a few hundred of them.

[SpiderCurt]

Hi Daniel

It would seem that in my rush to learn about hand engraving I neglected the User CP features. I'm the shy, bald one hiding behind the apple of my eye :)

I had only read about the pillar in some book several years ago. This discussion sent me to the web where I viewed a picture of it for the first time. It is much more impressive than I had imagined. Your analysis of the rust resistance property of this pillar is basically the same as what the "experts" came up with last year. Can I change my example of lost knowledge? :)