Oh, beautiful pain....

Today was the first day of the bladesmithing seminar... and boy am I exhausted. There's a reason why all the old paintings and photos of Blacksmiths all have the massive physique of Hephaestus of mythology... It's a lot of physical work!

The day started off with a quick overview of basic blade anatomy, design, and purpose, as well as an overview of the various steps we'd be taking towards successfully fashioning our own blades by the time 30 hours was up. Then it was off to the homemade forge that was set up for us!

I had in mind a nice mini barong design, which immediately was discarded when I burnt the first piece of steel by overheating it and had to start over with another one. So I opted to make a much simpler clip point knife. I didnt' have much experience in this thing, so I guess it was inevitable once reality settled back in. Nobody makes Excalibur on their first try! :)

Two things I'm happy about... I didn't burn myself, and I didn't cut myself... luck was certainly part of it, but a lot is owed to Tuhon Tom Kier's expert instruction and in my case, assistance, as my blade was rather crooked due to my poor skills with the hammer and anvil. He straightened the poor thing out in like 2 minutes, as I watched in awe how easy he made it looked.

The rest of the day was spent on laborious filework, profiling the blades bevels and edges and trying to make things as symmetrical as possible. I was so involved with it that I ended up skipping lunch. We had a belt-sander, a small Ryobi 4x36 rotary/disc model, that helped speed things up considerably, but the final shaping of the secondary edges required filework. I'm kind of glad that I got a chance to test out that Ryobi, as it was something I was considering getting before... now I'm pretty sure it'll be a purchase in the near future.

I didn't bring my camera, and I'm too exhausted anyway to go outside the hotel to my car to get my unfinished blade, but suffice to say it's still a bit ugly with some more smoothing and filing and sanding to get it looking more even.... but it still looks close to a knife at least! :)

More to come tomorrow!