Short Post on Inlaying for Doctor Hammer
Inlaying on a knife or spear or any other medium to high carbon implement is tricky, and requires very hard gravers. After a short conversation with Doc (Who you can find here
) I figured I could cook up a few images to explain the idea and process a little better.
Currently I've been slowly working on my friend Ancient Days’ Seax (Who’s fantastic Substack can be found here
), and many lessons have been learned. First, 1084 is ridiculously hard. Second, 1084 is even more ridiculously hard when it’s been quenched and tempered. Before I had even though about, I had gone ahead and quenched and tempered the blade. Recovering from this was not impossible though, and with some clever use of water and clay, I was able to draw the spine back soft enough that some gravers I had made could bite into the steel.
Final product will be shown when the time is right, However, for the time being we’ll get back to the How-To.
First thing, have the steel as dead soft as you can get it. If you are confident enough to anneal it, do so.
Second, lay out your pattern you want to inlay, You can do this with markers, print-outs, etc. There’s also the possibility of acid etching the design lightly to give you some help in starting your inlay channels.
Third, cut your initial grooves. They’ll need to be a little bit smaller than the diameter of your wire twisted together. I’m using 24 gauge wire, so For a single twist (2 wires, roughly 1mm twisted together) my groove is roughly .75mm, for more wires adjust appropriately. You’ll want them roughly the same depth as width as well. There are two ways the initial grooves is often cut, One by hammering straight down, cutting a v-shaped notch, initially, vs. cutting a square bottom. The square bottomed notch is more difficult, but less work for step 4. You can cut these by holding the graver at an extremely steep angle, cutting a chip out of the material (similar to how a shaper machine works) The major difference here is that the V-notch is displacing material (In theory with a deep enough v notch you can displace enough material that undercutting is not necessary, but in my experience this is a gamble) , while the Square is removing material, I find that the results at the end of the day are similar.
Fourth, Undercutting. This is where you take your V or Square groove and make it a proper inlaying channel. Undercut your channels perpendicularly. This will give an area for the wire to spread into whenever you are ready to hammer it in. This is essential to ‘lock’ the wire in.
Fifth, Harden and temper your blade.
Sixth, inlay your wire. Two sets of opposing twists will give you a Chevron pattern, while a single twist will give you a simpler ‘candy-cane’ pattern. Once you have gotten your twists, hammer them into the grooves. They should spread into the undercut channel and lock in.
Finally, sand and polish. Finish the work piece as you normally would. If you got everything right the inlay should be able to be sanded and polished as you would normally do.
This is not the end-all be-all guide of inlaying, but maybe it will help some of my fellow craftsmen out a little. I will put out another version of this with more pictures as a get the Seax mentioned at the beginning finished. I know this will be of limited interest, but figured it would be nice to put it out anyway. Thank you for reading, and remember to follow me on twitter
Thanks for writing this up! It makes a lot of sense, as in my experiments I found that some of the V channels would hold wire but not others, and come to think of it they probably were only the deepest channels I had cut.
Are you using the same graver for the under cuts? Those seem like they would have to be whisper thin, but then I suppose you are only making very small undercut, not much more than horizontal abrasions a few tenths of a millimeter.
Again, thanks for taking the time to write this up. These sorts of quick tutorials are a really nice place to get started.