Rondel Dagger - 14th Century Europe - MAN AT ARMS - REFORGED

I'm Cary Stagmer and we are the blacksmiths of Baltimore Knife and Sword. We're going to be building some of your favorite things and fantastic objects you've never seen before. This is Man at Arms Reforged. Today on Man at Arms we're going to be creating a historic dagger, something you guys have asked for pretty much all over the forums and the different YouTubes. We're going to be creating a rondelle dagger. It is truly a devastating weapon with a long spike that's used to penetrate armor, but why just make it simple? Decker's going to be making a big Damascus blade. We're going to be able to go through and create large silver sections for the guard and the pommel, and then Lauren will be here. She'll be setting gemstones and finishing the work. We'll be showing you this fantastic weapon from tip to pommel, from Damascus to amethyst, here on Man at Arms. Now that Decker has alternating layers of 1095 and 15N20 welded up into this billet, he's going to have to take it and get it forge welded. To do that it's going to go into the forge, come up to temperature, and he'll begin to hammer. Decker brushes the surface of the billet off. That's going to get the scale off the surface. He'll add a little bit of flux just to ensure that his weld is easier. Now that he has the basic bar out to length, he's going to cut it and restack it. That'll increase the layer count and give us a much more desirable pattern. If you look at the side of the bottom die, you'll notice a small bar there. We call that a kiss block. That's locked in place and sets the height that the material can be after the forging. He goes back to the hammer and takes the corners off. This is so that when the material is twisted, there's no overlapping corners to give us cold shunts. Lauren poured a couple of silver discs for me. The billet of this material can still be a little rough and a little grainy on the surface. The way we eliminate that is we anneal and hammer these. They're forged to form and that will consolidate the material and make it much cleaner. You'll see it change as I go through this and we'll do a couple of annealing cycles so that we soften it and it will continue to clean the surface until we barely have to do any polish work. What we're doing now, we're actually going to cut into the backside of the pommel where we're going to locate the bezels. There's no reason that you couldn't just set the bezels on the surface and go ahead and solder, but because this pommel is so thick, we're going to be using a lot of heat coming in from the bottom. The bezels can actually wander slightly as the solder becomes liquid. We don't want them to move, so I'm going to cut them in with a milling machine. There'll be a little seat and then each bezel for each gemstone will have a location. We put that in place and nothing will move while it's hot. Paul Freidel and Decker take this billet out and twist it. This is going to add pattern to the overall piece. It'll take a couple of heats and a lot of twisting, but when we go through and create the blade, it'll give us this really nice star pattern. Now that the bar is consolidated, he begins to forge down the blade. He's able to strike it much harder with the hammer. This is breaking loose the scale or oxidized surface off the blade. Decker now uses a tool we call a smithing tool, which basically holds an upper and lower chisel in place. It's going to allow him to give kind of a perfect pinch top and bottom and then he'll turn it left and right and that that's going to allow him to have a nice shoulder and then material that's pushed away on the other side, which will become the tang. So Decker got done doing the rondelle and the rough forging on this, so I'm going to take this now and I'm actually going to clean it up and I'm going to grind the three sides for the rondelle. Once I'm done roughing it out, I'm going to hand it back to them so they can do the heat treat. So Bill got all the grinding done on this rondelle and gave us this nice triangle or cross section. After that, I heat treated it and Kerry put it through the temper. You can see we've got a nice straw color here, which is kind of what we're looking for. So now I'm going to do the finished grinding, get these surfaces nice and cleaned up, get the tang down to dimension and get these shoulders nice and square. I've got a carbide face grinding guide that goes on there so I can make sure everything's nice and even and flat so when Kerry and the crew fit up the rest of the fittings it'll go well. We'll get this polished up and etched. I've got this about down to size. I've got my guide here with carbide faces so I can take all of this down and make it nice and flat. So I'm making the bezel for the pommel and I'm going to roll it around my bezel mandrel and then I have to fit it to the stone. So we fit it and then I'm going to cut it and then do fine fitting. Lauren is painting a boric acid mixture over the surface of the silver. It's going to kind of lock everything together as it dries. We dry it simply by lighting it on fire but it's going to create a surface over all of the silver which will prevent it from absorbing oxygen. So it's an oxygen blocker and essentially acts as a flux to a certain degree as well. Now that we have the bezels soldered in place I'm going to set the stones in it. I'm doing it old school because that's the easiest thing to do on a piece this size. Unlike the silver in the pommel which is sterling silver, the silver that's used in the bezels is fine silver or pure silver and the reason that we do that is it moves much easier as we begin to shrink it around the top of each one of these cabochons of the gemstones. It'll be much easier to form and polish although it will look essentially the same when the piece is fully finished. After a brief hiatus it's really great to have Lauren back in the shop. She's here and one of the main things is is that we want to create jeweled daggers on a regular basis. So one of the things that she's primarily here to do for us is exactly this type of work. So now that the finished grinding has been done I'm going to go take some sandpaper and do a little hand sanding on these surfaces to get them nice and clean and even before we etch this piece. So now that Bill has got this rondelle ground cleaned up and looking really good we're going to etch it so that we get the damascus pattern out of it. This is twist pattern so where we've got these real deep reliefs in this triangular cross section should look really neat. What I'm going to do is get it cleaned up. I'll degrease it really well, clean it up, then I'll attach some wire so I can hang it into the etching solution and we'll go into the etch and out and see what we get. Rick pulls out a felt tip and just lays out the pattern that we're going to engrave. It really doesn't take him very long. He kind of designs as he goes. He's got a great eye for this. I'm going to be doing the engraving today on the pommel and as you can see here Rick has just finished up designing what we're going to engrave on this. Next we're going to prepare the gravers for the engraving. It's a pretty precise step. These are very minuscule tools and the slightest angle change can affect these in the most drastic of ways. Very precise angles, very specific angles, and we are going to take this up to a very fine polish for a nice bright cut. I'm taking a highly polished planishing hammer and just going over the rims of these pieces of silver. It basically creates facets which act like jeweling and kind of throw the light differently as the piece is rotated. All right so today we are here to cut an amethyst that's going into the nut of the back of the sword and we are using this Diamond Pacific cabbing machine and it's a pretty interesting little process that we go through. They all kind of start out like these rough crystals and within about less than an hour you can get it pretty smooth looking like this and right now what we're just trying to do is just kind of get all some of the inclusions and go for a better color. Zach's got to go through and prepare the bezel. He's going to clean it up and make sure that it's fairly bright inside and there's no burrs that can crack the stone. This material, while it looks like silver, it's actually damascus. It's a piece of the blade so once the piece is fully set we'll take that to acid too and you'll see in the final shots it's actually got the same pattern in it that you see in the blade. We've selected a really nice piece of hardwood that's been stabilized to make our rondelle handle. Kerry is going to do the faceting on it. I'm going to start by roughing it and getting it into shape. We really enjoy working with precious materials like this. It's not something we get to do all the time here at Baltimore Knife and Sword. It's definitely something we'll be doing more of in the future and we'll bring it to you here on Man at Arms. Click here to subscribe or click here to see more episodes. Thanks for watching Man at Arms Reforged. We need to know what you want the team to build. Tell us in the comments below what you would like to see.