Hand-Forged File – 18th Century Forge

Morning! Welcome to Townsend's Wilderness Homestead. My name is Brandon Oswald. I'm the blacksmith here. Today we're going to make a file. As you can imagine, you can use it for many different things. Starting off with our blank of high carbon steel. So we got our forge up to temp. We got some good coals in there. We got our piece of high carbon steel, which is what you want. You want the file to have a good sharp edge that'll last. And we're going to start just by forging the tang onto the end of what's going to be our file. Shouldn't take too long to get this up to temperature. And we're looking for just a just a cherry red or a little bit past it. It should be about 1600 degrees. You can tell that by the color and just being used to it. The hotter it is, the brighter it is, and the softer it is. Let's get our coals in a happy spot. With this type of forge, this is called a side blast forge, where the air, instead of coming up from underneath, it's actually coming from the side or from behind. So you always have to keep that in mind. And it takes a lot more tending the fire, keeping the coals away from the vent where the air blast is coming through. Take it out and see if we're, we have a little bit of color, but not quite there yet. And this is a thin enough piece of steel that you have to be careful not to get it too hot, because it can actually melt it and destroy the end of it. All right, we're just about there with our heat. The wind has got a lot of these blowing my way. Okay, that's a good enough heat to start with. Now we lost our heat. It no longer has any color. We can continue hammering on it, but we want to do it when it's when it's hot. When it's red hot, that cherry color, that makes it soft and makes it easier to forge. So we'll put it back in the fire. And each time you do this, it's called a heat. So what we're doing is just working on the tang, drawing it out. And that's what the the end of it a little bit. By making your own file, you can make whatever shape you want. Straighten this guy out just a little bit. I'd say at least one more heat. I'm going to add a little bit more coal, charcoal. Once again, it's hardwood charcoal that's just been burnt without oxygen. Sometimes you get bigger chunks and just knock them into more manageable pieces. And we have our tang basically formed. We're just going to straighten it up a little bit. It doesn't have to be anything pretty because it is going to have a wooden handle put onto it. So we've got the tang part done. The other end, we're just going to clean up from where the cutter, you know, kind of splayed the end. So it's just kind of rounding it. Okay, so we have our basic file shape hammered out. The next step is to anneal it. And what that means is you have to soften it so that we can actually use the chisel to cut the teeth into the file. To do that, we have to heat it up and then put it into hardwood ashes and let it sit overnight. And that slow cooling down will soften the hard steel to the point to where we can use the chisel to cut the teeth. So we got to get this hot and stick it in some ashes. So we have our file blank that has been annealed sat overnight in the ashes. So it should be soft enough to cut with the cold chisel. And I'm just going to go along and cut the teeth into it. And this will be the step right before hardening. So it's soft right now after I cut the teeth and we'll harden it and we should have a file. And it's going to be a lot of this. You can see I'm angling the chisel just a little bit to get one edge of the cut to kind of pop up and give a little tooth. So we have our file here. I've got all the teeth cut into it. The next step is to harden it. So we made it soft overnight by annealing it. Now we have to harden it back up so that the teeth will hold an edge a little longer. And to do that we're going to heat it up to a good cherry red color, frontier file. It should do just the trick. Yeah, not cutting too bad. This will get put to a lot use here on the homestead.