Forging a Viking War Axe | Medieval Blacksmithing

Well hello hello and welcome back to Black Hammer Artisan. Today we're going to be forging an axe, specifically a viking war axe, using only medieval tools. So welcome to today's video. Today we're going to be making a viking axe, as I said in the intro. Sorry about the lateness of this video, it's been a really busy season so we're obviously late as you can tell. So this is our billet we're going to be forging the axe out of. There's going to be a spike coming off this end, a blade coming off this end, there's going to be an eye right about there, give or take a little. We have to square it up before we can really work with it. So there's going to be somewhat of a beard on the axe, not too crazy, not too extreme, but somewhat. Actually I'm going to probably make that by pounding down the eye area of the axe a little bit more and there's going to be a spike coming off the back as I already said with a puller going around the base of the spike just to kind of separate it off from the body of the axe. I think it looks good. All right so in the last video where I made a draw knife, I got a lot of helpful comments and one of them, one commenter whose name is escaping me right now, said that I should move my forge closer to my anvil and vise which was a great idea. So as you can see I did. Also you may recognize these bellows that I'm using here from a previous video that I made some time back which will be over here and they're drum bellows as you can see. I have modified them a little bit since then. The key difference being that I've switched the and I've teed both of these tweer pipes into one pipe. The reason I did that was first off actually to get me a little bit farther away from the forge because I don't like all the sparks flying in my face and secondly because that way if they suck air in at all, one of them's always blowing if it's going through the same pipe so that stops it from sucking any air. If you've ever had issues with sucking air with your bellows, which I have before, this seems to be a great way fix it. It's not sucking at all now. Should actually be ready pretty quick here. So one thing here, don't trust the video here on how hot this piece is because the sun makes it look a lot colder than it is. This is nearly at a forge welding heat and I'm just trying to get it real good and square so it sits good when I go to punch the eye. So I'm getting this here, you can see, squashed down. I'm gonna punch a hole through that and then I'm gonna draw the beard out of this. I figure probably one more heat or so, maybe two. Okay I figure that's about enough, close to anyway. Still got a little bit of heat in it. Right when you're getting the punch started here you really want to take care, even if it costs you an entire heat, and make sure you get the punch in straight and in the middle. Also keep your punch somewhat cooled and you want to switch from side to side as you do this. So I'm gonna cool it like that, switch sides. Now I'm doing it from this side and that'll help make sure you keep it straight and there we go. It's now very clearly marked so I'll show you here. You can see that there, it's a good clear deep mark. I'm not gonna lose that, there's no way. And I'll come back a little bit hotter next time and try and get it most the way through and I'll flip it over and do it from the other side. Probably do one more. So again it is hotter than it looks but honestly I still should have got it probably hotter than I did. I tend to get a little hasty, pull it out early. Also I don't put wedges in my top tools. Some people do but I think it's a bad idea. So just make sure you don't forget to tap it in every once in a while if you're like me. Just kind of experiment around and find how many hits you think is good in between turns. I think I'm doing about eight. Roughly, I lost count there. If you start deforming the front of your punch, you're letting it get too hot. So you always want to check that. Mine's looking great so far. Actually it still has some file marks on it that haven't even been hammered out so that's a good sign. Give it a little tap, keep the head on there. You don't want that flying off. And we do not see the frog's eye. So what's going to happen here when I get this, oops, when I get this with my tongs. There we go. When I get this hole and get the eye punched far enough through, you'll be able to see what they call the frog's eye on this side where the metal is kind of getting compressed and it heats up extra on that spot because of the pressure. Creates energy. Okay I'm not precisely recommending this but I was getting cooked by the sun so we stuck this up and it's definitely keeping the sun off me. It's still pretty hot and I have to watch it. I don't want to catch it on fire but it's doing good so far. Close. I'm going to see if I can see the frog's eye from the other end. Hopefully I can. Yep I can see it. So it's right here. I'm going to try and carefully begin punching it out. Cool. Okay so I just got it all the way punched through. I'm trying to get my punch freed up. Got a little bit over zealous perhaps and didn't switch my punches sides but that's okay. It's looking pretty good. So the punch is still not deformed at all which I'm really happy about and this is a very very important mile marker so I'll show you here. You can see there's a clean hole. Very clean. Very nice. All the way through and there is a beautiful probably one of the most beautiful hammer eye or axe eye slugs I've ever seen. So basically if you get your punch good and straight then you'll punch through most of the way on one side flip it over finish the punch out on the other side which is what I did. It punched really nice and straight and you will have a very nice beautiful slug like this and if you're not a blacksmith I'm sorry you won't understand but that is a beautiful slug. We usually put these in jars we keep them. So the next step will be drifting. So if you don't know what drifting is basically obviously this is supposed to become an axe but it's not yet. One of the things it needs to become more axe-ish it needs to have a proper axe eye hole that will accept an axe handle and if you've ever seen an axe you know axe handles kind of have a teardrop shape. This piece of metal here is called the drift. It's got that same teardrop shape that the top of the handle will have. It's the same shape approximately as the top of your handle it's supposed to go into the axe and you can see it's small on this end and it gets bigger so the idea is to stick it in the hole that you've now punched and you hammer it through until it makes the hole the right shape. All right for a drifting heat you're going to want to have the entire thing a little more hot not just the eye area. You don't have to have the entire thing fully heated but it's going to be moving more than just the eye and you want to check and make sure you get it good and centered which it's looking pretty good and you don't want to put this you don't want to bump this into the top of your anvil really at all because you just you just don't want to put a dent in your anvil. So there are two tools that I do not have right here anyway that uh would be really handy for this. One is a swage block. I would use that a little later on at this point. The other is a striking anvil because this anvil is obviously a bit higher. I'm having to hit up here. I want to be hitting down here to get a full swing at it and I'm just about out of heat as far as what I need for this but you do with what you have and other thing it's actually not imperative to keep your your drift completely cool um because actually what will happen you actually don't want to do that because if you cool your drift down all the way it will start sucking the heat out of your well and it already is to a certain degree but it'll start sucking the heat out of your axe and cool it down quicker because basically you know it's cool if that's hot so it wants to equalize itself and it does that by sucking the heat into the drift so you actually don't need to cool the drift down all the way but if you see it getting red hot you should probably cool it off. All right that was a bad idea obviously. All right so I've got my makeshift swage block over here as you can see. This is absolutely something you should do with gloves on. I forgot to grab them. I'm trying to get it through so it sticks into the block so I don't have to hold it up with my hand would be really nice and it's working slowly but surely. So this makeshift swage block here is just a piece of railroad iron railroad plate that there's a hole punches through and I have a it's very makeshift I have a just a stump underneath it with a hole the same shape hole roughly bored into and that way I can drop it through into this I can drop the drift all the way through the axe into that without you know smacking the top of my anvil or something like that. Obviously in medieval times they didn't have railroad plates but the idea of a fairly thick piece of metal this one's not as thick as it should be but oh well with a hole through it being used as a swage block is quite common oh that's hot there we go we're making good progress this time well there went my tongs uh that just happened if my face melts don't pay any attention just look away from the screen pretend you didn't notice that's hot I just lost a decent bit of heat there but oh well and I think that's about far enough all right so you can probably see I've got the back of it propped up on that thing that uh spike and I'm just putting it through from the other side which is going very easily that was easier than I was expecting it to be actually all right so what I'm doing here is the drift when I put it in got a little bit crooked so I'm going to cool down one side of the eye so that it the material on that side will move much slower and then hammer on the other side to uh to thin that out so that I can work more and talk less um actually no so that I can even them out a bit all right so last heat I tried to uh cool one side off in oil in order to make it not move as fast as the other side there's material on the other side so this time I used water worked a lot last time I made a big old fireball important thing here is just remember don't cool it down all the way because you will crack it if you do that drift handle's getting pretty hot there keeping to the glove you can see here I'm using the corner of my hammer kind of like a cross peen almost um if you have soft enough corners on your hand you can do that I would use a six pound cross peen or straight peen if I have one but I don't so so I got this whole fairly symmetrical and the next thing I'm going to do is be drawing out the bit so this will be the fun part one other thing I forgot to mention is we wound up having to not go with the spike on the back idea because I just didn't leave enough material behind the the eye of the axe so we're having to not do that this time I I like heating up big chunks of steel it's this part's always fun to me some people might think it's grueling and it is a little bit but it's it's a lot of fun you'll notice I'm using the flat peen here and that's because whichever so if I have the flat peen facing this way it's going to spread it this way almost all of the material is going to be very little this way movement of the material and that's what I want it's also a little bit faster you can see it's starting to look a little more like an axe which is always a fun fun time got a somewhat more drawing out to do on the beard of the axe here and the next step is going to be drawing out the lugs it's getting thinner at some point here whenever I get it a little more thinned out I'm going to try shaping it over the horn here it's about the only thing I like these horns for I generally like a really nice round conical horn on my anvils but which this one does not have it has kind of that squash flat horn thing that's I find really weird maybe somebody likes it but I haven't met them yet but actually no I did I did watch one guy that did like it Niels Ogren which you should definitely check out on YouTube he's a way better axe maker than I am he uh he liked pretty much this exact anvil for the purpose of shaping an axe which I also like it for but because I do a lot more than just making axes I don't like it overall all right folks we're back it's the next day the night is over and we're still working on forking out the bit all right so as you can probably see right here is kind of a weird looking angle it's because just a minute ago I burned the edge in the forge a little bit I wasn't paying attention don't do that and so I had to trim that off but it's looking all right I'm still gonna be able to fix this it should be okay but be careful if you're doing this when it starts to get thin and you're not paying attention you're used to spending longer heating it up because it's thicker when it gets thinner it heats up faster so remember that this heat worked a lot better it's pretty difficult to to heat up this middle section of the axe where I want heated up without heating up either end to an insane degree literally it's part of the benefit of a solid fuel forge though you can control where the fire is as opposed to a gas forge you uh you can't it just is everywhere I'm shaping over the horn now as I mentioned earlier that's pretty much the one good thing about this horn it's been a long time since I made one of these and I actually got one of the steps out of order which is you're supposed to put in the fuller right here where I'm hammering now before you forge out the blade but I forgot about that all right so next I'm going to heat up the eye of the axe and draw the lugs on it which should be pretty fun and then it'll be a little bit easier for you to tell all the dimensions and I'll spend some time messing around with that and getting it all looking right I'm trying to pull material back towards me as you can see they're starting to work so the thing is with the cross peen it spreads this way regular hammerhead spreads fairly evenly in all directions so that's why I'm using the cross pin I want to pull it towards me when I get to the top here I'm going to switch to this side and use that just going to finish drawing out the other cheek here didn't even need the hammer that time also I have a hate to tell you know how gloves are supposed to keep the slag off your hand I have a spiteful glove the other day when I was uh I think I was doing the same operation I'm doing now um a little piece of slag flew in and went straight down my glove to about here I got a bad burn on the back of my hand I mean not terrible but correcting my uh lugs of the axe here trying to get them to line up and be symmetrical all right so we got pretty much all the forging done got the lugs out they're looking decent I'm going to put my maker's mark on each side just because I think it'll look nice there the important thing to do in this situation is just make sure you hit it real good and hard the first time and probably get hotter than I just got it so I heated up the edge of the uh the axe here I'm going to do what's called annealing it which is basically where you you heat it up to a critical temperature around 1600 degrees give or take a little and um then let it cool very slowly over like 12 to 24 hours I actually ran out of charcoal though I had enough to heat it up but I couldn't bury the axe in it um so what I did was I just I heaped up the charcoal as much as I could over it which heated up the edge and buried part of the axe and then I buried the rest of it in wood and it's just like a little campfire here that'll keep on burning for quite a while should keep it hot and make it cool down very very slowly over a preferably you would heat up the whole axe if you're going to do it that way and bury it in the sand and that'll insulate it so it cools down very slowly but this should work fire is going to burn for quite a while which should keep it from cooling down very quickly all right so made this up off camera and uh it's not quite finished but it's close and then here of course is what the axe is looking like and the next step is going to be to heat up the edge and quench it it's always a good idea to wear a glove for this particular operation and move it around otherwise it can form a steam jacket around itself that will not allow it to cool very quickly and that's a good sign I did not feel any cracks you can usually feel this kind of kind of thing going on um when it starts cracking so I didn't feel any of that so it's just good so far you never know though until you grind the edge so cross cross your fingers hopefully it I just kind of quenched the back um it was not incandescent at all well below critical temperature I'm not hardening it I just wanted to I'm wanting to get rid of as much heat as I can out of this because I'm just gonna manually temper it in the forge so just so you don't get confused I'm not quenching it here at all I'm just getting rid of a little bit of residual heat that I couldn't quench off in this middle section here because I want to be able to handle with my hands but the edge was already quenched and cooled by that time all right so what I'm doing here is uh manually tempering it so I've taken a file and cleaned off the slag on the edge the uh the iron oxide I mean as you can see I've stuck the eye of the axe down in the forge the forge is not super hot right now um but it's it's just residual heat from when I heated it up and I'm gonna wait for the temper colors to come up I'll probably heat the forge up just a little bit to help encourage it so it doesn't take you know two hours but yeah when I see the temper colors I'm looking for first it'll be blue and then kind of a purpley and then it'll turn kind of a straw yellow and that's what I'm that's what I'm looking for is that straw yellow at this point I got to uh I've tempered the axe and I got to fit the head onto it also I got handles put on this thing as you can see so I'm not going to go over the entire handle making process as you can see I've already made most of it um because I've shown how to do that in previous videos and it's just not that complicated this is mainly about forging and I'll show the fit up of the axe as well so I'll bring it back in a second all right so here's where we're at I've got the handle all finished up and stained as you can see I put it on a little bit thick so it's a little darker than I was intending but I kind of like it and as you can see the head I've brushed it all nicely and I sharpened up the edge a bit wasn't going to waste your time you know showing you how to file an axe but it's not that hard just takes some time and uh yeah the next stage is going to be cutting in a split here and then making the wedge and driving it in and that'll be about it the thing you want to make sure you're doing here is just make sure you get it real good and straight and don't make one side much smaller than the other all right so the next step is pretty self-explanatory I've already cut the wedge in here I've got the head on and I'm going to take uh this wedge here and shove it down in all right so I got the wedge put in I made a line previously going to how deep the the um slit I cut into the top of the axe was so I'd know not to drive it too far because if you drive it too far you'll crack your handle and that's bad so I'm now just gonna cut it off I present to you the war axe so that concludes this project I hope you enjoyed watching me uh get fried in the sun uh but yeah it was a lot of fun all the processes from punching it to drifting it drawing out the blade quenching it crafting out the handle and just fitting it all together we got a good axe and uh it turned out to be more of a useful axe a little bit more of a camp axe war axe sort of thing um definitely could be used in battle but also functional because of the hammer I was originally thinking to make a spike but the hammer's got honestly a much more functional tool and I really like the way it turned out I think it looks great so I hope you enjoyed watching the video if you liked it then like it subscribe if you'd like to see more videos like this and until next time farewell wherever you fare