Will Stelter: How To Make A Damascus Rebar Axe

For the last couple months, I've been seeing these viral rebar axes all over my social media. They take a piece of rebar, they bend it to shape, they throw a little edge on there, they wrap the handle in paracord. It's a very interesting concept, but there's a couple of big problems with it. The first one is that rebar sucks. You have no idea what the steel is, it's probably not hardenable, so you're putting all that time and effort into something that isn't actually going to be able to cut anything. The second issue is that they do these, in my opinion, not-so-great-looking shapes, and so I think that what we can do is take this base concept and do a really, really cool version of it. For one thing, I have a design that I think is going to look really, really nice, and for another thing, we're going to make it out of Damascus, which is always sick. Now here's what we got. We've got a very nice-looking handle shape with two points that your hand can easily hang onto. We've got the swell right down here, which is plenty of room for your hand, so you can choke up on the axe. We've got a nice bird's beak swell down there, so that if you want a little bit more leverage, you've got it. We've got a spike on the back, and we've got about a three-inch-wide edge on the front. Now since we're going to make this out of Damascus, we need to work up that billet before we can start forging out our bar stock. Now these are end cuts from a big batch of Damascus that I did recently, and each of these pieces is 28 layers. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen pieces. Fifteen times twenty-eight is, oh, I should be able to do this in my head, that's not going to work, four hundred and twenty, which should be a nice, fine pattern. Now these pieces have been etched in muriatic acid, and so most of the forge scale has gone off the outside, but we need to wire wheel them before we stick them together and get the forge weld done. Look at that, load and load. That is quite the template. All right, we're finally ready to start actually forging the shape of the axe. I've got 31 inches of twisted 420-layer round bar, and I also cut out a sheet metal template of the axe itself, just took a photo of it, drew it up in Fusion, and then cut it out on the water jet. And so now I can hold up my bar as I'm bending it and not burn up the template that I'm forging through. Now, there is one big holdup of making this thing, and that is that I have no idea what I'm doing. My plan is to start at the top and make my kind of T-shaped bends first, and then just work my way down until it's done. Let's do it. Well, guys, I paused the forging because we have a pretty serious problem. And that is that it broke in half. I reckon in trying to close up that forge weld, it just got a little bit too hot, and it's toast. The good news is that I have, I think, a much better plan on how to re-approach this. See, it was really challenging to try and get all of those bends mathed out properly. I just have no idea what I'm doing there. So instead, what I'm going to do is do one piece that I'll make the back handle from, one piece that I'll make the front of the handle from, and then I'll forge weld those on to a blade piece. That will allow me to, for one thing, control the bends and contours a lot better, and for another thing, don't have to be quite as precise with my volume calculations. If I have too much material on the end of the handle, I can chop it off. If it comes out too far on the top of the blade, I can chop it off before I do my forge weld. And fortunately, I still have plenty of this 400-layer steel to get it done with. I think it'll also lead to a much cleaner all-around forging, because I won't be dealing with having the handles and the head in the way. I'll get everything looking really nice before I do my final forge welds. So let's get this thing broken down and into some, I don't know, probably half-inch bar stock. I forgot to hit record. I just quenched the ax. Gosh dang it. After all that. Sick. With the forging, grinding, heat treating, and hand sanding done, I'm gonna start working on the stand before I do the etching. Now this stand is gonna start off from 6 inches of 2-inch square stock, and I'm gonna be trying out some old-school industrial-style techniques to get this stand forged into something totally unique to display this ax properly. This thing turned out so freaking cool. I did do a blackening solution on there. I cold-blued it and then drew it back. It was kind of a charcoal grain that really brought out the chatoyance in this 420-layer steel. I love the top of the blade. You can see where the two handlebars are forge welded into the edge bar, and I'm just really digging the wood grain pattern that goes all the way around. I think this thing just looks mean, it's comfortable, it's really not all that heavy, and it was a great challenge all the way around to get this thing done. Now as it turns out, building this thing wasn't actually the hardest part of this project. This stand turned out to be a way more complicated forging than the actual ax was. I took a lot of inspiration from the J.W. Lilico book, Blacksmith's Manual Illustrated, on how to do some of these really complicated manipulations, but things like getting these corners crisp, getting this bottom flat, all of these 90-degree bends and stuff like that was all just super complicated, and this thing actually took me about four days to finish, which is a little bit longer than the ax took. So they both had their very unique challenges, but overall I am just tickled with how they turned out and with the combination. I love the way that the ax sits on the top of the stand. It's all just very blacksmith-y, very kind of industrial feeling, and I'm just a huge fan. And if you guys like it as well, this thing will be for sale on the Stelter MFG website. You can click the link in the description down below. But if forged Damascus axes are not your thing, don't you worry, because we have a couple other neat things on the website right now too. One of them being the Stelter MFG Proof Collaboration Razor. I designed this handle on our local friends over at Proof Razor, machine it, and put their awesome single blade pivoting head system on top of it. And what we're left with is a beautiful razor that just performs wonderfully. I know it doesn't look like I have to shave ever. I have to shave about every two days, otherwise my face looks dirty because I can't grow a full beard yet. The other things that we have on the website are the Stelter MFG Heritage Aprons. These are 100% USA made, USA made hardware, full grain calfskin, water buffalo straps. They're super comfortable. They look good. We're also going to be having a restock of Signature Series Chef's Knives very soon, so make sure you sign up for the email list if you're looking for a fantastic USA made forged chef's knife. That's the place to get it. All of that is going to be available on StelterMFG.com, so make sure you head over there. It really helps support the channel, and it helps us build up our small manufacturing business here. Here's the thing. Matt and I have no idea what we're doing, but we are putting out what I think are some of the best chef's knives on the market, and we're having a great time while we do it, so that's a big win. Of course, none of this would be possible without you fine folks watching, liking, subscribing, dropping a comment down below. All of that stuff really helps out the channel, so thank you guys so, so much. Thank you to our patrons for patronizing us. I'll see you guys on the next one. Bye bye.