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Historical Inspiration This forum is dedicated to the discussion of historical knife design and its influence on modern custom knife work.

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Old 02-02-2009, 08:17 PM
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Don Halter Don Halter is offline
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ancient steel/iron artifacts

I started collecting small knives, arrowheads and axeheads almost 20 yrs ago. I've been having problems with some of the items getting active rust spots on them. No doubt from improper/unfinished cleaning and stabilizing procedures. I finally got around to cleaning these up. I used to inspect the nautical archaeology dept when I worked at the university and they showed me quite a bit about cleaning and preserving iron artifacts, I just never got around toactually doing it on my collection.

Well, I de-rusted the first six knives and one large woodworking chisel/splitter. I was shocked at the results on the knives. Five of the six are of composite structure with very obvious weldlines. The upper sections are such poor quality wrought, with heavy silica inclusions that it sparkles in the light. The lower third is very clean/uniform steel/iron with no inclusions or visible silica banding.

One of the Roman folding knife blades still has remnants of silver inlay work in a zig-zag pattern inlaid into the fuller.

I collected blades that were found primarily in Germany (upper and lower Rhine valley and a few from the Black Forest region) from Roman ruin dig locations. Some of the lots also had coins found along side the same location so I could probably help date some that way.

Several are seax shapes, but only a few inches up to 4 or 5 inches long.

I'll work on getting pics together this week and post here. I plan on remaking all the items and putting them alongside the originals in a display case inset in a coffee table in our library area of the house.


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Old 02-02-2009, 10:59 PM
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Looking forward to seeing the pics. I'm developing a fondness for some of the Roman pattern utility blades, you're right some are very much sax shaped, in a broke-back kinda way.


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Old 02-02-2009, 11:12 PM
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It's not right for you to tease everyone with these descriptions and no pictures!!


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Old 02-03-2009, 10:48 AM
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I'm having scanner problems. I might have to set the light box up...but a scanner is sooo much easier for little objects like these!


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Old 02-03-2009, 12:31 PM
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You can mail them to me Don. My scanners working fine and I'll get them back to you..... eventually

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Old 02-03-2009, 05:06 PM
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Here's some of the more interesting ones. The scans aren't great, but they show enough detail. I plan on reproducing all in my collection. I want to make a glass/lexan toped coffee table with a display area inset in the middle to put in the library section of our house where I'll have all the originals and repros side by side.


All of them together...the biggest is 5 7/8" blade.




Here's the scans of them individually:
This one's the first one I cleaned and noticed. there's actually a 3/4" long weld failure you can see. It's hard to make out, but there are completely diferent grain patterns in the two. This is the "cleanest" of any of the blades I have with regards to rust and decomposition.




A nice 3" long seax. It has a double fuller along the spine on both sides.




Here's a 2" long seax. On the side scanned here, it has a weld visible in a fairly smooth clean section. The other side looks to have more silica clad iron on the front top with smoother iron on the bottom, but is more corroded.





I like this one. A nice little single edged dagger blade. I'd like to have seen the whole knife. The weld line trails off the end on this one. It was probably a longer blade by a couple inches, but the rest has corroded away. Like several of the others, in the clean smooth portions, there are two distinctly different materials on top and bottom.




This one has a lot of the blade edge eroded away. really hard to tell if it's welded ot just differentially hardened, but there is a definite "color" difference between top and bottom with a line separating the two. On the tng, it looks more like the others with difference in iron compostion, but there's just too much corrosion. I'll have to work a bit more at cleaning it.



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Old 02-03-2009, 05:21 PM
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Here's the remainder:

I didn't mark the lines on this one...they're pretty obvious. This one was found along with some coins dating to 3-4th century. Both top and bottom irons have silica inclusions and visible grain, just the bottom is a much more smooth. This one is one of my favorite ones.




I'd like to do several repros of the folding knives. I was pretty shocked the first time I found out they had folders back all the way to Roman times. I guess if you can build aquaducts and architecture like they had, the concept of a folding knife should be easy. I don't know why sometimes the simple things suprise me. This one is cool in that the pin is still intact in the blade. This has a single fuller about 1/4" wide on the scanned side. Within the fuller is what appears to be silver inlay in a double-lined, zig-zag pattern. (The little dagger blade had some silver leaf on the base of it as well but it has since flaked off.)




This one is the longest in my collection with ~5 7/8" blade. It's also one of the most heavily corroded and still needs some work. This one has so much silica and such in the upper half, it sparkles in the light. The lower half is a very smooth iron/steel. There are a couple weld failures visible as well on the side not scanned.




Hope you like them. I'll be doing the axeheads next. I'm actually going to saw one in half, polish and etch to show the composit e construction. I have three identical style heads, and this one the farmer that found it took and angle grinder to it to "polish it up". I told him that collectors really prefer not to have anything done to them. I'd rather have a shoebox full of the dirt still surrounding it than to have another grinder cleaned axehead!


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Last edited by Don Halter; 02-03-2009 at 11:27 PM.
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Old 02-05-2009, 12:34 PM
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Cool stuff, Don! Thanks for posting it.
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Old 02-05-2009, 02:03 PM
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Thanks for sharing the pics, Don!

Is there a chance that these blades are laminated, similar to what we see in modern Scandinavian blades such as Morseth used? Good steel used in the center/edge portion, softer steel used on the outside. So, what you are interpreting as a weld line might be due to the taper of the grind, where the outer soft steel ends and the better edge steel begins. . .just curious.

Nathan
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Old 02-05-2009, 05:03 PM
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Impossible to tell on these. The few that have weld failures look more like they were butt welded then smashed flat. I have one, that isn't pictured here that seems to maybe be laminate. It corroded off the blade edge and up between the two outer "skins". It's kind of a hollow knife right now. Of course, this could also just be that the surface rust and minerals formed a "case" and the rest of the iron/steel erroded away. It seems to have intact metal in the two thin skin layers though. The remainder of the knife is too fragile to really do anything with, though. It will need electrolysis to be stabilized.


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Old 02-05-2009, 08:41 PM
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Fun collection, Don.


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