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Ed Caffrey's Workshop Talk to Ed Caffrey ... The Montana Bladesmith! Tips, tricks and more from an ABS Mastersmith.

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Old 02-11-2013, 04:50 PM
DougCampbell DougCampbell is offline
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Meteorite Bowie for Arkansas

Hey guys, haven't posted anything for a while so figured I'd do a long one...

This story has a couple of different angles to it. First I've been wanting to do a build of a simple knife in the back of Flayderman's book, ?The Bowie Knife? for some time. Seeing Lin do that awesome Sheffield the other day finally got me off top dead center. I decided instead of doing it in plain carbon steel I'd add my own twist in the form of some special Damascus steel.

Secondly I have a customer who besides being a real rock hound is kind of enthralled by the legend that the knives made by James Black, the famous (via Jim Bowie) Bladesmith of Washington AR forged Meteorite into his knives. My customer wants me to forge a Damascus bowie incorporating Meteorite into the blade. A couple months ago I received a 5# chunk of what looks like a rock from him. The thing is solid metal and magnetic as can be. Anyway long story short he hasn't decided what shape blade he wants so I decided maybe I could do a little experimenting for this project and do this knife for the show at the same time.

I'm not nearly as good at these build-a-longs as some of you guys but hope you get a little something out of it anyway.

I tried to cut the Meteorite with my little band-saw first and burned up a blade in a few seconds, this thing is very hard. I could have cut slices with an abrasive grinder but didn't want to have that much waste material. I finally just put the whole rock in my forge and took it up to 2250 degrees. I proceeded to slowly try to forge it into some usable shape. I was able to ?work? off a small piece that weighed around a pound. It was a very slow process since any time I tried to make progress the meteorite had a tendency to crumble. After six hours of careful work with my press and hammer I finally had something that resembled a bar of steel just shy of a foot long, 1 1/2? wide X 1/8? thick.




I cleaned up the ?billet?, cut to length then laminated it between some pieces of 1084 and headed back to the forge. I forged this billet out cut, cleaned it up and restacked with 15N20 between the layers then back to the forge.





It was a two day process to get the blade to this point but here is the forged blade.



Then a couple days later here she be, decided to go with African Blackwood instead of Ivory like the original. Course she's a fair bit different from the original anyway.

In keeping with the Meteorite theme I tried a little inlay a little artsy stuff in the handle. I started to do wire inlay but after practicing on a piece of scrap Blackwood I decided it was just too hard and brittle for my limited skill. Wound up doing dots with several sizes of stainless wire to hopefully depict a shooting star...

Put quite a bit of work into that Wrought iron guard but I think it was worth it.

Anyway hope y'all like it and it'll sure be going to Arkansas with me. We'll see if it gets any attention in the "Historically Inspired Bowie Category".....

Meteorite Damascus, wrought iron, African Blackwood and Stainless wire.



Thanks for looking!!


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Old 02-11-2013, 04:51 PM
DougCampbell DougCampbell is offline
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Not sure how legal it is but here is a pic of the original, circa 1840-50 Sheffield Bowie.


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Old 02-11-2013, 05:46 PM
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Very, very cool Doug. Nice job matching the original closely. The meteorite is a cool touch and I like the pin work in the handle and how it stays with the 'meteor' theme.

Really well done. Thanks for showing it and the pictures along the way.


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Old 02-11-2013, 08:35 PM
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DOUG! THAT IS AWSOME!

Jim


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Old 02-11-2013, 08:50 PM
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Very nice!!!


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Old 02-11-2013, 11:47 PM
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Nice job, Doug. Meteorites aren't easy to work with are they? As you found out, most are pretty red short. I'm surprized that it was hard to cut. All that I have worked with were very soft. It looks as if it was pretty good about welding though. Do you know which meteorite it came from?

If you have it with you at the Arkansas Show this weekend I would love to have a look at it.

Gary


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Last edited by Gary Mulkey; 02-12-2013 at 04:19 AM.
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Old 02-12-2013, 01:40 AM
cdent cdent is offline
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Red short, I didn't know it was possible to weld oat meal into a billet.

Great set of pictures and really nice bowie came out the other end. Safe trip, bet you'll have a terrific show.

See you around, Craig
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Old 02-12-2013, 01:17 PM
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Doug, Great story & pics of progress. Thanks for sharing.


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