Nice intro. Didn't understand much of your tech jargon but, cool blade! I paid an amateur blacksmith 50 bucks to make me a hatchet and he also used a railroad spike, except the entire head was malformed, uneven, and requires an angular chopping swing. The handle was made of softwood too. Still like it but your blade attempt looks better quality.lol
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Railroad spikes are fairly low-carbon, and usually unclear what carbon content they are. That makes them fairly soft, which means they won't hold an edge. For anything serious you probably want at least a 1070 carbon steel (that's 0.7% carbon), and probably even harder for the edge itself.
There's definitely a "lean" in my blade between the blade and the tang; it twisted slightly during quenching and I didn't catch it in time. Getting something perfectly aligned is a lot harder than it looks. :-) (And from my experience, if you only paid $50 for a custom hatchet then, well, you got what you paid for. I know I couldn't make something worth using for $50 worth of my time at my skill level.)
Still, I'm going to keep working on it. Hopefully blade 2 will work out better. From the sound of it plenty of people here are interested in it so I'll post pictures when it's done.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I paid him 50 bucks because he told me what he was studying once a month through a local club and I wanted to give him an incentive besides really wanting a handmade hatchet.
This was what he produced:
Unfortunately, it wasn't uniform on both sides and with the weight:
I can't fault the guy. It was his new hobby and he's a delightful fellow. That was 6 years ago so he's more than likely improved if he has stuck with it.
I still have it though. He put a lot of time and effort into it and the spike was salvaged from a 100+ year old railroad line... a bit of aussie history in my drawer at any rate.
Honestly the history of the object in that case matters more than the function. Even if you never use it, it's a good conversation starter. :-)
That actually sounds like my setup. There's a forge in Chicago with good rates so I'm going (mostly) weekly. I'd like to do an ax at some point, just for variety's sake. It will probably not be well-aligned either. :-)
Having a "thing to model" is helpful for building up your skill as it separates the design aspect from the construction aspect and lets you work on them separately. (Kinda like Code Katas, for the techies reading the thread...) So good on you for giving your friend something to work toward.