this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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I make swords and knives as a hobby.
You can get these specific colors by heating the steel up. Getting these colors ruins the temper, though, and you'll have a pretty display sword that won't hold an edge. Perfectly fine if you never intend to seize the means of production, but I like to keep my steel properly hardened.
That's so cool! Do you have a gallery anywhere of your work?
I would love to get into jewelry design, metalsmithing, etc. It is such a satisfying way to work with your hands and science! Unfortunately as a hobby it requires actual property space not an apartment :,)
I used to have an Instagram page but I stopped updating and eventually deleted it because Facebook.
So basically I just have what I take pictures of, when people are interested, I show a few examples. I don't advertise my stuff because it's just a hobby and I refuse to make it my job.
a picture of the last commissioned piece before I finished the leather work, spoiler alert they're divorced less than a year later
a replica of the Hunter Blade from the video game Destiny I don't know what to do with
a kitchen knife I made 7 years ago and still use weekly
A hunting/cleaning knife I sold for the birthday of someone who will never go hunting and faints at the sight of uncooked hamburger.
Small knife I made for my wife that she uses to cut up her apples
So cool! Thank you for sharing. I love how your first knife is still going strong and you can plainly see you used the same wood for the handle.
Man if you ever wanted to try working on some other replicas, supernatural has some cool knives. Especially Ruby's demon blade.
You're going to love the tv show "forged in fire"!
https://imdb.com/title/tt4680444/
Boooooooo!
LOL no if you enjoy it that's cool, I just personally can't watch it. It's completely unrealistic and doesn't give the layperson a good representation of the skill.
I actually know a guy who was an early contestant and absolutely bombed on his first attempt. Fantastic knives though. It's his primary source of income and better than anything I've made. Just doesn't work well under pressure already, and the unrealistic goals they set for quick work don't take into account any sort of materials issues.
I hate when they use scrap metal for any kind of challenge because unless they really did a lot of prep work, shitty materials can be mixed in with good ones and you wouldn't know without being able to do your own tests beforehand that take time.
I wonder how many other hobbies/professions have this happen to them, where everyone goes "hey you would like X because you're Y" but it's a poor representation and they don't like it. Like nerds and big bang theory.
Would it be possible to coat it and color the coating like this without damaging the temper? Iirc aluminum you can do it with electricity (I don't know anything about this forgive me), so maybe aluminum coating and zap it?
Electroplating/Anodizing is the term you're thinking of.
One thing I've done with a knife is copper coating.
I used a combination of copper sulfate from the hardware store (fungicide/algecide in blue crystal form) and a bit of salt and baking soda to make the electrolyte solution, a piece of copper pipe on one end of the wire and the knife blade on the other.
I should have done an intermediate nickel layer but I was experimenting and didn't prep right or electro plate super long
End result was a copper colored knife with a shiny steel blade edge. If I left it in longer it could have built up enough copper to polish it up.
To get a trans flag you would need to use a combination of different methods from electroplating to titanium vapor.
Supposedly you can electroplate aluminum onto steel, so you could simply electroplate the steel with aluminum, then do the normal acid dye for the anodizing the aluminum. Then a quick sharpening of the edge and you're good to go.
Regardless of the method, it would look fuckin rad
This makes me want a battle ready trans sword so badly 😭 Thank you for the write up!
Can’t you also get this color from titanium?
That was my first thought. It shouldn't be too hard to expose different areas to the electrolyte for a time and do a different voltage for each.
Haven't seen that, though. And the choice of colours isn't quite arbitrary, but it should be possible to do some things.
You can, but it's way more expensive and uncommon, so I just assume it was made the cheap way