Bladesmithing

I've long been critical of the discourse around masculinity. For the archetypal right-winger, masculinity means machismo, at least mild sexism, the rugged loner individualist who picks a fight and never cries because Men Are Supposed To Be Strong(tm). For the archetypal left-winger, the word "masculinity" is simply never uttered without the word "toxic" before it, because anything that implies males and females are different at all is inherently misogynist and thus destructive and we must not allow differences to exist.

You can probably tell from my tone just how much contempt I have for both modes of discourse.

It's been a while since I last posted about bladesmithing, but I've still been at it. My first writeup got fairly good reception so for posterity I figured I'd finally get around to blogging my second blade.

A few notes: I finished this blade several months ago; I'm only just getting around to writing it up. (I'm finishing up my 5th blade right now as I write this.) I've since learned various things I've been doing wrong but I'll largely be covering how this blade was built at the time. Second, I've decided that I should start giving my knives names to help distinguish them rather than just "first", "second", etc. My forge instructor said my first blade looked vaguely Civil War-ish, so I have retroactively dubbed it "Ulysses", as in General Ulysses S. Grant. This blade is curved, so I hereby dub it Suleiman The Curvy!

A surprising number of people seemed to like the knife picture I posted in my opening post, so what the hell, here's more knife-pr0n. :-)  I was taking pictures all along the way as I made it so that I could post a process story at some point, and this seems as good a place as any.

Warning: Red hot metal ahead...

This isn't the railroad spike it started from, because I totally forgot to take a picture of it first.  But it's the same type of spike.  Railroad spikes are pretty cheap, low-grade steel, probably around 1030 carbon but who really knows.  Good for practice, lame for a really good working blade.