PART FOUR: FORGING THE SUNOBE INTO A BLADE
 

The next step for me is to make those two steel bars into blades. I will start by manipulating the pattern in the steel. This is not a foreign concept to the Japanese smith. They use it commonly to make mokume out of soft metals and some schools use it to enhance the visual appearance of the steel grain in their blades. Most commonly the Gassan school in creating their ayasugi hada.
Here is the plan in drawing. It is a modified ladder pattern that generates the wavy look of the ayasugi hada.

 

 

I first lay out my marks on the steel bar. I will only be doing this to one bar only.
 

 

I used a 3/8 round file to cut the grooves
 

 

In to the forge it goes.
 

 

You can see here that I have already reversed the tip of the sunobe to make the kissaki of the blade. What the Japanese call sunobe is not other than a steel bar that has been modified to have the distal taper and width taper in it thus making it easier to forge the flat faces and bevels from it.

 

 

Here is how it looks for now resting on my old worn out anvil.
 

 
A little bit ahead in the shaping.
 

 
And further ahead. Pretty much now is at the stage where I can start working the bevels in. Meaning the distal and width tapers are already forged.

 

 

I will start forging the bevels at the tip.
 

 
And work my way down the blade.
 

 
Like so.

 

 

I finish on the nakago (tang). At this point I choose to not forge the blade any further. It is easier for me to set the machi (notches) for both the ha (edge side) and mune (spine side) on the grinder.
 

 

But I will go ahead and thermal cycle the blade 3 times at this point. I start above austenizing temperature for the first cycle and just at austenizing temperature for the last cycle.
 

 

Here you can see the blade pass the recalescence point in a sequence of pictures.

 

 

I forged the other blade and thermal cycled just the same way. So now I have two identical blades ready for the grinder.
 

 

I am not taking pictures of the grinding process. There is nothing of interest there. These are the two blades at the end of grinding. They both have 220 grit grinding marks along the length of the blade. The mune machi and ha machi areas have been cut in and the mune has been beveled as well. They are ready for the clay.
 

 

In case you wonder how much they have "grown" from forging.

 

 

Summary:
I started with 2 bars of steel about 9 inches long and now I have 2 tantos measuring 9 and 1/2 inch nagasa (length from the notch to the tip) and 3 and 1/2 inch nakago (tang). Overall length is 13 inches.
Next step will be clay-coating in preparation for hardening.
 

TO PART FIVE