Making an Elamite dagger, part V

Since one grip scale bowed outward a little (probably due to unevenness of the tang rather than the scale itself) I pressed it into place with epoxy and weights, using one pin to ensure it was sitting in the correct position.

I cut up the pins with the angle grinder and gently rounded off the ends to prevent raggedness when peened.  They should protrude above the scales just a few millimeters on both ends.  If you cut them too long, you can grind them down a bit; obviously, if they're even a little too short, you have to start over.

Any old block of metal can serve as an anvil for setting the pins.  Hammer them down until they're flush with the scales.  The hammer does unfortunately leave discolored marks on the wood which need to be sanded off and a final coat of linseed oil applied.

Here you can see that the scales were a bit too short to cover the triangular ricasso.

With handling, the slick appearance and stickiness imparted by the linseed oil will dry up.  The dagger is far more comfortable to hold with the scales in place.  The leaf shape gives it plenty of blade presence; it feels like a chopping blade despite being little more than a foot overall.

Making an Elamite dagger, part IV

I rough-cut the grip scales on a band saw months ago out of a 1/4-inch maple plank from Lowe's.  A more historical material would probably be Eurasian walnut (Juglans regia, aka Persian, English, European, Circassian or common walnut).  Unfortunately the American black walnut planks I had on hand no more closely resemble Eurasian walnut than maple does.  The maple was the remnant from the same plank I cut the scales for my letter opener from back in 2015.  I sorted through the selection at Lowe's to get one with the most visible curl.

After much dawdling and working on other projects, today I finally sanded them down to the correct shape.  The most tedious part of the process is channeling out the undersides of the scales to fit into the flanges, and I failed to get a perfect fit.

To the right are some common nails annealed by gas torch, which, when cut up, will serve as substitutes for the iron pins on the original.  I think I'll be able to get two pins out of one nail, but we'll see.

While a light brown stain might have popped the grain more and given it a slightly closer resemblance to walnut, I am awfully fond of the look of pale wood on dark grey steel (similar to the bone scales that were prevalent on similar swords in the late Bronze and early Iron ages), so instead I'm going straight to the linseed oil finish.  Sufficient coats of linseed will turn pale wood golden yellow, a color similar to antique bone.

Making an Elamite dagger, part III

After multiple sessions of cold-forging and polishing, the blade is finished.  I tried to anneal the edges of the tang with a flame weeder, and I do think it helped.  As you can see, I didn't manage to polish out the last of the grind marks.

The flange is quite shallow, maybe a millimeter and a half at the most.  But I think even one this shallow will serve its purpose.  A higher, thinner flange could, as I understand it, be crimped a bit into the scales to provide much better hold on them.

Some of the equipment for raising a flange.  For me, both hammers proved necessary:  The cross-peen hammer's narrow face gets into concave curves that the claw hammer is useless against, but the cross-peen hammer's round face has nasty concentric circles that transfer onto the medium, so the claw hammer's smooth face is necessary for all straight and convex edges.  Another useful tool is a table clamp for holding the blade while hammering on the top of the pommel area, since bracing the blade's thin point against anything would risk damaging it.

I finished up with the usual combination of various grades of sandpaper ending with the Dremel's carbon steel brush.  The initial sanding also included a round file about 1/4 inch thick for roughing out the narrowest curves.

Making an Elamite dagger, part II

Couple of weeks ago, I went to town with the angle grinder's flap disk.  In about an hour and a half, I removed a third of the tang thickness and completed the primary bevels.

I also did a quick polish to round off the now-sharp edges and highlight remaining problem areas.

Getting the tang down to an even thickness is proving difficult.  A nice surprise was how easily the little chevron shape on the guard formed as a result of adding the bevels, but unfortunately, I don't think the scales I selected are long enough to cover it, so it might wind up as a very small ricasso.  Although it has practically no distal taper before the point, the blade now feels light and sword-like, balancing about an inch in front of the guard, which will likely move even farther back when the scales are added.

What didn't go so well?  The flap disk does the job fast, but it left behind many deep grind marks which will be difficult to polish out.  The flap disk also seemed to produce a slight hollow grind on one side of the centerline.  And keeping the centerline from wandering was pretty difficult...

...  which resulted in this, the blade becoming too thin below the shoulders, where I tried too many times to correct it.  A well-made sword blade should be at its very thickest at this point.  Hopefully, the original grinding wheel can get rid of the flap disk's grind marks and reduce some of the uneven thickness a little more slowly.

With the edges safely rounded, I could feel and sorta see that where the blade should be at its widest, the edges are faintly convex.  As well, I learned from my belt knife project that the flanges don't require that much extra material, so I should make the tang narrower by perhaps a sixteenth of an inch.

I've halted work for several weeks, because I have other things to do and the weather in Bucks County's been cold and rainy (grinding is too noisy and produces too many steel filings to work indoors).  I intend to pick up again a week from Sunday, after my woodworking class ends, hopefully correcting all the above issues.