Shiiiii....

Well, the knife that I posted the photos of has turned out to be a failure. The heat treat came out alright but I discovered that the bevels weren't at all even, and there wasn't any way to fix it-- I worked on it but it was starting to not look like the knife I was trying to make and I wasn't getting very far with the bevel fixing anyway. So I bent it, chopped a 2x4 with it then shaved, threw it at the ground a few times and called it a day. The pisser is that I'd put about 10 hours in to the reclamation of what was a pretty ugly blade experiment (that includes the guard which was about 80% done).

grrrrr.....

First Bowie WIP

Here are some pics from the heat treat of the "bowie" I'm working on. I put bowie in quotes because no one knows what Jim Bowie's knife looked like and anything that's large anymore is either called a bowie or a seax. I digress, on to the pics:
Prepping for heat treat-

  

 Normalize cycle number 3

 

Burning off the oil from HT 1 prepping for second heat treat. I've never done this before, but I've heard of it and decided to give it a try. Dramatic, yes?

 

Quick thanks to Jaime Forero for bringing over several filters this weekend- I shot these with the UV filter and I think they came out really good.

Website

I've been trying to work on the Alchemy Forge website since the weekend, without much success. When my old computer (the stolen one) was running Vista and then Win7 I didn't have any problems with Yahoo Site Builder. Now that my new machine has Win7 Pro running, I can only make the smallest of changes, and only once. So when I fix a typo or smooth out a rough section of my prose I find that I can't save the file to then publish it.
The Mrs has been taking a mass media class about blogging and web design, and has moved her personal site and blog to a new provider. I may do the same and switch over to a WordPress-based format which will allow for easy creation of dropdown menus and embedding. I'll keep the blog up to date with major changes.