How do you make a sword?

Answer 1

You must first have a furnace. Then you get some metal plating and heat it up to a melting point. Then pull it out of the furnace and hammer it into shape. You make the handle the same way. Then let it cool and viola!

There are several ways to make a sword. Since forging seems to be on the mind of the person above I'll comment on that first.

Forging:

Forging a sword and forging a knife or a small door handle, fork, or other widget at completely different animals and I dare not attempt to stick this answer in an ask.com article in its entirety. But I will let you know the basic set up.

Heating:

The one thing that was correct is that you need a furnace, or a forge as it is typically called in the black smithing industry. The forge is to heat the metal to various temperatures for various different reasons. You will need to heat the steel pretty evenly through it's cross-section so do not even think of blow-torch for thick steel! Temperatures vary depending on purpose, thickness, and type of steel.

We will discuss steel selection in a moment but for now just know that the steel you will use to make a sword is pretty hard stuff, usually rockwell hardness of greater than 40, so you will first need to anneal it. To do this you heat the steal up to the proper temperature based on the type of steel, but typically it will be red hot (dark red) to glowing brightly. You need it hot enough to upset the grain structure in the steel. It must then be cooled very slowly. Certain oils can be good for this but the best thing is probably a salt bath (advanced topic worthy of it's own topic on ask.com).

Another type of heating is prior to working (or hammering). For hard steel, and especially thick steel, it will need to be very hot (one step below sparking) and you will need to work fast. Heating takes about 4-5 minutes and then hammer for about thirty seconds and toss it back in the hearth. Light, fast hammer blows are better and a pneumatic hammering machine is best (also another topic). Easy, right? Wrong. When working steel at these temperatures you need to maintain complete control over temperature or you will "burn" the steel (steel doesn't exactly melt when heated in air). Don't bother looking for the molten steel that you used to call your sword project, you will not find it. This too is for another topic.

Tempering steel is a topic all its own and I'm not even going to touch on it, though I will mention it because it is another time when you will need to have a good heat source. Read about 30 books on tempering, then read them again, then test, then read some more, then test, experiment, use recipes from the books, etc. This is not something that is just easy by nature and you will most likely need to build a salt bath.

Other supplies:

Hammer, pneumatic hammering machine of one type or another, and/or a machine press with some useful jigs. You need a water bucket to keep your tongs and such cool but do NOT dunk spring steal, tool steel, or any other type of hard steel into water after heating it. You WILL ruin the steel and render it more or less unusable and brittle, turning it from steel into a type of martensite.

Tongs/Handling tools.

An anvil (if hammering by hand), the heavier the better. I have a 200lb anvil that I paid 700 dollars for. They are not cheap! Anvil design is another topic.

Several good pairs of leather gloves, you may also want a leather apron and glasses for safety, as well as long sleeved cotton shirts and jeans, plus other protective stuff depending on how sensative you are to burns. You will get burned hand forging, I promise!

Salt baths and oil baths are almost essential for forging swords, if you want them to be useful.

Good Steel (discuss in a moment)

About 3 months working 10 hours per day. (this one I'm just guessing)

That will do for now, feel free to add other supplies.

Steel:

Not all steel is created equal. For knives and tools, use a good hard tool steel with a high rockwell hardness, I prefer old chisels to make my tools from.

Jigs and handling tools can be made from any steel, though mild steel is fairly cheap and abundant.

Sword forging is a lost art, unfortunately, and different experts will have different opinions on the best steel for different reasons. A lot of people who seek the lost Damascan art of forging prefer laminating different types of steel and folding the blade 3-8 times to ensure good lamination of the base blanks. I would not recommend hammer forging laminate steel for your first project, and if you are reading this, you do not have those skills.

Mild steel is terrible if you want the sword to have functionality as a sword, but just making something to hang on the wall it is probably fine. Put a nickel or chrome plating on it when you are done or keep it oiled.

Stainless - sorry, I've never worked stainless so I don't know. I do know that galvanized steel when heated puts off toxic fumes and turns green. Stainless is probably best used for another method of sword/knife construction, which I will touch on in this article.

Tool Steel - Rock hard and great for knifes! It is very tough to work and you will get the best hardness possible for the blade. Unfortunately, for a sword longer than a 12 inch blade, swinging it against hard objects can cause it to shatter, especially when tempered. If you are going to use hard steel to make a sword, anneal it before use. This will make it softer but less prone to shatter in use. You can also try to harden only the edge, but you need to seek more help to accomplish this than I can offer here.

Spring Steel - IMO the best steel for making swords is found in the leaf springs of an old Chevy. It is already in flat plates and it will flex or give a small amount when struck, making it very durable. It can also be tempered to be extremely hard, while retaining its strength. It will never be as hard as the best tool steels, but a rockwell of 56 (may be 86, I admit that I have not looked at a rockwell chart in years, someone check this for me and change if needed) on a sword is pretty darn good. Rest assured a weapon made this way can and will slice through a crummy 440C Stainless blade without causing the blade to nick in competent hands. The downside, yes there is always a con, spring steel is nearly impossible to work in a coal forge by hammer forging. It is very tough to work, tougher than tool steel according to most smiths that I know. It can be rather expensive (visit junk yards for leaf springs, this is the best steel there is for this purpose in my opinion). And tiny mistakes that would not affect mild steel can ruin a piece of spring steel forever. You need to know what you are doing.

Custom Steel - If you have a lot of money, talk to a foundry. Often times they have several types of steel that are built for specific purposes and one may appeal to you for sword-making. You had better be an expert on both metullurgy and sword technique for the specific type of blade that you want to make if you go this route. I cannot think of a single person on earth at this point in history that would need this.

That was my 10 minute overview on forging, and is by no means an instruction manual, unless you are looking for instructions on what to research. You can make a decent smithy for under ten grand, but in my opinion, if you are interested in blacksmithing, join an MA (Metalsmithing Association) near you (they are everywhere in the cont. US) and learn the trade. Get an anvil and a forge and get working on mild steel, learn the trade, and by the time you get the experience needed to forge a sword, you probably won't even want to anymore.

Stock Removal:

Forging is tough, takes a lifetime to learn properly, and can be costly compared to other methods. For making swords, I prefer the stock removal or CNC method. For this, take a steel blank (even spring steel), get a grinder, belt sander with really tough sandpaper, or any other number of metalworking devices and go go to work. Cut the blank away until you have a decent blade shape with good geometry, but a tang into the end of it and move on to the last step of this article. Temper if needed.

Making swords by stock removal isn't as romantic as forging, but it gets the job done quicker, cheaper, and easier. If you are using hard steels your work will be a lot slower but you also have the advantage of using galvanized steel and any high nickel or stainless steel that you like without any hiccups.

Stock Removal also allows you to concentrate of blade geometry, proper weight distribution, etc. without having to worry about how to forge those things into the blade. In many ways, stock removal is superior to forging, probably why almost everything made of heavy chunks of metal in our society is made with CNC machines.

Okay, so that is two methods of making a "blade," but it's not worth much if you are just holding a chunk of dull steel shaped like a sword. You need to construct a handle, a guard if desired, a counterweight if necessary, and the sword needs to be sharpened if you want it sharp. Here is a note of putting an edge on your new blade.

When I make a blade, I like to leave a thickness on the end of between 1/16 and 1/8 of an inch until last. Then I carefully cut an edge on this by grinding, whether the blade would be hammer forged or CNCed, it's all the same at this point. Cut this edge before or after hardening. When I say edge, I don't mean razor sharp, we are talking edge geometry here. A 40 to 70 degree cross section on the edge will make a pretty sharp sword, but anything from 90 down should be sufficient for a "chopping" weapon. If you don't know how to use a sword properly, 90 degrees will get the job done and you don't need to worry about geometry. 20 to 40 degrees is overdoing it in my opinion, hell 45 is probably overdoing it. I prefer 60-70 degrees to add some strength to the point, but whatever, this is too much detail. After you get the edge on there, temper the sword if need be and then sharpen with a good file or other sharpening tool. Have fun, be safe, I'm going to smoke.