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My journey in recreating famous Finnish spearhead from Rovaniemi, Marikkovaara continues. In this episode, both the socket and the wrought iron core will be forge-welded into a single piece. The spearhead is getting closer to the famous Wolf Tooth pattern.
Here is Part 2 of my new A Spear Born of Fire video series. My journey in forging the famous Finnish Wolf Tooth Spear from Rovaniemi, Marikkovaara is making slow but steady progress. In this video, I am forming the spear socket and forge a mandrel that will be used for later forge welding. Stay tuned.
A Spear Born of Fire is a new video series in which I will show how to forge a Wolf Tooth Spear. The spear closely follows the famous Finnish spearhead from Rovaniemi, Marikkovaara. It will have two pattern-welded bars within the wolf tooth pattern. I will start at the very beginning by consolidating wrought iron that will then be forged into a wide plate. Afterwards, I form the spear socket and continue with lots of forge welding.
Blacksmithing usually happens in a dark shop with very hot metal. A dark shop helps the blacksmith see the color of the steel better and thus know when it's ready to work or when it is too cold. Unfortunately, the dynamic range between dark and light makes it difficult to create videos that show both the shop as well as the hot metal. The dynamic range is too high to show up appropriately in videos. Fortunately, this has changed with Youtube's support for HDR. It still requires a new TV to support it though. This video is my first experiment at producing an HDR video. I filmed it on a Sony PXW‑FS7 in 4K raw and then color graded it in DaVinci Resolve on a Sony BVM-X300.
The Mysterybox folks have put together good information on how to produce HDR videos.
Visualizing pattern-welded steel has always been intriguing to me. At the forge, I end up layering different kinds of steels by varying carbon-content, nickel or phosphorous but ultimately don't know how the patterns will look until everything is forged, heat-treated, polished and etched. Using tools from the visual-effects industry, to be specific SideFX's Houdini, I have started exploring different ways of visualizing pattern-development. Here is a very early experiment:
