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.
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:
A Day at the Forge documents a single day at the shop. This time, I am working on a complex pattern-welded sword that contains a core of 8 pattern-welded bars. Watch me forge-weld the core and then assemble the cutting edges to create the pre-form of what will become a majestic Viking-age inspired sword.
Here is a comparison of my heat-treated experimental dagger/spear to the famous pattern-welded spear in the Helsinki museum. As I mentioned before the experiment was solely on creating teeth on both sides and in no way meant to be a re-creation. Nonetheless, it seems that at least the spacing of the teeth is pretty comparable. I need to do a few more experiments but I am slowly getting closer to an attempt of recreating this spear. That project will be video documented, so stay tuned.
