We have annealed the sword so the steel is soft enough to work on with tools and that is what we will do in this section. If you need to start at the beginning of this series of tutorials it is right here: Part 1

In this part it actually ends up looking quite a bit like a sword! It is called rough grinding but we do 95% of all the grinding right here. We will do the finish grinding and polishing in a later step.

First let's take a look at what we end up with after this rough grinding portion of the tutorial. The ruler is an 18" ruler. So this is definitely a short sword. But you can see it is well defined and has a nice shape. And the blade looks pretty good. I have spent some time grinding the blade. But it doesn't have it's final polish. We will do that in a later part.

Laddering down the variety of tools

That is a bit of an unusual term "laddering down the tools" but what I mean is that you start with the bigger power tools to do rough work then you move down to the finer tools to do the finer work.

Start with a 6" belt sander if you have one. This will do most of the work for you. Clean off all the scale and sand down the profile of the sword so it has a nice sword shape!

From there you move on to the smaller tools like the bench grinder, the 1" belt sander then files and finally 100 grit emory paper.

This picture shows me using the bench grinder. One of the best uses of the grinder is to get the spot where the blade ends and the tang begins. I will show you another picture of that.

And this picture shows use of the 1" belt sander.

And this picture shows me filing the sword.

This picture shows a couple of important points when it comes to shaping the tang.You have to have two flats on the blade. The guard will rest against this flat. And the point where these flats meet the tang should not be sharp angles. You should round these inner corners. This will make it stronger and less susceptible to stress cracking.

Now we need to take a look at an important part of grinding the sword. This picture shows three different ways you can grind it. These are sideways views so you can see the edges of the sword. You have to grind along the full length of each side of the blade.

The first type of grind is a flat grind. The ground edges of the bevels are straight. The second type of grind is a hollow grind. This gives the sharpest blade but it is the hardest grind to do. The third one is a convex grind and this is the type that I have done on this sword.

Okay, so this part is a lot of work. I spent 4 hours on the belt sander alone. Take your time and you only have to go down to 100 grit emory paper. We don't want to polish this sword because it will be going back into the forge.

Let's Move on to the next part of this tutorial and make the handle of the sword

Techniques Of Medieval Armour Reproduction: The 14th Century (Medieval & Renaissance)

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Forge Medieval Arrows - This style of arrow tip is called a bodkin and it was used in the middle ages and the Renaissance. They are easy to make and I show you how. Forge medieval arrows

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