In this part of the tutorial we finish off the heat treating of the sword by tempering it. Then we start on the other parts of the sword including the guard, handle and pommel.

Part one (the beginning) of this tutorial is here

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We temper the sword by heating it to around 500Fahrenheit. And we can judge the temperature of the steel by the color of it. When it gets to this temperature it will be a wheat color. The sword currently is black from the forge so use a medium grit emory paper to clean all that scale off it and get it to its normal silver color.

This way we can put it in the forge and watch the color of the steel change.

We don't want to just put the sword right back into the fire. That would heat it up way too hot. We want to brace it up with something so it is around six inches away from the heat. I put a couple of steel bars across the forge and I put the sword on that.

At this point you monitor it closely and move it around often. The tip of the sword and any thin points are very prone to quickly overheating.

As it moves past our tempering temperature it will start to turn a plum color. This means it got a little too hot and is over softened.

Once we get it to wheat color (tempered) quench it and lock that new molecular configuration in. The sword is now hardened and tempered. It will be strong and durable, yet have flexibility while still holding a nice sharp edge.

Let's take a look at it. You can see the center section of the blade is wheat colored and pretty good. And you can also see that some of the blade is plum colored which means it is a bit over-tempered. That's ok though. We are going to go with it. I really don't need this sword to be battle ready.

But, if you wanted to get it right you would re-harden it then re-temper it again.

Once it cools we can clean and polish the blade. We do this with emory paper.

Start out with a heavy grit around 100 and clean up the whole blade. Then move on to successive finer grits and this starts the polishing process.

3M 9064 Emery Cloth

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Here I am continuing the process of polishing the blade and it is starting to look pretty good. You can progress through the grits as far as you want. It all depends on how shiny you want the blade. Sometimes I will go as far as 1200 grit, progressing at 100 grit intervals.

Ok, the blade is done (except for the design work) So let's continue by making the other parts of the sword

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