Handmade Handle

This finished product.

Starting with 20" of 5/16" rod stock. First, the rod is heated to a bright orange and bent in half. Some might disagree with taking a heat this wide for the bend, but I'm going to twist it in the vise next.



The picture here isn't great because I had to demo what I was doing, take a pic, and then reheat it and start over. But what's going on here is that you take a full heat, quench the "eye" portion of the stock, then quickly clamp it in a vise, place another piece of rod through the eye like a propeller, and twist.





From here, I adjust the twist using a coffee can full of water to cool parts of the stock-- the parts that remain hot twist faster than the cooled stock and I can refine it until it's even. Once it's even, I forge weld the opposite end to form the other ring. This part is pretty hammer intensive and I couldn't manage to get the process photographed. Luckily, iForge has a great demonstration (see Forge Welding I) of what went on. I use regular old 20 Mule Team borax as a flux.

Here's an image of the twist after being flattened and beveled.



And now I bend it into the finished shape.



A traditional method of finishing steel is to heat it to a few hundred degrees and wipe the metal down with a mixture of linseed oil and beeswax. This is repeated until an opalescent black finish is obtained. The mixture helps to make the piece more corrosion resistant but is not recommended for indoor applications.