RIDEFAST AUG 21

Cleaning the chain
Sections are tack welded.
Spring steel forms the cutting edge.
• Beating starts. Eventually Mike took the block
and popped it onto a chunk of wood and
started beating it with a hammer. Its all about
compacting the links. You don’t want junk in the
alloy. Guess what... back onto the cleaning tray,
clean, clean, get any residue off the bar.
• Compressing. Its just like in the movies into the
forge - out again, beat it with a hammer, clean,
and so-on... slowly slowly the links start to weld
together into a single very hot bar. We are not
going to lie. Those first few steps literally took
hours. Once Mike was happy that he had a relatively
compressed bar - it was time to use some
modern technology.
• The Press. Out of the fire and into the hydraulic
press. Once again,a repetitive process. Compress,
turn, compress, clean, borax, forge. Out
repeat - and slowly, slowly a proper bar of metal
starts to appear. Mike keeps stressing the importance
of getting all of the rubbish out of the
bar. Heat, beat clean, heat, beat and eventually
the bar starts to elongate a bit. Eventually there
is less junk falling out of the bar. Mike feeds the
longer solid bar into his big boss mechanical
hammer unit that helps to elongate and shape
and compress. In the fire out, shape... you get
the idea. After what feels like a lifetime... he has
a solid bar that starts looking like something
that could be used to make something out of.
• Cooling. Once Mike had a bar that was the
correct size and shape that looks nothing like a
chain it was dunked into a barrel of vermiculite
overnight to cool down SLOWLY. We went off
to draw out the design of the blade that we
wanted.
Into the forge.
lots of beating.
Borax cleans and works as a flux.