 In our last video we worked our way further into the Bronze Age, by building a natural draft kiln now with the capacity of heating and casting larger bronze items, it's time to start making some of the base tools I'll be needing for future projects. For my designs, I'll be looking for historical bases from across the Bronze Age era to replicate for my own. Bronze is a different metal with different properties and limitations, so attempting to replicate modern iron designs would be a recipe for disaster. My hope is that I can get a quality set of tools that will last me through the Bronze Age until we start getting into the Iron Age. So I'm aiming for some more high end examples of tools I can find, so I can hopefully have some of humanity's best tools at my disposal for some success in this era. Of all the tools, most crucial will be some durable axes and a large blade for felling and healing trees into lumber. I've already cast 1 axe earlier, but with a poor choice of a dried clay casting medium, it was pretty brittle and had already broken several times. So my primary goal in this video is going to be casting one of the largest axe heads ever found from the Bronze Age. We recently discovered large Nordic blade that's twice the size of most other blades in this era, wrapped one worthy of Thor himself. It's believed these original axes were buried as a ritual sacrifice to the Norse gods, so that might not be too far of a stretch. We'll see if this one can summon the Bifrost. I'll also be experimenting with a method frequently used in the early Bronze Age of using a carved stone mold. But first, to learn a little more about a few historical axes and get some help casting a few. This summer I got a little help, once again, from Greg, the sword casting guy. I'm back with Greg, the swordcaster, and previously we made a few different swords, but now we're going to make some axes. So you want to tell me about these different axes you have? This axe is an axe from England. This is from the late Bronze Age, about 1000 BC. This is called a palstave axe. You can tell that this is a very refined piece, very symmetrical. This was made in a two-part stone mold, so they would have carved soap stone very carefully and precisely, and they would have preheated those stones and then kind of held them together like that and then pouring the bronze down this way into the mold like that. And the way this was attached to a handle, they would look for a kind of an L-shaped piece of wood. They would split the top piece and like pat it on either side here and then wrap raw hide around there to attach it. And the very earliest ones of these didn't have a little loop like this down here. You can imagine a problem with this, if you're like jamming this into something, whether it's a chest plate or a chunk of wood or whatever, it could get stuck in it because an axe is a wedge. So you lose your axe head. So you tie a piece of leather to this and then tie it to your handle. It doesn't totally solve the problem. Like you could still imagine it like slipping out and still kind of hanging there. But if you survive battle that day, maybe you could fix it and go battle the next day with it. Start out being used as a weapon because bronze was mostly a military thing for a long time, but very handy as a tool, certainly. This one is a duck bill axe. This is from Mesopotamia. This is about 2000 BC. A lot of these were found around the ancient city of Urr in a cemetery. They were buried with warriors. So we know that they thought it was a very powerful weapon if they wanted to be buried with it and go into the afterlife with it. An axe is used as a countermeasure to helmets or to armor. This would have been attached to a handle like this. Big step forward and they don't lose their ax heads anymore. Once you can put a handle through it and attach it with a pin at the top, you're not going to lose it. It also doesn't have to be razor sharp because it's a fairly blunt object strike. So this would be like for a good whack like that. When you think bronze age, think small. Bronze was very scarce. They were very economical with the bronze. And so they would have made things just as small as they could have to make it functional. Pretty interesting weapon. We can definitely cast some of these. The bronze age, they used a lot of different varieties of techniques. In the beginning of the bronze age, they were using clay. And by the late bronze age, they were using stone. And they were even sometimes using bronze. Like you can make like a pretty thick bronze mold if you haven't have bronze laying around. And when you pour that smaller quantity of bronze into, it doesn't like weld together because the other bronze is so much cooler, it just draws the heat out. And so they'll pop apart from each other. But stone is more common for sure. And stone has the advantage that you only need to make the mold once. Right. So you can mass produce weapons. So stone molds, good for a certain amount of time, and then they break. You know, they like do lose some detailing. You might use them for a while and then decide to make another one. And to cast this, I made a little wax copy of the Duckville axe. That scraped it off, put it back on, flip this up, and there it is. So now we're just going to clean this up. It's thought that they probably lost wax casting these. More powder and the bronze, they poured vertically. So that's what we're going to do too. All right, that one's ready. We're getting some great colors. I think you could just sell it as art. Yeah. Yeah, that's nice. That's good work. This is our most technically complicated casting of the night. Now, I hope some viewer is able to tell us what all these colors mean, like why that happened so consistently. Because I don't know and I sure would like to. You might have a little bit of this, but not to this extent. Because those eyes, they're perfect. Like that is just great. Tonight, we have just revealed to the world how to cast a Duckville axe. Greg is a sword casting teacher who travels the country teaching group classes for casting your own swords or axes. And if you want him to come to you, just shoot him a message on his website swordcastingguy.com. Now, the half the heads. Third would be the preferred binding for these, but I'm currently planning on sourcing leather very shortly in the future, so I'll stick with the hem twine for now. Next up is work hardening the edges, so let's stay sharp longer. Greg explained this previously when we made a sword together with a minor incorrect detail. Shoving the atoms a little closer together makes it significantly harder. I heard that edge hardening is putting the atoms closer together. Is that actually true? Damn you. No, it's not true. No, no. So what's happening with that? I learned from all the all your people who watch your your earlier post, you're causing little defects in the crystal structure. And so those defects amount to being harder because you're kind of limiting some of the ways I can bend. Then to sharpen and polish them. With the help of Greg, I have a few more access to add to my tool chest. The next challenge for making my own is that I haven't quite achieved the technology yet to employ Greg's more modern sand casting method. Form fitting pairs of casting flasks like his will require some milled and jointed wood. The tools to make those are what we're aiming to make in this video, so for mine I'll be exploring a few more historical methods of casting with carved stone for the giant axe head. Now to do some casting. I think it's done on the inside of it. All right, so we've got these giant bubbles on it. It's not great. I'm not sure why that happened. Must have been some sort of gas coming out of the stone, I guess, but we were heating it like all day. So it was nice and hot. Shouldn't have been any water. So, which ever caused it? It's similar to the first axe I cast in clay where it's very bubbly and causes bubbles. That one kind of just broke apart. Unfortunately, this mold is completely shattered. I only got two pores out of it. So I don't know if sandstone just isn't an ideal medium. Haven't been able to find any good soapstone in this area, but I think I'll see if this works. See if we can salvage it still. Putting holes in axe heads was something that was done to save bronze. They're a little close to the edge. Maybe make it work because that was a lot of time for a mold that did not work very well. One downside with using twine is it tends to loosen with use, but I found that by coating it with the pine resin beeswax charcoal glue, it helps hold it all tight. Goodbye, Bill. First of all, thanks to Greg. We were able to cast these really nice, got the duck bill, the pal-stave axe here. Took these out and found out they are pretty effective. Really nice chopping tools, better than the broken one I made. This guy, also really nice. We actually took them out, cut down a Christmas tree. This is the time of the year. Did a really good job. It just cut really deep and really well. The voids here, not really an issue. It actually turned out pretty good. It did break, but not what we expected in the back. It was just on the backswing, it hit the ground and bent and broke this part. If you look inside, there's clearly was some sort of air pocket that got trapped, made it a little bit weaker. There's some obvious flaws with the stone mold that haven't really figured out. There's also a lot of work and that was just one side of a mold. Usually they would do two that fit together. So I think I'm gonna move on to the method that was used later. But they used more of the cob mixture that we tried out before with the dagger. So I think we're gonna do that for some other tools in the future and see how well that turns out. We use this to cut down a Christmas tree. It's actually looked up and the axe, this is based off of, they found it because the farmer was gonna start a Christmas tree farm. Did a little search of the area and make sure there weren't any historical artifacts that might get destroyed and that's how they ended up discovering this axe. This kind of gone full circle that we base this off of that axe and use it to cut down a Christmas tree at a Christmas tree farm. So in the next video, you can see this axe put to the test against the Christmas tree we cut down on the Santa Christmas tree because we are still about 4,000 years before the birth of Christ. So we are gonna be looking into bronze age traditions and what was done for the winter solstice and do our own version of that. Making all of these took about 11 hours. Little bit of assist with Greg using his more advanced method. Now something I'm able to do quite yet because I haven't been able to mill my own wood and get it all joined together to form the boxes. So that'll be an ongoing challenge but now I have nice broad axe. Milling wood should be a lot easier. So overall, it took 11 hours or about $88 at minimum wage. Not a bad deal for three axes. Not much for that. I think you can do all of our supporters on Patreon without you, this won't be possible. And if you like our content and want to see more, be sure to support us. Any amount really helps. 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