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Which Stainless should I use?

Guys, guys.

Live action role players tend to be more interested in the role playing than in spending years training so they don't get hurt. If you want to let people play, you have to either take horrendously expensive insurance (and thus have horrendously expensive prices/membership), or make things so safe that nobody has a chance of suing the organisation.

I speak as someone who does LARP and also metal weapons fighting (like SCA but with blunted metal weapons). membership in the metal weapons group costs me five times as much as the LARP group. The difference is the insurance.

Oh, and Andy? They're boots. They're comfortable. Suits/PHBs care less about them than they do about sneakers. Get over it.

Reply to
Politas
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Hey Ken, I would use alloy 304 as it is easy to find relatively cheap and quite forgiving in the forge. Regardless of what Charly said stainless is a bitch to forge. It takes a LOT more force to move it than mild steel. The non hardening varieties can bee taken right up to almost the burning point. "Cherry red" yeah right. Make it a yellow heat! It will still feel like high carbon steel under your hammer. Personally, I would make practice weapons out of mild steel, finish them out and just keep a good coat of natural paste wax on them. I am making some practice spear points and am using mild steel.

Glen G.

Reply to
GSG

Considered Mild steel but the rust issue (given the moisture level of my gym bag) and the use of wax paste (just imagine what that would do to all the stuff in the gym bag). 304 might be harder to work, but I think the benifits out weight the effort. Ken

Reply to
Ken Vale

Glen... I said 'use bigger hammers'. The hammer and gravity do the work, I just steer it. force applied = mass X (velocity squared). More mass, more force. Cherry red is a lot easier to produce on a budget in a garage than yellow. Of course, Ken could just spend a C-note on a belt grinder and carve away everything that doesn't look like a knife and forego the fire altogether. Bar stock is easy to find.

Charly

Reply to
Charly the Bastard

Point taken Charly, Still, it's good practice to always work steel at it's upper forging limit no matter how big the hammer. Currently my forge is a "SpeedyMelt" it's a big boy, like a Johnson. Problem is I can barely get 2000 f. out of it. But hey, it was brand new and I only paid $300. at auction. 304 grinds like a bitch too. Lately I prefer the laser, shear, break, weld methodologies for that stuff.

Glen.

Reply to
GSG

Have you considered anodizing or chrome-plating the mild steel? You don't plan on banging these against anything, right?

Gravity can only work *after* the arm has lifted the hammer. Your math applies equally to lifting the hammer. Who are you paying to lift that heavier hammer with each blow? Bruce Freeman?

Reply to
Lee Cordochorea

Well, after a couple of summers stacking cylinder heads, most hammers don't feel all that heavy. Anything under ten pounds is featherweight. Of course, finger tight is fifteen foot pounds. YMMV

Charly

Reply to
Charly the Bastard

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