4-Hour Speed Forging Challenge with Sausage Man Forge

4-Hour Speed Forging Challenge on the Australian Beginner Knife Making Group

By Bjorn Jacobsen, 10th of July 2020.

Jamie "Sausage Man" Bishop hosted the first 4-hour speed forging challenge competition on the Australian Beginner Knife Making Group the first week of July 2020.

This came about a while ago when Jamie and I were discussing if we could do a "forged in fire" kind of competition; doing a 4-hour knife build where you had to test your knife at the end. I tried a couple of times to do it and failed time-wise both times. My first build was 7 hours and the result was frankly embarresing. The second time I got there in 5.5 hours and the result was okish but not what I hoped for.

So Jamie said we should do it as a challenge on the Facebook group, and so we did!

The rules:

• 10 am on Saturday 4th of July you had to upload a photo with the cold steel on your anvil, together with the handle materials you were going to use
• Every 30-60 mins you had to upload a progress picture
• by 2 PM you have to both upload a photo of the completed knife AND a video of you slicing paper with the sharpened knife.
• You have to use a proper blade steel, meaning a steel that can be hardened
• Within the 4 hours you have to forge, heat treat, grind, add handle scales including at least 1 pin
• Any style goes, fulltang/sticktang, whatever but blade length has to be 100+ mm

On the Wednesday before the big Saturday, we did a live stream on the facebook group with some experienced makers giving their tips and thoughts about how to get this done in 4 hours. Here Adam Fromholtz from Fromholtz Knives is discussing with Jamie his tips for saving some time on the handle attachment; corby bolts vs pins and epoxy selection. Adam was supposed to join but had to go away on the day, hoping to see him in the mix next year. As a full-time knife maker and teacher at Tharwa Valley Forge, Adam is another very good maker.

There were plenty of makers who wanted to have a go, and with such a tight timeline not everyone were able to finish. This was expected, one slip-up is enough to derail something like this but from the comments and photos it seems most of us enjoyed the experience, if it was a bit stressful at times!

We had several live streams throughout the day, in addition to all the photos and short clips uploaded to the facebook group, these were;

SausageMan's official Challenge stream with his 4-hour build : Australian Beginner Knife Making Group only

 Kevin Slattery of Kev's Forge did the live stream with Jamie on and off during the day and gave a lot of tips throughout the challenge period both before and after the actual event on how he has worked to streamline his process. Kevin runs classes in Canberra and we knew with his investment in time and effort, he would be hard to beat in the challenge.

Toby Murrill from Toby Fire and Steel was running his live stream on youtube, showing his build: https://youtu.be/PGBHvWP55e8

Just before 10 am on the Saturday morning, the entry photos starting popping up in Jamie's thread. Here is Rob Semmler's photo, showing the cold steel on the anvil with handle materials, ready to go. The rules said you could have the forge at temperature and ready to go, but the steel was not to be in the forge before 10 am.

Rob ended up making a massive knife/machete/orc kind of knife and was one of my favourites from the day. he can be found on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/robsonez/?hl=en

Sam Towns is another well-known blacksmith and knife maker who was joining the challenge, being in Perth he had to time-shift a bit. 10 am in Sydney is only 8 am there and a bit early for forging noises near neighours :)

Sam did his build on a live Youtube stream and took on what was maybe the biggest project to complete in 4 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knzWMlFrf9w

Matthew Will Donaldson did his stream on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/669519440

The last stream to mention is Troy Hageman from Nowra Knives, and Troy ended up completing the build first. Next year we might make this a prize as well. He managed to go from cold steel on the anvil to ready knife in 2 hours and 37 minutes!

Troy's stream on Facebook can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/1322329860/videos/10218934162368029/

At 2 PM we had a dozen completed knives, and what a collection of knives! Amazing to see so many makers jumping on the challenge, and we had not expected so many to complete their builds on time. Very impressed with the results, here they are;

We posted the 12 completed knives on the Australian Beginner Knife Making Group that night and let the community decide who should win. Everyone got 3 votes to put towards the 3 knives they liked best, be it completed result, complexity of build, material selection of whatever else they would weight towards the final score.

When everything was said and done, these were the 3 winners:

1st Prize: $100 CreativeMan.com.au voucher went to Kevin Slattery: He even had time to etch the blade, and ended up auctioning the knife off in the group aftwerwards.

Second Prize: Uncle Bjorns Handle Finish Kit, went to Mark Barrett for a very nice knife with san mai blade;

And 3rd Prize, a SausageMan Forge cup went to Toby Murrill who made a nice knife from his own damascus steel;

It was great fun doing the 4-hour challenge, and awesome to see how many different styles and results we ended up with! A big Thank You to Jamie from SausageMan Forge for hosting the event, and we will be doing this again for sure!

Here is a short clip from my own build, quenching the blade forged from 6 mm 1084;

If you are a maker in Australia or New Zealand and have not joined already, jump on the group here: Australian Beginner Knife Making Group