Weeding: rake just below the soil surface to cut down small sprouts. For deep rooted weeds like dandelion, the long blade and sharp point make it easy to dig the tap root out of the soil without bending down to pull by hand.
Digging: the sharp point and 6 1/2″ long blade make digging into soil or lawn a snap. Use it for edging and digging holes for potatoes or other root crops.
Cultivating: Again, the sharpened edges make cultivating the surface of the soil very easy to do. Since the tool is lightweight overall, and can be sized to fit you properly, there’s minimal stress on the body when working with this hand forged garden hoe.
Furrowing: by drawing the crook of the hoe along the surface of cultivated soil, a furrow is formed for planting seed. The deeper into the soil you press with the hoe, the deeper the furrow.
Starting a new garden bed all with this one tool: Dig the lawn first to loosen it up. Draw the hoe through the first few inches to cut the grass roots. Add compost or organic matter to your new garden patch and cultivate it using the sharpened point and to break up any dirt clods. Form furrows for seeds or dig holes for transplants or tubers. All done with one tool!
It’s about time for an update from the crew here. My wife has taken on a bigger and more direct role in how we do things in the forge. I’m grateful for her presence and dedication. We fully expected the pandemic to slam our business into the ground but it had the exact opposite effect. This website, and our Etsy shop, helped make 2020 one of our best years yet. That was the impetus for my wife to devote more of her time helping me with Reforged Ironworks.
A trend we noticed last year, despite the obvious move to purchasing online, was the renewed interest in “do-it-yourself” and buying local. This phenomenon helped drive interest in our gardening tools, which has always been the main purpose of creating our business. Also, the crazy increases in material prices for things such as newly manufactured wood and steel has reaffirmed our decision to make as much of our product with old and reclaimed materials.
In a lot of ways, it seemed that we were ahead of the curve. Can we stay ahead of it in the second year of a pandemic and with all the other shifting variables and concerns out there in the world? We won’t know until it’s come and past. I can say with some certainty, however, that not chasing fads and instead staying true to our focus and reason for doing the work we do, i.e. to create heirloom quality garden and homestead tools by hand from reclaimed materials, will most likely see us through any challenges that come our way.
Yaki-ire, or clay tempering, is a style of steel hardening. It isolates the hardening to the places the bladesmith wants hard (such as the edge), while keeping the rest of the piece tough (the body and spine). If the style is perfected, it results in blades that combine the best qualities of steel: hardness and durability at the edge, and toughness as the foundation to prevent breaking from brittleness in the blade. The transition zone between the two qualities of steel is called hamon. I’m curious to see if a hamon, a sort of frosty, wavy line that delineates the transition, is visible on the blades I treated using yaki-ire.
Preparing the Clay
I took the sister blades I featured in my last post and applied a clay mask to each of them using the recipe I found on the Crossed Heart Forge website (a wealth of information, by the way). The basic recipe is:
1 part clay (binds the mix)
1 part crushed sand/grog (prevents cracking and shrinkage)
1 part crushed charcoal (prevents flaking off in the fire due to heat expansion)
The goal is to crush these materials as fine as possible, for the smallest size grain determines the minimum thickness of the clay slip or mask that can be applied. This post covers how I prepared the clay mixture.
The swage block from Crossed Heart Forge brought back into grinding service.
Sand before crushing (left) and after (right). The sand’s from a local beach and was already very fine.
Firescale from around the anvil. It serves a similar purpose to sand/grog in clay.
Firescale ground into powder
Charcoal dust from sifting pieces for the forge. Nothing goes to waste!
The dust crushed into a very fine powder. It had a tendency to float everywhere when crushing it.
I mixed some clay I got from an art class with water to make it very thin and spread it out on a sheet.
After baking in the oven at 200 deg. F for a couple of hours.
The clay is ready to be crushed into a fine powder. This is the binding agent for the mixture.
Crushed clay!
Bringing it all together
Now that I had my three (four technically) constituent parts, I was ready to mix them in equal proportion (by volume) and add water. The consistency to aim for the mask that goes on the body of the blade is pancake batter. It seemed to me to be like the texture of mortar when laying down tiles.
The materials ready to be mixed. It took about a tablespoon of each material to make enough for both blades.
The dry mixture. Add water and apply!
My next post will feature a video where I mix and apply the clay mask to the hori hori. Stay tuned!
Working on some new tool designs, I took an old lawn mower blade and recycled it to use as stock for a kusakezuri (Japanese hand hoe) and a hori hori. In my continuing study of Japanese agricultural tools made with reclaimed steel, I’ve created these as prototypes. The fact that the two blades are sisters really speaks to me, and I plan to let whoever becomes the owner of these tools know it.
The kusakezuri blade, ferrule and handle unassembled. The blade needs hardening at this point.
The hori hori blade with tape measure to capture the scale.
Heat Treatment Process
The hand hoe is ready for heat treatment. The process involves annealing (which I did already), then normalizing the blade for two or three cycles depending on if the blade warps as it cools. Finally, the blade will be hardened by quenching. For this particular steel from the reclaimed lawn mower blade, I took a piece of it and tested it. It hardened very well at a cherry red heat quenched in room temperature water. For longer pieces like a blade, however, quenching it in a medium like that could cause it to warp excessively or even crack from the stress of cooling so quickly.
I next tried hardening the test piece in warm vegetable oil (came out soft), and then cold vegetable oil. The second result had ok hardness (a file barely scratched it). I decided to quench the hori hori blade in the cold vegetable oil. This is the result:
A slight curve can be seen along the blade’s edge. This needs to be corrected.
The blade warped slightly, curving upwards, and the edges were a little soft for my liking, with the file biting a bit. The ideal is a file skating on the surface of the hardened steel. I’m going to harden the hori hori again, but this time using yaki-ire to harden the edges. I will use the same process for the hand hoe as well.
Yaki-ire is a style of edge hardening that is accomplished by applying a clay mask to all surfaces of the blade except for the edge. When the 1-2 mm clay layer is dry, the blade is heated to the correct temperature and then quenched in water. Water quenches faster than oil, so I believe this will give the hardness that I want while maintaining some toughness in the rest of the blade.
Blade Anatomy
A slight concave is forged into the back of the hoe blade to ease in sharpening.
Tang detail: note the sharp shoulder where the tang meets the ferrule.
The back side of a single bevel blade is called ura in Japanese, and in the picture above I forged a slight concave on the ura to make sharpening easier. This is a traditional method for forging single bevel blades. The blade will fit into a slot cut into a hardwood handle. An iron ferrule is used to support the tang and blade; for the support to work correctly the ferrule must fit snugly with both the tang and the wood. It takes a bit of work to ensure all the pieces fit properly.
In this video I show the steps I take to finish the forged and tempered hori hori. It’s broken down into four essential steps:
Grind bevels to final shape – using files and/or a bench grinder with various grits of belts, I take the edges down on both sides of the blade to their final shape. The finished angle of the bevel is about 30 degrees, to ensure a robust edge since the knife is used primarily for digging
File serrations into one edge – using a round file, I file in serrations into one edge. This helps with sawing through fibrous roots and woody stems.
Wrap the handle – The handle is wrapped with brightly coloured paracord so that if the knife happens to be left in the garden, it’s easy to spot.
Sharpen the edges – Finally, I use a sharpening stone to get the edges to their final sharpness. I don’t go as far as making the edges razor sharp because they would lose that edge pretty quickly digging in soil anyways. The knife is still sharp enough to cut paper, and it chops through wood readily.
Lorinda demonstrates how the kama is an ideal tool for selective harvesting and cutting of green plants and herbs. Here she is specifically harvesting leaves and flower buds from a comfrey patch.
The kama can be used for many other applications such as harvesting garden greens, squash, and cutting grasses and weeds around trees and other sensitive perennials. To find out more about the kama and how it’s made, visit this page.
Lorinda and I love using this tool around the garden for pretty much any cutting job for herbaceous plants.
It’s harvesting time once again, and here we’re showing you how we get our garlic out of the ground. The broadfork is an indispensable tool for harvesting because it 1) digs up the plant we want and 2) loosens and aerates the soil at the same time and thus prepping the bed for spring all in one go.
Lorinda and the hens are the stars of this video. No music this time as I wanted to highlight how quiet it is working with hand tools as opposed to machinery.
This spring my wife and I recorded us preparing a garden bed for planting using three tools that I make: the broadfork, the russian hoe and the hori hori. Each tool has specific functions that complement one another, culminating in a garden bed that’s weed free and cultivated without putting through the equivalent of a soil blender (powered roto-tiller). We had a bit of fun with this as well!
