Thread: Tamahagane work in progress

Some time ago I was asked to build 2 Tamahagane razors, made from the nakago (tang) of old Japanese blades. I have 4 pieces to work with. This project is different from my previous tamahagane build in a couple of ways. First, this is not edge steel, but nakago. Second, because of that, I cannot retain the original heat treatment and hamon, simply because there isn't any. A nakago is never fully hardened.

This means that I need to do the heat treatment myself. these are the 4 pieces.



Initial spark testing confirmed that none of them was hardened in full. To verify that they were all good steel, I brought them all to cherry red and quenched in water. There was a bit of warp (to be expected without normalization and unknown heat / deformaiton history) and all of them sparked well afterwards.