Thought it was best that my first post was here in the intro thread.

Hello everyone, you seem like a fascinating bunch of enthusiasts.

Just added this line because it seems the post ended up slightly long, so unless you are having a slightly boring day just leave it as hello, otherwise, short novel below.

Found the workshop part of this Forum last week whilst investigating different ways to anneal steel(more about that later), and then found the forum to be quite interesting, since I always though straight razors were rather awesome.

I was very impressed by the work people were doing on their projects that they were posting pictures of, and then just kept looking at other sections and figured I had to join.

Then on the weekend I thought I may need my own straight razor to at least look at from time to time so I would fit in properly and found an interesting ebay auction from a vaguely local seller with a lot of 5 (judging from the pictures of the cases) rather old razors that I ended up winning so I will have my own collection starter arriving later this week.

Living in what is/was quickly becoming the biggest nanny state in Australia I will probably not get a straight razor through customs (recently folding knife imports were banned), more recently the local government got booted out too so many some of the silly stuff will get fixed, but at this point in time if I buy from overseas I probably will be wasting my money so local was an important factor if I were to acquire any sort of folding bladed implement.

I will of course need to post picks of my insta-collection somewhere else on the forum once they arrive seems to be the done thing around these parts, and if they are not complete trash as anything other than collectors pieces find someone locally to get them in working order for me.

And now for the really random reason I was looking to find annealing info, I decided to start rebuilding one of my re-enactment swords.

I snapped the pommel off hitting someone one weekend and found that it was due to some faulty construction in the handle, seems I got the one made by the work experiance kid.

Since I had to cut about 5 CM of poor construction off the end of the tang I needed to make about that much of the blade into tang, requiring the new tang to be annealed, whilst trying to retain the heat treat on the rest of the blade.

Incidentally I found some useful info in the workshop section that will achieve exactly what I wanted even though it was about something totally different. And found an additional hobby in the process.

Also this little orc guy is cool so I put him in here somehow:



Once again Hello, and I look forward to discussing things with people once I am one of the cool kids that owns a straight razor or 5.