Today I moved onto the next step in making my broken-back seax after forging out the blank: filing.
Filing takes the largest amount of material off of the blank and is the most important step for establishing blade geometry after the forging of the cross-section and the profiles.
I used a long, coarse file for this step, initially using it as one would a rasp on the edge of a piece of wood.
After watching me work, Don showed me a preferred method of the bladesmith: draw-filing. He took hold of the file in both hands and drew the middle portion towards himself perpendicularly on the blade. The edge of the file literally scraped off material from the blade while establishing the desirable linear grain.
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