Now I made a go at a spear many years ago when I was not as practiced as I am now at this. It was not great. I feel like this attempt is much better. As with other projects this one started with an idea. I picked up my pencil after a while of it rattling around my skull and threw it on paper.
Once on paper I knew It was time to start making this thing. Again I found good steel in a Stanley wonder bar, an x2 I think it was called. But what about the shaft? That posed a unique problem as this was to be what I would consider a good spear and not the garbage I have seen in so many catalogs and internet 'weapon shops'. A spear shaft in my opinion needs to be able to take a fair amount of abuse i.e. impact, shock, direct hits so I decided to go with the only logical choice. A decent hardwood. The search begins. Turns out most hardware stores don't really sell hardwood shafts in more than about 4 ft lengths unless you look to buy tool handles witch to their credit are good strong hardwood such as ash, hickory, oak but all are machined down to unacceptable shapes or sizes for my needs this time. So I settled for a martial arts staff of red oak. I should have began there as they are made a bit differently than normal wood dowels. Most staves as, I understand it, are from the cores of saplings and have a long linear grain good for absorbing impact. Perfect for what I intended. Next up I picked up a length of iron pipe from the hardware store and a 1 and 7/8inch trailer hitch ball to be used as both a counterweight and alternate impact surface.
Work begins: I started off by cutting off the ends of the wonder bar to get a straight billet of tool steel with my trusty angle grinder. Next I shaped about 2 inches worth of tang to go into the pipe. With that task finished I fixed the two pieces of metal together with my Lincoln stick welder using 1/4 round bar stock to fill the gaps and reenforce the tang. It looked wrong though. It was missing something. I decided I needed a cross guard for both functional and aesthetic reasons. You see on Chinese fighting spears they have a large red tassel at the end that had a few purposes. One of witch was to keep a dedicated enemy from running up your spear shaft after you run him through to take you with him into whatever lies beyond. On English boar spears cross guards exist for the same reason. Wild boars don't care that they are stuck with a spear, they will keep right on charging unless something keeps them back. Enter the railroad spike. An ancient rusted thing I found about a decade earlier while walking along the rails that are all around my town. Some simple cuts and grinds later and I had two pieces that were shortly welded to the tang and formed the block of a raw cross guard.
That was about it for the first day. About 4 or so hours of real work. I returned when I was able and began the butt of the spear. Most spears that I have handled or seen usually had no end or if anything just a simple metal cap. I wanted more than that, this was after all supposed to be my ideal spear and I figured a nice solid ball on the end would be magnificent. I was not wrong. I cut the hitch ball off and welded it to the other piece of pipe and polished all the coating and scaling off with a wire brush wheel for my angle grinder and a bit of sand paper. Next I implemented a decorative groove below the beveled ends for the end cap and drilled a hole for the rivet after sliding it onto the shaft. A large nail and a bit of work with a ball peen hammer and it was together. This oak stick suddenly had allot more weight to it.
That was enough for that day. Another several hours worth of work. I came back for the final push a few days later. I began by rough shaping the tip and cross guard. Most of the work was handled with the angle grinder and a 4 and 1/2 inch grinding wheel. Next came the grooves in the neck of the spear head. They would serve as decoration and if necessary a grip for when you have to choke up on the spear. I had to get creative here. I mounted my grinder in the vice and spun the head in my hands along the spinning grind wheel...like a reverse lathe if you will. The result was good enough for me after touching it up with a 1/4 inch round file and sanding wheel.
After this the only thing left was the blade. It was looking a bit plain as I began to think about finishing the blade. I decided it needed a fuller. A blood groove as I have commonly heard it referred to. That however is not the purpose of a fuller, it's not to provide drainage, its merely to subtract wight from the blade and add aesthetics. It can be a bit complicated to make them though, especially if you want them to look decent. I used blue painters tape and tried to set up a rig to force the grinder to grind nice and straight down the center but it was not as easy as that. In the end I measured and drew the lines on the painters tape directly on the blade and free handed it. I'm not too bad at free handing as it turned out pretty even. I touched it up with a dremel and a carbide rounded tip, then a sanding wheel. After the fuller All that was left was the edge grind. I learned a neat trick about edge grinding to keep it nice and even by watching a master do it once. A simple line down the center of the edge of your billet works amazingly at keeping the edges even and clean. Just like in kindergarten you want to color, or in this case, grind inside the lines for the 'A'. After the rough grind a sanding wheel polished it up nicely.
The final steps were quite simple, two holes done on a drill press, two rivets made of large nails and ball peen hammer work and its all one ominous piece of hardware. Some final polishing with wire wheels and sanding discs gave it the finished look. I signed my mark, the triple V with a dremel.
Over all the spear measures in at 7'2" and weighs about 6 lbs. pretty substantial for a melee weapon but I definitely feel confident in it. But what now? There is no realistic need for this kind of weapon anymore. It will never be used on a battlefield or anything similar. I leaned it up on the wall and thought about it for a while.
That's it, I will hang it on my wall. After all whats the point of having a house if it never feels like your home? So I needed a mount. Where do you get a spear mount? The internet? Those purveyors of the junk weapons that I get so offended at seeing peddled? Well they do know how to make a plaque to display a weapon designed to do nothing more than hang on a wall, but my spear was designed as a weapon and deserved a better mount than that. It's only fitting that I make that as well. So a plank of pine ,some decent looking hooks, stain, a rasp, and an hours worth of sweat later and I had my solution. I love it.
