Sad to say, I'm not doing it the "proper" way - I'm not really forging them from scratch. My brother bought a bar of metal for a knife he made (more of a shortsword, actually) and I'm using the leftovers. (O1 Carbon steel, these things will be very strong after I temper them!)
Here's an interesting infographic which I used as a reference when planning from
this site.
First of all, I cut the 21'' long piece in half:
I marked out basically where the handle would go, then moved on. That step took a whole day (about 5+ hours of just sitting there with the saw blade grinding at this metal) and you can see I ended up with a little bit of heat damage on the tip there.
After that for a few months I didn't have much time to work on it, but I got back to it last weekend, carving one of the handles:
It started out as a big block of wood, which I first cut down to size, then started carving away at to get the general handle shape. It fits quite nicely in my hand, and I'm almost done now. Might stain it, but it'll most likely just be wrapped in leather when done.
I added some more details on the handle last night, and started grinding out the tang (decided on a tapered shape) earlier this evening. I'll post more photos as it goes along!
