Respect for those who do fullers.

On the 2x72 grinder fullers are easy when you've had a little practice.  This one took me 30 minutes.  

Same on both sides and perfectly parallel


But I haven't found an efficient method to do them on a curved blade and without a milling machine or CNC.  This one is about 20" long and curved.  The small wheel attachment would hop out of the fuller.  The fuller is narrow in the straighter part near the scales and widens towards the front of the blade.  It's what I wanted but I can't avoid the effect caused by the curve of the fuller. >20 hours of hand sanding to fix and finish.




Later today or tomorrow I'll post pics of 7 blades I think I spent a combine total of 200 hours on.  I completed them while watching all seasons of House, LOST, and The Walking Dead over again.

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ive hammered some in and ground some in, hammered in i used a ball hitch in the hardy hole of the anvil and a modified ball peen hammer this works quite well, ground in tilting the angle grinder to vertical and using it to grind that way works well for wider fullers                                   like this               this is what i got with ball hitch and hammer, found best way for measuring ones on a curve is to use a set of calipers and score in lines to match the width of the finished fuller then use the angle grinder to grind between the lines, just my method dunno if it would work for others                                

Very nice fullers! The thing that bothers me though is that secondary bevel... but that's not the subject of discussion here.

Ah! Everything is fine then lol.. Will wait to see the end result. Pretty sure it will be awesome as usual :)

I used the 0.75 or 1 inch wheel to make the double fullers on the cleaver.   I can't go any smaller with the wheel because the two fingers that hold the wheel in place will protrude more than the belt (yes, I have shaved the two fingers down and the bearing wheel too).  

For larger fullers like on a European sword a 1.5-2" wheel attachment will work great. A steady hand or a work rest is needed to keep the fuller straight.

Here are work in-progress pics for my fuller work.  I would greatly appreciate help if anyone has an easier way to make them without expensive milling machines.

I start with a flat surface



I mark-up the fullers



The most nerve racking part is cutting them with an angle grinder. The trick is not to go too deep and to have good control to prevent the disk from skipping across the surface and to stay on the lines





I switch from a thin cutting disk to a thicker grinding disk





I use a dremel to carve the ends of the fullers







Here is the most time consuming part, with small stones and with small pieces of sandpaper I clean up and polish the fullers. This requires more than 20 hours. I would really appreciate a better method.





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20 hours sheesh! But the result is fantastic! Very clean and smooth.

Those narrow little fullers sure are a hassle hey? I can't think of any easy way to do them neater, and will continue to avoid them.

Grinding straight fullers in a straight blade is much easier if you're blade is still a nice new flatbar, and you rest it on a wide flat rest spaced just right under the wheel. Easy as pie, and another win for stock removal. Even easier if you can start the fuller/channel on a milling machine to give a nice straight runner to work in. Certainly not 20 hours work in a fuller done like that.

I saw an image once where someone was doing a curved fuller, by resting the flat bar or blank on a 1" dowel mounted perpendicular to the plane of the contact wheel - imagine the dowel pointed straight at your guts, appropriately spaced below the contact wheel - thus the blank can reston the dowel but be rotated to through the arc of the fuller. Never tried it, but I imagine the widening that Digs' describes would have to occur to some extent. Though I usually only use one edge of the contact wheel, not the whole breadth.

Finishing by hand is essential of course. Paper on dowels and cork blocks.
A note I've only recently learned about fullers is that you can thin the web between them to a final thickness of only 1mm (or just slightly more). This will allow you to grind the distal taper down nice and thin without 'deleting' the groove (applicable a medieval sword blade anyway). 
Keep at it guys.
Brendan

Necessity - the mother of something something...