tl;dr: I picked up a broken WWI bayonet and decided to breathe some new life into it.
This is/was a bayonet for a Lee-Enfield rifle circa the 1900's and possibly used in World War I.
I paid less than $2.50 (£2) for it at a coastal flea market in South Africa in a milk crate full of rusted tools. Because it is either snapped or ground down to a shorter blade, combined with the sheer number of these made and whole, perfect condition versions still exist, it's really not worth much.
I pondered it a long time (over a decade) where it moved from box of tools to the to-do shelf, and then back into the shadows, repeat.
Finally I cleaned it up with a vapour blaster, knocked the pin out of the bottom and welded a whole lot of additional metal around the "stump".
Then spent a while with an angle grinder getting the basic shape cut without removing too much and making the most of the available material.
And that was just the beginning.
What followed was hours and hours of filing and sanding and grinding and swearing and sweating.
It's not finished… might never be, but I'm finally willing to show it to the world, and would love any opinions / advice you might have when you see it in the current state, which to me is still very rough.
The weld "channels" left I'm considering using a rotary tool to bring it down nicely curved bare metal 'blood grooves'. Lots of work in that alone.
And yeah, I know enough about metallurgy to do the heat treat and tempering. The final scales will also be removable. I'm thinking of doing denim micarta scales.
Also, yes, it's inspired by Rambo's Bowie and the more modern M9 bayonet.
by allchornr
