German hunting trousse, part V

I've concluded that this unidentified steel is much harder than I'd expected.  I annealed the tang several more times, switched between different sizes of drill bits, broke four or five, and endured much screeching noises before managing to create all the small pilot holes.

In the end, I locked the blade in a vise and gradually widened the holes with a 1/8-inch round file held in a pair of pliers.  When the holes were large enough that the file slid through easily, I ran the 1/8-inch drill bit through each one from both sides, then tried to make it a shade larger with a 9/64-inch bit.  This worked for three of them, but not the remaining two.  I settled for making the holes large enough that the nickel silver pin stock would slide through without much difficulty, which is all that's really needed.

I concluded the week's work by smoothing the reshaped tang edges with a rasp, then polishing them with sandpaper up to 1500 grit and finally the Dremel's wire wheel.  The sandpaper failed to take all the rasp's scratch marks out, but they're only visible on close inspection and I'm not too ashamed.