I use the HC spikes, and harden them in soap quench. They definitely get a lot tougher that way. Still not great edge holding though. But, hawks take a lot of abuse and I like 'em a bit soft.
The first thing I do is heat the sharp end to high orange or yellow, and I prefer a coal forge for this, as a local high heat is easier to obtain. You don't want the heat much into the rest of the shaft. I upset the end back into the shaft until it's a square, flat end. This gives me more metal to work with when drawing the blade width.
I use a hot-slitting chisel for the eye. Before cutting the eye, I mark the cuts first on top and bottom with a cold chisel. That way I can find them when hot with the edge of the slitting chisel, and have a correctly centered cut.
I bang the chisel straight down in from the bottom about 3/4 of the way through. I remove the chisel, heat the spike back up, and bang the chisel in from the top until the cuts meet. They should meet pretty much exactly, with equal steel on each side of the cut when viewed from top or bottom. The cold chisel cuts really help, as does practice.
I heat back up to yellow, and use the slit chisel to drift the hole a bit. The chisel edge tapers up to a rounded body. I drift enough to fit the nose of my hawk punch into the cut.
Yellow heat again, and I bang the hawk eye punch down in. I don't call it a drift, as it does not pass all the way through. I make my spike hawks with an eye tapered at the top to lock the head on by driving the handle down.
Take a handle, the size you want to use, and copy the shape and size, and taper you want, in steel for the punch or drift. I used # 10 rebar and forged, then ground the punch. Looks like a steel carrot. You'll have to support under the hawk with your hardy hole, or a swage block if that's not big enough, or some block with the right sized hole in it.
Drifting good and hot, at a yellow, I find will keep stress cracks from occurring on the outside corners of the eye.
When the eye is good, I use a cross peen hammer to forge the blade out. periodically lay the spine of the hawk down on the anvil and shape the underside of the blade with a rounding hammer to get the profile you want, with a straight spine. I like a good beard on a spike hawk, but there is only so much metal there. It sticks better if the toe (top edge) of the blade sticks out a bit farther than the rest of the blade.
I heat a bit above non-mag and quench in super quench, don't have the recipe on hand, but Google it. Rob Gunter's soap quench. Basically, it's salt water, Dawn detergent, and Shaklee basic "I" surfactant or Jet-dry surfactant.
I like to forge to shape as much as possible, and not grind. Grind marks looks bad IMO on these, they can be worked out but that takes trouble. I stone some of the scale off the blade with a chunk of old sandstone grinding wheel, and sharpen pretty blunt.
