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I Forge Iron

My First Tongs


Gundog48

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I've been messing around on the forge for a couple of weeks now, and I finally decided I needed some tongs to forge some bigger stuff. I've been reading a lot of books about bladesmithing, so believe it or not my first actual project was a knife. I've read all there is to read about it, but I figured to understand it properly I'd have to try it. I'll be posting that later. Anyway, I finally got some square stock to forge a pair of tongs which I'll need for working on some bigger stuff to forge cut-off hardys and things. Looking at most blacksmiths, they seem to have over 20 pairs of tongs for different sizes of metal. Not having the time to forge them, material to make them or even space to store them I got some inspiration from a photo on the forum for an adjustable tong. Here's how it turned out:

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I spent most of my time working on the rivets which were hard to get right so that everything was just tight enough.

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It automatically adjusted to pick up real thin stuff like this blade.

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And did the same for the biggest thing I could find, a 2" thick plate weighing just over 30lbs.

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It's also pretty good at picking up round stuff, as long as the widest point is behind the pivot on the top jaw.

I'm quite proud of these for a beginner, and they should do just about everything I need them to do for a while!

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I think I own something like 100 pair of usable tongs and have a bucket with probably 20 to 30 pairs of broken tongs waiting to be made into something useful. One of the reasons I have so many is that I have people at the shop andhaving only one pair of any given size is a problem.

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Thanks! Thought they went pretty well for a starter project! They aren't too hard to build, and I imagine an experienced blacksmith could do it easily! I started with 12mm bar, made a normal tong jaw and flat on one length and made a right angle on the other for the pivot areas. The top jaw is two bits of flattened bar welded at a right angle (first try with a welder!) because I didn't have anything else to work with.

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