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I Forge Iron

Forging a shovel from RR track


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That is a good watch Andy, thanks for posting the video. I really liked the long strip of hot steel rolling around the top roller in the rolls. Rail would make FINE shovels and the like, excellent low alloy steel.

 

Frosty The Lucky.

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This was posted to Youtube by someone named Sergi Ilysov.  Therefore, I'm pretty sure that this is taking place in Russia or somewhere nearby.  I knew it wasn't anywhere under OSHA's jurisdiction when I saw the guy with the tongs guiding the hot pieces through the rollers.  If he missed one of thos and it kicked out towands him it would be a really bad day to be him.

 

I need that hammer too but I wouldn't say no to the rolling mill.  I wonder what is powering that shaft.  Probably a huge steam engine. (and if it isn't it should be)

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Obviously where ever it is the wages are cheap and the cost of the steel is high, and the rail must be able to be got for next to nothing.  We used to use rail for forging some tools, I found there was too much work with cutting, grinding etc to make it worthwhile, also some of the rail can be quite old and you don't always know the quality is there, and rail can have cracks in the head that you don't necessarily know are there until you forge it out.  I found it was just cheaper in the long run to use new steel that had a chemical cert, was the grade I needed and I could just go out to the steel rack grab what I wanted, bang it in the saw and go to work.

Still it is keeping those guys in work, so who cares if it is really labour intensive.

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Jeremy   Thank you for posting the video.  Amazing how they do the entire forging on one heat.  The pile of forged hammers awaiting hardening is testament to how many they do.  I bet that they know about how many hammer blows it takes to make each one.  They look like they will be very tough sledge hammers.

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  • 4 months later...

The thing I have trouble "getting my head around", is this ..... Where is the Market for all those Shovels and Hammers ?

In 1988, I bought a good, used #8 Sledge, ( I think I paid $4.00 )  ... to use for driving the 1,600 spikes ( 12" ) that went into building my Log Home.

In the ensuing 27 years, it's been used for all the usual things that you'd do with such a Hammer, when working on Heavy Equipment, ... and in the Blacksmith Shop.

And it's condition is NO DIFFERENT than the day I bought it, ... ( it's still got the original handle )

There's got to be MILLIONS of similar tools in existence today, ... so who's buying all those new ones ? :wub:

 

And don't get me started on Shovels .....

I've NEVER worn out a Shovel, ... and have NO INTENTION of EVER doing so.

 

.

 

 

 

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​Industrial sized plasma.

​It was also being used to score the rail so it breaks where desired. You can score rail with a cold set chisel and hammer though it's more work and takes longer.

Frosty The Lucky.

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I see a lot of worn sledges out here; often with steel pipe handles welded to them. Usually indicative of a lot of rock breaking and concrete breaking work done the hard way by labor they don't care about long term injuries.

My hammering steel tools show small wear from the abrasive effects of scale---after decades of use and I expect my grandkids won't wear them down to far to use by their grandkids.

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I won't even allow a hammer with a welded pipe handle in my shop and anyone who did that to one of my hammers would be 86'd as soon as I found out.

Worn out shovels are good stock and make nice blades even stock removal blades. Ever try shooting a hole in a shovel blade?

Frosty The Lucky.

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No but I made a garden knife from 1/2 a set of sheep shears; wife muckled on to it bigtime.  

What really hurts is to see a pipe mounted on a cast steel atha sledge with enough welding (with no preheat of course) to make the structural integrity of the sledge suspect.

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And don't get me started on Shovels .....

I've NEVER worn out a Shovel, ... and have NO INTENTION of EVER doing so.

​I used to work doing concrete with a bunch of laborers who came here from Brazil. I got burned on my part time job and couldn't continue doing concrete for about 2 years. When I came back I couldn't believe the condition of the shovels those guys were using. They'd worn the points off at least 3 pointed shovels. Now we'd had one that the point was "blunt" on from wear I used to keep on the truck to scrape the concrete truck chute with, but these would now have qualified as flat shovels. The flat shovels were all worn down to 1/2 to 1/3rd their original size blade. O  think they wore them out cleaning up piles of dirt and stone off concrete and asphalt drive ways. I said something to the boss and he said he'd tried to buy them new shovels, but they just kept taking them off the truck and putting the old worn ones back on for whatever reason, and he finally gave up.

 

I'll have to remember to grab a picture of one of those shovels next to one of mine next time I'm up at his place. I think there are still a few the Brazilians didn't buy when my old boss died, still sitting up at the shop.

 

 

As far as sledge hammers, it's probably like most handled tools today. They get tossed as soon as someone breaks the handle. I've got 2 or 3 sledges that way as well as a matox, potato hook and a number of decent shovels that I've acquired when the owner broke the handle and simply chucked them vs putting on a new handle.

 

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In my clueless and callow youth, ... one day when I needed a Sledge, I welded a 3 ' long pipe handle, onto a short ( 9" ) piece, of  2 1/2" diameter round bar.

The first time I hit something hard with that nasty thing, ... I learned why pipe handles are a very BAD idea.

So, it floated around the Shop, ... unused, ... for about 15 years, ... until one day it occurred to me that it might serve as a "Slide Hammer", for driving the 1/2" Re-Bar stakes, commonly used to support "temporary" Electric Fence.

( My Neighbor had brought a 20' bundle of Re-Bar to the Shop, ... for me to cut into 5' stakes, with the Plasma Torch, ... and asked if I'd make Him a Slide Hammer to use to drive them. )

While I was torching the Re-Bar, I remembered that old pipe-handled Sledge, ... and sure enough, ... after a bit of a search, ... it was located, ... and proved very effective for that job.

 

I'm sure there's a lesson in all that, ... but I'll leave it to you to decide if it's about saving every old bit of junk, ... or about intelligent tool design, ... or about dumb luck, ... or some combination of the above.

 

.

 

 

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The very long part of the sledge head making video showing the water quenching really cast some light on some of the muddied discussions about quenching anvil faces.  I always thought that a fire truck and a large amount of water was required to quench an anvil that was being hardened.  I don't know why I have this belief, since I have never seen it done.  It just seems right.  Now, here is a video, which doesn't look faked, which gives a new window into reality.  Since, to first approximation, the heat flow in the metal is unidirectional, water requirements should scale linearly with mass, and quench time should scale as the square of the depth of the object.  This means that 10 times the amount of water for a duration of 2 times the one in the video should create a similar depth of hardness in an anvil sized block of steel.  Sledge hammer faces are pretty hard and durable, in my experience, and they are excellent in the ball bearing test.  This would not require a fire truck.  And, it could even be done with recycled water to avoid the ire of Candlestick demolition observers and the like.

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All good video clips. I really like seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff.

Like was mentioned before my thoughts were do people really use that many shovels? But i guess so. If that was in Russia I bet they have all the ak47 tooling in storage somewhere on site. ;)

Edited by norrin_radd
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