mike-hr

Thanks Everybody!

I get that feeling also. Find a willing youngster and teaching them something helps, also have a buddy or two come over a couple times a month for a shop play day.

Great Job! That would make a nifty water feature element (gutter downspout, top of a fountain).

Here's a few things that set off the CO detector in the shop that I wouldn't have thought of :
Oxy-Acet rose bud. Had it turned way up pre-heating a big chunk, the alarm went off in under 2 minutes.
Miller Bobcat portable welder. The welder was outside on the trailer, the big shop door was open, the prevailing breeze sent all the exhaust right into the shop.
Lump Charcoal barbecue. Cold snowy night, so I wheeled the BBQ into the shop to cook dinner. The alarm went off in less than 10 minutes.

I had a guy come to the shop with a very old industrial electrical switch, likely from the 1920's. The main guts, that were cracked, looked to be bakelite, that black pre-plastic stuff found on antique waffle iron handles. If I need to machine him a new piece, what modern substance is strong, and insulative? Phenolic (sp?) came to mind, but I think I heard somewhere that machining it is pretty noxious.
Thanks, mike

go to Home Page There's contact numbers in the conferences section

Sorry, never heard of this anvil. Might you have a picture of it?

Nice looking set up! I was in south California over xmas break and stumbled into a state park run facility in an old towne historic district. When I walked up, the smith pumped the bellows up, and went to heating and forging. I noticed he was burning coke in the bellow forge, and the flame was bubbling after the bellows had collapsed. I asked him about the situation, he confessed the bellows were a put-on, and he had an electric blower hidden underneath to keep the fire going... I'm sure I was most likely the only person that noticed for months, but I felt bad for the guy. I don't think that would fly for more than a morning in your neck of the woods. I wish you a great season, keep it hot.

This is a very interesting topic. I find myself thinking about liability when things like this are dicussed. To follow up on what Dodge said, If you are engineering something close enough to the breaking point where you have to think about grain structure, as an open-die smith, you ought to build it bigger. My old welding teacher, Mr. Cone, used to preach, 'If in doubt, build her heck for stout'. Okay, I paraphrased his quote a bit. Family forum.

For repeatability and quick, I would suggest cold twisting. I can do 1/2 inch square cold in the lathe, for 3/4 stock, you would need to build a twister machine with a 3 foot or bigger hand wheel. Not difficult, just use big I-beam or channel for the frame. I can usually beat the fab shops to a railing with twisted pickets. The ones I've done have great timing, so the light reflects the same on each facet all the way up the stairs onto the loft. Hard to do if you buy twisted stock and cut it into bits for the job.

I pulled my achilles tendon pretty bad last November, and couldn't be in the shop for a couple weeks. After a few days I was gnashing my teeth wanting to create something, I had a block of soft plasticine from an art supply outfit that I was going to use someday...I stumbled to the shop, got the clay, some punches and chisels, and a small hammer in a bucket and tripped my way back into the house. I entertained myself for a couple days forging the clay into 1/4 x 1-1/2 flatbar on the coffee table, and then making decorative hinges out of the clay flatbar. The thing i noticed is, with clay you can pinch,pull, and twist in one motion. You have to break those down into individual steps to be able to replicate the moves with steel. Once I got healed up enough to light the forge again, my first project was to replicate a goofy bird head I made in clay, to steel. It turned out very close to the clay mock-up. I think it's a great way to block out steps of a project fast, and also allow yourself to push the creative envelope, if you don't like it, just squish it back into a piece of faux-flatbar and try again.

When you get this animal cleaned up, look around all the moving parts for tiny drilled holes that seem to serve no purpose. These are oil ports, dig out all the schmung with a dentist tool or piece of wire, and, you guessed it, oil them before use...

I would give it a good scrubdown once, if for nothing else to check for cracks and defects. if you got it clean enough, you could paint it, if not I bet it will get oily again real fast with use, and not rust.
If the handle is cast iron, you can still re-attach it, with brazing or nickle rod. show us a picture of the broken handle.
check with industrial supply places and get a composit belt that's laced on the ends

I live in Klamath Falls, Been to Lake Owyhee a couple times. I think it was 7 hrs or so to get there. I remember meeting a smith from Burns, Oregon one time, but his name escapes me. The NWBA conference is in Sisters OR, next month, you could make some contacts there probably. Feel free to look me up if you're ever in my area.

Sounds like a great project! Grinding is never fun, do you know anyone with a milling machine to vee out the 5 inch plate prior to welding? Are you going to stickweld, or MIG? If MIG, what size is your machine? Most weldors would ask you vee down to full thickness minus 1/8 inch from all sides to get a full weld. That's a pile of welding! If you want to learn how to stick weld good, you'll be there when you're done. 4140 will get hard, but not as hard as a Peter Wright anvil. keep a tempil stick handy, and put your hands in your pockets when the face plate is over 400F. I have a big anvil with upsetting block, never used it. a chunk of plate on the floor seems to always be more convienient, my opinion only.

how about an exterior doorknob lockset? I've made boxes from a slice of 4 inch tubing and holesawed end plates that a lockset fits into. You can buy them premade from the ornamental suppiers, also. I get stuck a lot when it comes to latches, there's just too many options. A good book to look at is 'Early American Wrought Iron' by Albert H. Sonn. It has 35 gazillion latch ideas, enough to get anybody dizzy.

That looks real nice. I like the guide system,too. How much clearance does the bottom (moving) rack have between the uprights and the sliding guides? At first glance, I wished it had a solid header plate at the top to cut down possibility of the frame tweaking under load. Do you think it's unnecessary? I'm quite interested in press designs, I got an hydraulic enerpack last year, a nice press is high on the to-do list. The bottom ram design you have seems to make sense.

I didn't check the machinery handbook, but I looked at Industrial Supply Equipment from MSC Industrial Supply , searched 5/8 acme, and rolled through a couple pages. I don't think 5/8-2 tpi is a common size. You can get a 5/8-8 nut for $18USD , and 36 inches of steel thread for $21. A machine shop with $50-$100/hr shop rate couldn't touch that.

Use the green toolbar at the top of the page, click 'search' and write 'square corner'. There's a thread by Warren Nekkala called square corners. Mark Aspery wrote a ditty in the thread on how he does it. He taught this to me in a class a couple years ago, I'm still jazzed about how good it works. You can dink out a square corner in pretty good time, to a very close dimension.

Happy B'day Jayco, you've always been a shining star around here. Thinking about television, my grandparents ranch is down a dirt road 40 miles out of town where there's never been TV or phone service. I spent many summers there, and never noticed the lack of either. Grandpa would get me into a penny-a-point cribbage game every night,by the end of the summer I would owe him forty dollars or more.. I couldn't pay him back, but he had an instant slave to go check on a downed calf a mile off in the lower pasture, or change solid-set irrigation pipe with 3 million mosquitos on each of my arms. Don't know why, but I think of my time with him as some of my best time spent. Grandfathers have quite a bit of influence, it don't matter what mom thinks...

I would like some feedback on this. I recently told a fellow that the only reason not to have a blower-type forge, is if he had no electricity to run a blower. Farriers, sure, but driveway smiths have acess to extension cords. I see the majority of people starting up with gas forges here are constantly fiddling with flame adjustment on Venturi type forges. I forge Semi-professionally, as do a lot of the folks I hang out with. We all have blower gas forges, along with solid fuel stations. I see it as advantageous to be able to adjust the gas flame from neutral, for heavy production runs, to rich, for detailed, less scaley work, by fiddling with the air intake adjustment from the blower. This takes less than two seconds on my blower forge. I would postulate that a person can make any one of a dozen burners for a blower forge, and be able to adjust it to rich, neutral, or lean, in a couple of seconds.

As a matter of discussion, why do most folks start with venturi-type burners? In my opinion, they are NOT the easiest way to start out.

mike

Howdy, Join the CBA. I'm an instructor, but the drive from LA to south Orygun would be intense. There's lots of folks in between, they are all good folks.You are in luck. In my opinion, which didn't cost you anything, the CBA has one of the best grass-roots-type education systems going. you can learn the basics from someone close, and if you want to attend a workshop for pay someday, you will be armed with a deadly array of basic skills with which you can heartily get your money's worth from. A two hour drive wouldn't be inappropriate, I routinely go 4-7 hrs to get to 'local meetings' in NorCal. It all depends how bad you want it. Carry on.

I think that's pretty common. My used-to-be-good-sized-shop is out of room, now i'm tripping over an errant 5 gallon bucket. That means I have to clean up the place all the time. I've tried saving all those one hit wonder fixtures, but everything can evolve better. I've found that I can rarely locate those specialty doo-dads when needed a second time,and even worse, identify what they do, so I usually just make another one if needs arise. I bet there's some resourse re-appropriator at the scrap yard that's filling his shop with things that I made a year ago, and junked out, not remembering what it is.

Once a year in August, when the humdity is down, I mix up a batch of Linseed oil/turpentine,60/40 ratio. I paint the tops of all hammers and set tools, and pour the remainder on my anvil stump. I don't know if it helps the stump or not, I guess the thing I wanted to say is, don't sweat that stuff, start using the anvil! I've seen a lot of folks so infatuated with getting their tooling correct, they lose track of the big picture, and forget to start making stuff. I have a very good friend that spends all morning every saturday going to yard sales, looking for blacksmith tools. I keep telling him that if he would spend every saturday morning forging his own tools, he would have what he wants, own more skills, and save a lot of gas money. (sigh)

I love traditional work, and have carved my niche in the community as that guy. I feel toolmaking, however, is a race to the finish line, and anything goes, as long as it doesn't cause a murder. We had a hammer-in a couple weeks ago and I made a set of heading blocks for the Museum/learning centre. I dropped a chunk of 3/4 x4 flatbar off at the waterjet guy's shop, the next morning I picked up 4 pieces, 4 x 4 inch with 1 inch, 15/16, 7/8 and 13/16 square holes blasted thru the middle. Total cost of plate and holes, forty dollars US. I was easily able to donate the blocks to the museum after welding them up. If I had chisled and and filed my way thru 4 blocks, I would have been resentful. Part of maturity is knowing where to pick your battles. I feel great about using the waterjet guy for dumb flat work, and burning calories on more challenging battlefronts. The first two heading blocks I made, I drilled, milled, and filed. went way over forty bucks in time. I can say I worked thru them, I guess that's worth something.