mike-hr

I get ITC-100 from mojave southern machine works in San Jacinto.. 951-654-5660. 1 pint will do 2 forges.

I used a side-blown forge with coke for a 5-day class a few years ago. I was having lots of trouble forge welding in it until I figured out where the hot spot was. On the forge I used, the hot spot was directly above the blow pipe, I kept thinking it would be forward a bit.. another thing that helped was listening to the fire. If I couldn't hear a dull roar, i would take a straight poker and lift the bottom of the fire a bit, until I did. I can't comment on the charcoal use in a side blown forge, maybe somebody else can.. good luck!

A couple pulls of single-malt scotch at the end of the day makes all those little stingers seem secondary. It's a good honest worthy pain, embrace it and congradulate yourself.

There's a learning curve in rolling angle iron. the angle will curl in as you roll it, so you have to pre-roll the non-circle leg of the angle a certain amount to compensate. I forgot the ratio, maybe someone here knows it. It's in the Francis Whittaker book.

My elbow has a finite number of hammer blows in it. I don't know what that number may be, but I hope it's one more than i need before I die. A lot of forging is isolating a length of stock to a dimension, then making that section different than original. I use a guillotine fuller to get that dimension, and feel just fine PHammering the original section to pretty close, and finishing with a hand hammer. I haven't seen anyone yet who was competant at power hammer forging with out having a strong background at the anvil first. That's a great question, and i feel worthy of my best guess of a response. At local hammer-ins, we all still love getting one to eight strikers together and see what can happen, but I would hate to pay for that many employees.

I made a concentric ring burner tube for my blower-type forge six or eight years ago. a piece of 1/2 round, surrounded by 3/4 blk pipe, on top of 1-1/4 pipe, etc. up to 2 inch pipe, with small keystock spacers in between. I've put a pile of propane through it, a bit has worn off the end. When I built my new forge recently, I gave the old one to a smith in the area who had a venturi forge and I thought he needed a blower-type set-up. I expect he'll get another ten years out of it at a hobby/weekend rate of usage. I've been forging for ten years of so, welding and machining for 20 years, what's worked for me is to build something, anything, see if it works. If it fails, do something better next time... Smithing is fairly low-tech. The power is in your hands, and head.

Whitney Potter, all-around smart guy of the California smith club, whipped up some propane forges for the spring conference a couple years back that had digital thermostats. You could contact him through the CBA website, www.calsmith.org

I did a bamboo railing from various sizes of black pipe earlier this year. I was going to get it hot dipped, but the foreman of the shop wanted me to drill 2 holes in each piece of pipe, so it wouldn't float in his tank. I asked if he could simply wire it down to the tank cage, but he thought that was a silly idea. I ended up getting it sandblasted, and used Sherwin-Williams Zinc Clad IV, two part manual zinc epoxy. It was a gooey mess, and slightly thicker than sub-zero 90 wt oil. I had to brush it on with a stiff chip brush. It turned out okay, because the brush marks added some nice grain texture to the bamboo. Might be ugly on fine scroll work, or detail stuff.

Disturbed kaowool gets disheveled like cotton candy. It's real hard to ask a fluff to stay there whilst you try and glue it in. Suck it up and get some new wool.

I use a 50-50 mix of linseed oil and turpentine on all my wood handles. Rakes, picks shovels, hammers. The turpentine thins the oil enough to let it soak in the wood easier. Treatment lasts about a year in the sun.

Howdy Grant, The oxy-bottle top is a fine firepot, if you have the means to drill a hole through it to get a pipe and clinker-breaker to fit in. I do them in a vertical knee mill, a drill press could be used if it will slow down to low enough rpm's to not kill a holesaw. I see a lot of newer drill presses where the slowest speed is 800 rpms, the manufacturers can't seem to get the idea that you can get a whole lot of work done between 80-200 rpms. Welcome to the forum. Ask any questions you want. Please put your location in your intro, if you are close by, I'd be happy to help you. If not, you are most likely close by to somebody else that would like to see this trade grow, and you can pass on your knowledge to the next guy..

On repetative projects, like 200+ forged pickets, I keep interested by making a game with myself and a stopwatch. I do 10 pieces and see if I can shave some seconds on the next 10. I have a good stereo with satellite radio in the shop, I try to make the shop a fun place to be. My wife just got me a revolving mirror ball for my birthday, it's great to have on when doing power-hammer work after dark. There's some days when I just don't feel like working. Good time to chop wood, go to the dump, catch up on paperwork.

I can't make it, but if you see a crabby old guy named Dick, wearing farrier boots and running a coal forge, tell him Mike said hi.. he's one of our elder/mentor types from NorthCal/South OR.

I would reccomend taking an intro to welding class at the local community college that covers all the processes listed above. My personal feelings, if you have some time to burn, get a stick welder and 50# of 7018 rod and use it all up. 7018 is sort of a self-inspecting rod, if you don't use good techniques, it won't look right. If you buy a small wire feed machine and squirt a handle on a pattern-weld billet, I doubt it will last 3 heats before breaking off and flying past your ear..

Arbalist, I don't know the answer to that. I will say that, in my opinion, blower-type forges are a whole lot easier to run and get the flame mix tuned how you want it. All the pro smiths I know use blower forges instead of atmospheric.

Roy, thanks for that link. I've experienced the pre-ignition situation when I was goofing around with how cool I could get the forge to run, but still run. Since it was new, I noticed my greasy fingerprint marks were smoking behind the burner, where it's usually cool to the touch. I shut the gas feed off for a few seconds, and then re-opened it. It started running good again. My low tech blacksmith indicator for if this happens again, is I put a dab of axle grease behind the burner on the air pipe. If the grease starts smoking, I know what to look for. It's a bad idea to leave any forge unattended.

Scratch, the ceramic part of the burner measures 3 x 9-1/2 inches. Once the forge is at temperature, the heat distributes through the whole chamber. WWW, I'd be happy to do a write-up on it, once the BP section here gets ironed out. I did two BP's over 6 months ago on a couple different projects. They aired on a Tuesday, but haven't seen any daylight since. It takes a bit of energy to write up a BP, I just want to make sure they didn't die first. There has been articles in the ABANA mags and the CBA(California) newsletter describing the burner. RT, I don't know why it's called a ribbon burner. That's how it was presented to me...

McraigL and I teamed up and built two new forges, I finished mine last week, and am really happy with it. The shell is 12-3/4 inch OD well casing by 18 inches long. We bedded boiler bricks in the bottom for a floor, grouted in with castable refractory cement. A piece of half inch thick kiln shelf sets on the boiler brick for a replacable floor. Inside wrapped with 1-1/2 inch Kaowool, coated with ITC100. The usable area came out to be 6-1/2 tall x 9 inch wide inside measurement. Propane is injected via a MIG tip drilled out to 1/16 inch, plumbed in by using a Thread-a-Let welded to the elbow. a 2 inch gate valve makes for excellent control of incoming air from the blower. John at Gearhart Ironwerks turned us on the the ribbon burner. Glass blowers have been using them for some time. It uses Mizzou refractory cement poured around crayons for a lost wax technique to create the burner holes. John told me folks are getting approx. one third better 'mileage' on a tank of propane, I don't think he's far off. These burners are really efficient. We mounted the burners above the centre line of the forge area to get a swirl of flame inside. The typical 'hotspot' opposite the burner is greatly reduced, and I have been pulling out 18 inches of hot steel of consistent color. Great for pickets and railings. Some folks have complained that these forges will burn up steel, but with the fuel valve and the air valve right there, I can turn it down to a low blood red color real easy. In conclusion, there's many ways to make forges, here's one more to help keep everybody confused..

I think the ball swedge would leave you dissatisfied. if I want a ball on 3/8 round, I start with 3/4 round, forge the ball in my homemade swedge, and powerhammer the stalk to 3/8. another option would be saw some 3/4 x3/4 blocks, drill a short 3/8 hole in them, fit the 3/8 round into the hole, arcweld the blocks to the stock, and then swedge a 3/4 ball on the end. You could also get a nifty look by smashing the 3/8 stock really flat into a fan shape on the end, with maybe a gentle curve included. Each two curves could face each other to imply a round negative shape, with the next negative space implying a curved vee shape. Imagination is free, go crazy.

Sometimes I find chunks of shale or sandstone in mystery coal. Might be possible you busted up a non-flammable mineral.

Life's too short to spend time with inferior abrasives. Buy the best, get the job done fast, then go fishing.

The club got together and bought a container load of Lazzari coal a few years back. I got a ton as my share. It was probably 60% dust, and the rest, pea gravel size. At least one member screened his entire batch. What the rest of us did is dump a half sack into a 5 gallon bucket with some water and stir it until it made a pasty gravy. Don't add fresh coal on top of the fire, add some wet stuff to the outer edge, let it dry out and coke up, and gradually push towards the centre of the fire. Some folks prefer using dust.

I bought a new lincoln SP-125 plus, probably 8-10 years ago, for packing upstairs on the back deck to do final installations on railings. The little guy does okay in the shop, but I quickly noticed that electricians just can't see the merit in running a #12 wire with a 20 amp breaker upstairs to the back deck of any house. The little lincoln really doesn't like 15 amp breakers and #14 wire supply. I bought a Miller Bobcat portable with a Miller suitcase Mig set-up for it. The suitcase is real nice, even with the inconvienience of running cables from the Bobcat. I haven't used the little lincoln in over 5 years, I reckon I should take it to the next hammer-in and sell it for gas money.

Is a #12 the 275 pound double bick model? That's what I use for my main shop anvil. I don't wish for anything else, it's a fine unit.

My main shop anvil is a 275 Peddinghaus double bick with upsetting block. She's a sweetheart. I've also got a Trenton, Peter wright, and Hay-Budden all in the 125-180# range. What comes to mind is, they all produce the same product. It's not the car, it's the driver. More mass translates into a bit more rebound, but it's me, the hammer, and how much coffee (or beer) is in my system that spits the product out the door.