Marc

OK, so how come I can't see the pictures you all seem to see? I can see pics on other subjects, though.

In the immortal words of Gilda Radner, as Emily Litella, "Never mind".

Any basic welder will power the torch. The higher the current, the hotter the arc, and a 200A has plenty of juice to melt metal. However, an AC welder works far better than DC. With DC, one of the electrodes will burn down much faster than the other. It doesn't take too long for the short one to get so short that you can't make contact without repositioning the carbons. You can reduce this somewhat by reversing polarity and just "take turns". And the thing makes a racket, though. It's a pretty cool sound if you don't live too near crabby neighbors. It will also interfere with some radio reception. One thing I did was get this thing called a "MIG-IT" shield. This is a welding filter that normally clamps onto the MIG gun, and you look through that. I clamped it onto one of the electrode holders. This works better than helmet, since you can't see color through the filter, so you don't know how hot the piece is. Constantly flipping the helmet is a pain. It's easier to keep the arc going and just move it out of the way. You could easily rig a normal welding shade to do the same thing. I don't think MIG-IT is still around.

I don't know ... That Pakistani Piece Of Superior craftsmanship is pretty nice. Just look at those forge welds. You can hardly see them. ;)

My most serious injury blacksmithing was when I got a phone call. I put the piece I was working on the anvil, then hurried around the horn end to get the phone. I cut the corner too sharp and jabbed my thigh into the horn. I went "OW! OW!", started losing my balance, and then steadied myself by putting my hand on the anvil face - right where I put the still-hot piece. I said something more biblical and reproductive than "OW! OW!" and proceeded to answer the phone with my good hand. So the big lesson learned is: Don't answer the phone in the shop. It's never important anyway. Other lessons: For crying out loud, don't be so stupid as to put hot stuff right where anyone can touch it! I also have a tennis ball with a hole in it bungee'd around the anvil. I place the horn in the tennis ball hole when the anvil isn't in use. This prevents the accidental extreme anvil goose. It looks pretty much like one of those rubber clown noses. But mostly, just don't answer the stupid phone.

My answer is Yes. About half my tongs are bought, mostly through eBay or flea markets. I sometimes re-forge them to fit the task. But I also like making them. Since I'm a hobbyist, my only goal is fun, and I really enjoy making tools. I may have made more tools than non-tool things. Maybe not, but it's a goal :)

On stuff that looks "organic", like this does, I often prefer to avoid symmetry. I find it more interesting.

You should be able to get some furnace cement from the big box stores and small hardware places. It'll get glassy at forge temperatures, but still holds bricks together.

I got a bag of insulating castable refractory from Cutter. Salem Refractories, in Londonderry sold me some insulating fire bricks. They may have castable - It all depends on what's left over from a job. They're a contractor, but real nice to deal with and have no problem selling what they have on the shelves.

I usually use a ball pien for striking tools. At one of our meets, the demonstrator, Tom Latane, says he uses a mild steel hammer for striking his chisels and chasing tools. The hammer eventually dishes and that helped him center the blows.

My forge floor is just under shoulder height. Same reason - to see inside. I usually work small stuff that I can move with one hand. My material rest is attached to the forge stand, which is a rolling toolbox. You can see pics at http://ironringforge.com. It folds flat to the front of the forge, but can swing out and extend something like 1-1/2 ft to 2 ft away from the front. And I can adjust it up and down. It was made from some junkyard rebar and scrap. My most recent big project was a birdbath (somewhere else on this forum) that weighed about 35 lbs. That did strain my shoulders a bit, getting it in and out of the forge, but not too badly. If that's the kind of work I did on a very regular basis, I would probably lower the forge. However, my material stand did a good job keeping it in the forge. One thing I changed fairly recently was the layout of the forging "triangle". I now put my anvil between me and the forge and just reach across the anvil to put stuff in and out. The problem with propane is the dragon's breath, and having my back or side to the forge gets pretty uncomfortable. If I aim the forge mouth away, then I can't just peek inside to see how things are going. With the new arrangement, I'm always in a position to see and it's actually quicker to get from the forge to the anvil. No swinging around. My treadle hammer is to my right and the vises are to the left, behind the anvil. They're the only things I need to take a couple steps to.

If the garage has windows, open two far apart from each other, then put a fan in one of them. My shop was once used to store cars (imagine that!), but I replaced the doors with swing-outs and put openable windows in them. In the winter I open the windows on the far right right and left and put the fan to blow out one of them. I use a dept. store pedestal fan, and that gets all the CO out. I second the recommendation for a CO monitor. Strong recommendation. You won't find much cheaper life insurance, especially the kind that actually insures lives instead of betting you won't die. Get one that has a digital readout so that you can keep track and take measures before that brain-piercing alarm goes off. Usually I keep the windows closed while starting work and then ventilate as soon as I see the CO numbers go above 0. Once the forge is all really warmed up, usually 1/2 hour into working, I can shut things down. However, a propane forge gets the shop pretty warm, so unless it's below 0F out there, I tend to keep ventilating. Did I say get a CO monitor?

There is also insulating castable refractory, which I used in my forge to make am arched ceiling. I've never worked with hard castable, so can't compare it with that, but the insulating castable is similar to insulating firebrick. Not as tough as hard brick, but my forge floor is holding up real well. The IFB walls are mostly intact, with two of them having cracked in the past 5 years of occasional use. I use plain old furnace repair cement to fix them. The ceiling has held out very well, with only one corner chipped off. As for insulation, I think the castable insulates a somewhat less than fiber, but not too much. It gets glowing much faster than the steel in the forge and is hot, but touchable, after about an hour of forging. After much more than that, you can't touch it. That said, it was kind of a pain to work with. Getting it to mold in an arch took some finagling with forms, where blanket would mostly be just stuffing it in. And figuring out the mix is iffy. The mixing is in water per bags of castable. In my small quantities, it takes some guessing. I would seriously think about using blanket for my next one. The other nice thing about it is I have my burner nozzles cast right in the roof.

My doctor's office uses these mini-laptops for everything. They look like netbooks, but they've had them for years. Anyway, anytime someone, doctor or nurse, goes to see a patient, they carry that in and look up records and enter new ones. Things like maintenance shots, regular medications, etc. show up on the main screen as when last performed and when due. So I'm pretty sure they'll let me know when I need something.

Looks like a nice bit of work - Not bad for a "lazy" guy :)

Not exactly a ring "accident", but it's a ring story. After 20 years or so, it appeared that my wedding ring, which never leaves my finger, had shrunk. I'm sure that was caused by washing all those dishes over the years. It's actually in two pieces, a gold-filled sterling inner band and a sterling outer that fits in a channel in the inner band. Since I work with metal, how tough could it be to cut it off and make it bigger? So I put a piece of sheet under where I was going to cut it and proceeded to use my Dremel with a little cutoff wheel. Did you know that sterling is also an excellent conductor of heat? Did you also know that even a tiny little Dremel cutoff wheel is enough to heat a sterling ring to where it will burn skin? But it worked, and my finger healed nicely. I just expanded the ring and rotated the bands so they didn't line up. One of these days I'm going to fill the gap in the outer band with some silver solder and shape it to look like that band. But at least now I can take it off my finger before I do that. I'm not stupid!

With a small shop, my "table" is portable. It's a 20" length of 15 X 3 X 3/8 channel. I slide it around my wooden workbench (solid-core door on metal workbench legs) as needed. I can always slide it out a little to clamp on the ground. I got this from a scrap yard, back when those yards sold to little guys like me. The Chinese scrap revolution put a stop to that, although maybe it's better now. I haven't been for a long while. But I got the channel without any use in mind at the time. Thought it might make a nice base to something. What I left behind were some scraps of 3/4" - 1" perforated with 3/4" - 1" round holes. They were around 2' X 3'. Now those would have been nice for a small table. They were gone by the time I was thinking about welding tables.

I do oxy-propane. I own and exchange the O2 tank when empty. Propane I just go to a refill place.

I see a few have used gas savers with oxy-propane. Any trouble lighting them with the pilot? I've got O/P and have propane cutting tips, but the brazing and heating torches are standard O/A. I don't have a problem lighting those, but only with a technique different than O/A. Anything else and the flame pops off the end. I was thinking of getting a gas saver, since most of my torch work is heating for bending, some brazing, and occasional cutting. So I tried a quick check to see if it would light. I set the flame to what I think is neutral and then turned the tanks off without changing the torch valves. Then I turned them back on and tried to light using a butane lighter flame. That's my best simulation of a save pilot. The flame would just pop off the end every time. Now it's entirely possible, even probable, that I don't have a proper mixture. There aren't any pictures out there, either on the 'net or in books, of O/P, so I go by some pretty decent text descriptions. But they're less than a thousand words, so I can't be sure. Could I just have the flame wrong? Is there a better way? Or do I really need to get O/P tips for this? Thanks.

Thanks for the comments. It's propped up because the yard slopes in that area. That's my back yard, where I took the picture, not the final resting place. I just liked using my shed for a background. The color was contrasting without being glaring, and no features to get in the way. I meant to take process pictures, and even brought the camera out a couple times. But once I got to working, I was just too focused to remember to take pics. Maybe I should hook up a security camera to take pictures as I work I did have to rig up some stuff to help make this happen, because of the size and weight. I made some jaws to go in my vise to provide a wider surface to clamp the four 5/8 round rods for twisting. I drilled holes through the bottom of the jaws and inserted a rod to go from one to the other. That gave a resting place so I could just drop the thing into the jaws and tighten. The other end was held up by a stand so it wouldn't droop. The dragonfly was just a basic technique I got from Anvilfire. Same as hummingbirds and I've also done a bee. It was fun building, even though I got two nasty burns and broke a twisting wrench. All the tendrils, except for the main vines, were done at the same time, without any real notion of where I was going to put them. I just tried to think like a vine and make them different. Then, when I had a bunch, I looked for good places to TIG them in. I tweaked with a torch after each was put on. The burns happened during the TIGing and tweaking. I would TIG or tweak a tendril, then move on to another. But the previous was still hot. I've got Kevlar sleeves for the next time. Best of all, I'm getting better at estimating the work. I earned a lot more than minimum wage this time :)

To misquote Freud (who probably didn't say the original) sometimes a dragonfly is just a dragonfly . The customer asked for some kind of critter and I forged and tacked that on. I forged a dragonfly and a hummingbird and have them hanging in my office, and that's where the idea came from.

One of my coworkers wanted a birdbath for his wife. She wanted an organic type sculpture where the birdbath function was secondary. So here it is. A couple tendrils stick out a little to the side and up high to hang bird feeders. The basin is a terra cotta flower pot dish. I tried to talk them into a copper basin, but she liked this better. I suppose if the birdbath function is secondary, then the dish hides better. --Marc

My anvil stand is from an I-beam, and you can see it, and the problems with it, here: Blacksmith Class Projects Just scroll down about 1/3 of the way. Bottom line, I guess it depends on how you mount the anvil. I went with the I-beam horizontal and the web of the beam did not hold my 140-lb anvil steady at all. I had to weld in some supports to stiffen it. Also, it did make a real loud clang. Since my anvil is a Fisher, it's quiet itself, but the clang countered that. A piece of plywood between anvil and beam made it quiet. I would probably make a steel tripod if I went to do this again, but I was brand new and having fun with the welder. I still use it, by the way. My modifications fixed whatever problems I had. I found I wanted it higher, so now the feet sit on 4X4's, but otherwise it hasn't changed.

My anvil stand is from an I-beam, and you can see it, and the problems with it, here: Blacksmith Class Projects Just scroll down about 1/3 of the way. Bottom line, I guess it depends on how you mount the anvil. I went with the I-beam horizontal and the web of the beam did not hold my 140-lb anvil steady at all. I had to weld in some supports to stiffen it. Also, it did make a real loud clang. Since my anvil is a Fisher, it's quiet itself, but the clang countered that. A piece of plywood between anvil and beam made it quiet. I would probably make a steel tripod if I went to do this again, but I was brand new and having fun with the welder. I still use it, by the way. My modifications fixed whatever problems I had. I found I wanted it higher, so now the feet sit on 4X4's, but otherwise it hasn't changed.

My old well tank sprung a leak in the bladder, so I saved it to make a smoker. That project never came through, so I cut the top off to use as a slack tub. This was a tall, 40-gal, tank and I wanted the height for long stuff. One problem was the bladder was attached on the other side of a partial metal dome. Since I was already into this, I popped the dome out with a chisel. It wasn't all that much work, as only weak welds held it in. The tank has a nice base and I put a basket in, like Frosty, for dropped stuff. And if I need to empty it, I just might hook a hose up to the outlet and drain away.