Marc

Michael, after it's straightened and rolled, I grab the flower tip with large bolt or V-bit tongs and then round it down like I would round the end of a pipe. I start it on the near edge of the anvil, which, on mine, is ground with about a 1/4" radius.

Don, I'll think about the Blueprint. Might be fun. But in the meantime... They are all one piece. I flatten/spread the petals first. Then I neck down the "stem", but I leave a piece of the petal thick, the same size as the stem. It looks like an "L", with the petal piece hanging from the bottom of the "L". That leaves me a thick enough piece to bend straight and then wrap the petals around it. Maybe I can get to a BP this weekend, but the weather is supposed to clear up. I need to spend some time outside. I'm in NH and it's been pretty wet the past week.

Yeah, what I do is forge the petal section so that the end is wider than the beginning. That makes the outside petals longer. Then, after rolling, I just hold the end of the flower with my pipe tongs and it's pretty easy to neck the bottom of the flower.

A while ago I made these for my wife. I call them railroses. They're just a variation of the "Russian Rose". --Marc

My shop takes is in what the previous owners of my house called a "garage". Other than being a nice word for Scrabble, I can't find much use for something called a "garage". It's 24 X 26, with a 7-1/2 ft ceiling. Most of it is the forge and related use, but 3/4 of one bay has the table saw and other wood-related stuff.

What Lucian Avery, up in VT, does is undercut the sides of the grooves with a chisel, sort of a dovetail shape. Then he lays in the copper and hammers it down so that it upsets and fills the dovetail. He does this cold, as copper is plenty soft enough. Don't know if bronze is soft enough, though.

Also, the thinner the wire, the higher the resistance.

A minor correction, but Reverse Polarity is really Electrode Positive. (DCRP = DCEP). Straight Polarity is Electrode Negative.

So? Has anyone ponied up for this? It is amazing technology, and the points about it being cheaper than a lost finger are valid. I've read about it, and it does work exactly as advertised. It's also been rated as an excellent saw with or without the safety feature. But it also has a potential for false triggers. If only working with dry wood, probably you'll never have this problem. I just get occasional use of my saw, and sometimes need to cut up pressure treated, damp, whatever. A false trigger not only puts you out around $200, but puts you out of business until you get it fixed. I could see this in a cabinet shop. I would probably make it mandatory if I were running a shop. But I would seriously think hard about putting these in schools. While the immediate value is pretty clear, I would worry more about a false sense of security. Once these students hit the streets, the SawStop may not be the saw they end up using. Would it be better to really teach safety? Luckily, I'm not in such a position to decide what tools go where. This would be a tough decision to make. But since I'm just an occasional wood mangler, I'm scared enough of my saw to be pretty careful. My only close call so far was due to a kickback, which this saw can't help with. No stitches in that one, but I'm still a little scarred and have a numb spot on my thumb. By the way, I think it's not conductance it senses, but capacitance. Something like, or maybe exactly like, those touch lamps.

The SawStop works by detecting conductance, as RC said, but it doesn't just shut off. That wouldn't work, as the blade's inertia would just finish cutting off the finger. It jams an aluminum jaw into the blade, and then mounting of the blade swings, letting the blade's inertia swing the blade beneath the table. This whole process ruins both the jaw and the blade, but saves the flesh.

I've gotten a couple pairs identical to those at local flea markets, usually for a buck.

Archie, check into the New England Blacksmiths, New England Blacksmiths One of the MA Directors is on the east coast, up in the Cape area, and he may be able to point you to someone near where you live. We just had an open forge on the 9th and will probably do it again. Look at the link for the Brentwood Teaching Facility to see what may be coming up. Also, there are some fine smiths in your area who have helped beginners in the past. They occasionally give beginner workshops at our shop in Brentwood, NH. Good luck! --Marc

I sometimes use a home-made apron out of cotton duck. It's full length with split legs, and velcro straps to wrap around the ankle. I keep it pretty loose. The straps are there to keep the legs from flapping around. It's got a chest pocket I use for soapstone, pens, pencils, rulers, ... I use it when grinding and welding, or if I've got some clothes on that I don't want messed up. And also in the summer, over shorts.

Napkin rings are quick and easy, once you make a jig. Nutcrackers are more involved, but well appreciated. Trivets can be as quick or fancy as you want. Little trinkets like leaf key fobs are nice. Maybe a personalized Christmas tree ornament? And also check out Anvilfire link removed at the request of anvilefire for some neat ideas.

And so begins the tale of Ebeneezer Blacksmithseed. Back in the 70's, after the Industrial Revolution all but drove the blacksmithing craft into hiding, Ebeneezer roamed the countryside dropping swage blocks on remote walking trails, in the hopes some hiker would pick it up and revitalize the mysterious and lost art of forming steel using heat and hammer. Seriously, though, I'd guess that the original owner of your block ground off the "NEB". I did that to mine because they're raised letters and I used to just sit this on a bench to use. The raised lettering caused some annoying rocking. If you look on your second picture and zoom in to just below the right side of the shovel form, it looks like there's an "EB" showing there. It could be the tail end of "NEB". Or ... it could be the initials of the one who dropped it there. And more seriously, if you'd like to find the original owner, I could put a call out in our newsletter and on our internal email list. Or if you'd like to sell it, I guarantee it would go quickly. We usually cast five or so twice a year to sell at our meets and they always sell out.

I'm pretty sure it's a NEB block. The end on the ground is the key. We've got two V's and the SF block has a large radius swage. So how did it get there??? Whereabouts in NH did you find this? I can't imagine it's been out there very long. We've had some decent rain all year and my block gets more rust than that just sitting in my shop. I'm guessing someone is looking all over his shop for that thing. --Marc PS, here's a pic of my NEB block:

Since you found it in NH, it couldbe one of the New England Blacksmiths' cast swage blocks. We based our pattern on the Saltfork one as that seemed to have the shapes that a hobbyist would like. We sell them for around $90, I think. If it's one of ours, it will have the letters "NEB" raised on one side. The age is no more than 3 - 4 years.

The BSA Metalworking merit badge has a few different components that the boy can choose from. One of those is blacksmithing, where the boy would need to perform some basic skills, like drawing out, bending, etc. You can see the requirements here: Metalwork Merit Badge But there is no real proficiency test to be a counselor, at least in my council (Daniel Webster, basically most of New Hampshire). You have to write what your interest in the subject matter is and that's pretty much it. I helped out with our council's summer camp Foxfire program. Mainly, I taught the teachers and suggested some projects for the boys. We settled on a drive hook. It covered all the requirements except for riveting. But a fireplace shovel or burger flipper could do all the req's fine. The Foxfire program was not there to fill in any merit badge. Mainly it was a fun thing to do with a theme. Any merit badge requirements were a bonus. I would think the striker would be a good project, too. Whatever you do, you need to keep the ages in mind. You may get an 11-year-old along with a 17-year-old. A small 11-yr-old hits with a light hammer and has little arm strength. It could take him 12 heats to point up a hook. If all you're doing is a demo, then keeping it short and sweet is key. The striker, followed by a demo of using it, sounds pretty nifty to me. A lot depends on your alotted time and the audience. Another thing is the demo format itself. If this is at a troop meeting, then you're stuck with the time they give you. But at a large jamboree, you'll have boys coming and going and more flexibility. But getting back to my little experience - I visited the area to see how they were coming along. The day I visited they had two patrols in there. That was a group of 14 boys sharing one coal forge and two anvils. My recommendation was not to do that any more. They cycled through OK, but lots of time was spent hanging out, waiting their turn.

I also built one using Clay Spencer's inline plans. But I varied quite a bit mainly because of the materials I was able to scrounge. You can see the pictures at Blacksmiths Gallery

Alan, that's scale that's bouncing off your hot steel. Basically an iron oxide. In warm weather I rarely wear long sleeves, and when the forge gets warm, I'll roll up my long sleeves in the cold weather. Hot scale stings a little, the bigger pieces stinging more, of course. But I don't think there's any real permanent damage. Sometimes I get small blisters and it might get white spots on a tanned arm, but that's about it. I sometimes use a backwards baseball cap when arc welding if I'm doing something up high. The bill deflects a lot of the sparklies from hitting the back of my neck. I wonder if the welding caps do the same? The bill is smaller. But they look more comfortable than the baseball cap. That adjustable band is in the same place as the headband of my helmet.

Instead of adjusting the height of the anvil, how about the height of the blacksmith? With those bucket stilts, you could conceivably get different buckets for a wide range of adjustability. Just set your anvil at around 40" for the maximum effect.

My father-in-law is a retired exterminator, but the company is still in the family. He regularly gets us poison bait and bait boxes. The poison is basically the same stuff in D-Con, but in a waxy cube. The boxes hold the cube and allow the meeses to walk through to the bait, but keep other animals, like my dog, from taking it. One thing he told me about bait and traps, keep them snug against a wall. Mice are mostly blind and tend to walk along walls instead of across open space.

"To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer." -Author unknown

About that anthracite - I don't use coal, but I'm curious after reading the Foxfire blacksmithing chapter. They say that anthracite was the preferred choice of coal, because it burned cleaner. But the soft bituminous was normally used because it was easier to get. Apparently Aubuchon Hardware Stores were more plentiful in Appalachia at that time (a New England thing :-) And I would expect that they didn't keep a constant blower going while forging. Then I got to thinking that that anthracite is burned in thousands of coal stoves and those seem to stay lit all winter long with no blower at all. Draft is enough. The biggest beef with those is that they're hard to light, but people have their tricks. So maybe we have a case where the forge design itself could be tweaked to keep the fire lit? How about opening up a gate to the tuiere to let outside air come in when the blower is off? Just a thought that came up on a cold, rainy, windy, day.

The ways I've heard of to quiet burners is to make some kind of nozzle for the end, instead of the open pipe or flare. I use a style that Jymm Hoffman came up with that is basically a pipe that fits over your mixing tube. Jymm's nozzle end is flattened to a small slit and he uses a more powerful blower. I think it requires a 3400rpm blower. My blower isn't powerful enough, so my opening is maybe 1/4-in wide. It's stil noticeably quieter than a straight nozzle, but it's definitely not quiet. A friend had a big 4-burner forge similar to Ralph's sidewinder in design. He used NG, but his nozzles were concentric pipes. That thing, with all four burners going, as very quiet. No problem having a normal conversation near it. And lastly, there's this ceramic burner head, Iverson or something like that???, that has bunches of holes that the air/gas mix goes through. It's supposed to be real quiet. But the point is that all these muffling inventions require a blower. You can't put anything at all in the way of the air/gas in a naturally aspirated burner. My current burner is made from a 90-deg sweep of 1-in electrical conduit and was originally naturally aspirated. It wouldn't operate properly until I removed the zinc coating from the inside. They're that picky.