John McPherson

2nd Saturdays Blacksmith demonstrations at Roper Mountain Science Center, Greenville, SC, Anthony Palacino. contact.864 386-5546 3rd Saturdays Blacksmith demonstrations at Hagood Mill, Pickens, SC. Often, our own Griz Hockwalt. October Meeting: October 6 Todd Elder at his Columbia (the city) shop. State Fair October 12, 13, 14 John Tanner Contact Autumn on the Ashley Craft Fair at Magnolia Gardens. October TBD, Contact Ray Pearre. Colonial Days, Living History Park, October 20– 21, Barry Myers demonstrating. Myrtle Beach Renaissance Fair, November 10 (Marine Corps Birthday) and 11, Contact Ray Pearre. December Meeting: December 1, Lexington County Museum, Hayward Haltiwanger to host. 2019 Meeting Schedule: February - Conway, April —Magnolia Gardens, June - Marcengil’s, August - Camden, October—Lexington County Museum, December - Ryan Calloway’s in Greenville.

4th Quarter statewide meeting- December 8 at 9:00 A.M. Roger Barbour's Shop Clayton, NC Program TBA Dixie Classic Fair website Winston-Salem, NC Sept. 28 - Oct. 7 North Carolina State Fair Raleigh, NC October 11-21, 2018 www.ncstatefair.org Regional Blacksmith Groups of NC ABANA Local groups hold their own meetings. Please contact the host to confirm date, time and location. Members may attend any of these meetings. Triad Area Blacksmiths – Winston-Salem, Greensboro, High Point area. 1st Tuesday 6:30PM for demos 3rd Saturday 9:00AM for business, and all day forging Meeting Location: Dixie Classic Fairgrounds, Winston Salem, NC Contact: Marshall Swaringen (336) 998-7827 marshall@swaringen.com Southern Foothills Blacksmiths – Charlotte, Mooresville, Concord area. 2nd Sunday, each month Contact: Steve Barringer (Mooresville, NC) (704) 660-1560 b2design@windstream.net Triangle Blacksmith Guild – Central NC, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area. 2nd Saturday, odd numbered months, location varies Contact: Randy Stoltz (Cary, NC) (919) 481-9263 rhstoltz@gmail.com Brasstown Blacksmiths – Southwestern NC. 3rd Tuesday, even numbered months, 5:00 PM to 9:00PM Starting in 2013 the meetings will be the third Tuesday evening of even numbered months. The locations will float around and folks can call Paul with questions and locations. The meeting time will be 5:00 PM until 9:00. Contact: Paul Garrett (Brasstown, NC) 704-604-1777 pgarrett286@gmail.com Wilkes Teaching Forge (Millers Creek) Contact: Lyle Wheeler (336) 838-2284 chairmaker@yahoo.com

Oh, but there are right handed and left handed.

To really get this out in a shades of grey area ( nowhere close to 50.... yet), we can talk about sole authorship vs helpers when putting your name or brand on a product. Say that you take in a close relative or child of a family friend as an apprentice. They start out sweeping the shop and breaking up coal, but progress to running the chop saw and grinder on your preforms. Is that any different than buying laser cut blanks? Are they allowed to do any of the forging, twisting, fitment, final grinding and polishing, and you still put your name on it and charge for it? How about sending the completed product out to a powder coater, or a commercial heat treatment service, is that cheating? Where do the knife sheaths and mounting screws and wooden tool handles come from? You working kydex, turning threads on a lathe, ranching cows for leather, growing ash and hickory on the back 40? Historically, especially in the craft guilds, the answer wound be an emphatic yes to the role of allied trades, and rules for apprentices and journeymen. They were not allowed to handle money or negotiate, but all work leaving the shop bore the Master's stamp. How else were they going to learn? We have a huge skills gap in the US, and a couple of years in a community college setting does not turn out a well-rounded journeyman, the best you can hope for is a qualified apprentice. That is why all the ads want someone with 3 to 5 years of field experience. Gosh, it is almost like it takes a seven year apprenticeship to turn out a useful, independent craftsperson. Who knew?

Buying old worn out wrenches is "post consumer" recycling, buying them from a local business (and supporting the local economy) is local recycling, buying them online from alibaba and having them shipped halfway around the world to your doorstep would be direct recycling. And it would not matter if you were turning horseshoes into crosses or ball peen hammers into tomahawks, as many other crafts persons do. As long as you do the actual work, and don't farm it out under the table, it is ethical.

Case hardening is just what it sounds like: a thin skin heat treatment, usually only a very small fraction of an inch thick. Various compounds are applied to the surface, and placed in an oven to be absorbed into the base metal. Somewhat similar to the coatings found on drill bits. If you grind off the high spots, only what is now the base of the valleys will be hard. But even that is not going to last long with hot metal if the last step was a quench.

No standard MIG gun that I know of will fit in that small of a gap. You could actually take the gas nozzle off, the metal would act as a dam in that small of a gap. Standard insulator is about 3/4" on a 300 amp gun. Stick is the only viable low-cost option.

Your work is sparse and Minimalist, with clean, pure lines. Anything added would merely be embellishment. Always a pleasure to see you post something new.

A shop can never have too many sources of light, especially when it gets crowded with tools (over time) and bodies (during class). Walk up to a work station. Does your being there cast a shadow on the work? Do you constantly find yourself having to twist your body, or actually move to examine something adequately? You need more and better lights. As far as teaching techniques: EDGE and Oreo. Educate, Demonstrate, Guide, Encourage, in that order. (Google it.) Oreo means sandwich a critique between two compliments, not just drop a criticism and walk away. "Nice point, the edge is a little thin to heat treat well, good transition to the tang." Best of luck, young man.

Depends on work and family. I will not be sure until I get to the Ohio state line, maybe not even then.

"pray...on the weak"? Oh, with some people it's all in the inflection: "He was a stranger, and I took him in!" (fist pump)

CrazyGoatLady, you are a blacksmith on Day One that you hit hot iron with a hammer. You are a Beginning Blacksmith if you are on your own, or an Apprentice Blacksmith if you are lucky enough to find a mentor. Progression through Journeyman to Master depends on luck, skill, talent, (three very different things) and time applied to the trade. You are an Amateur Blacksmith as long as you don't charge money for it. You will be a Starving Blacksmith if you don't charge enough money for it. Later, you may want to differentiate yourself as a specialist or niche artist. Some people call themselves Artsmiths, Artist Blacksmiths, bladesmiths, (big B is copyrighted by the ABS), Historical Blacksmiths, Blacksmith/Toolmakers, or some other monicker.

Farmall, they have a minimal website just to say they have a website about the company, like a lot of other folks. No images of products.

Wow, they actually kept the guard in the box! First time for everything. (Same guy usually wears his safety glasses on top of his head.) That usually goes in the garbage with the packing materials. People keep trying to sell me used grinders, but we keep an OSHA compliant shop at school, and so do I at home. No guard, no handle, no deal. I did trade a clueless student a new grinder for one he had bought at a pawn shop with no guard. I only use it for cup brushes, where a guard would be useless. Cheap-o HF and other underpowered brands are OK with brushes, but tend to bog down and burn up with stones.

Since the only words that I can seem to make out in the first photo are "shEFField" "wARREnted" "MOuse" "HOle", I am afraid I can't help you.

There is an old story that when great art critics gather, they discuss line, form, depth, shadows, meaning, hidden meanings, brush strokes, ad nauseum. When great artists gather, they discuss brands of brushes and cleaners, and which bars will extend credit until you sell something.

Repairing cast iron is an old-school trick that few young welders have even seen done. If the person that you talk to just wants to MIG it with common wire, or even Stick weld it with stainless rod, run, don't walk away. The whole unit has to be pre-heated to several hundred degrees, then welded (by one of a couple of alternative processes) then wrapped in hi-temp insulation and slowly cooled at least overnight. Longer is better, but hardly anyone has a digital heat treatment oven that big. And yes, time and expertise are money, good welders get $25/hour after expenses. Great ones get double that. If you want to return it to food service use, it could be welded by a gas torch and cast iron rods for an invisible repair. Arc welding with 99% nickle rods would show up silver on black, but would be food safe. My Scout troop has been using a pot repaired this way for 40+ years of fish fries and spaghetti suppers. Lastly, it could be made water-tight, but not necessarily food safe by mending the cracks with silicon bronze rod and a gas torch. Again, it would show up as gold (eventually green) on black. The Metal Museum in Memphis, TN has a Repair Day each fall where people bring things in for work by experts.

Sorry, it does not work that way: cast iron is not a magic glue, or no one would have wasted the last 100+ years on arc welding. What DOES happen when it cools is a brittle zone between the steel and the cast iron that breaks with any external stress, or maybe just the stress of the different coefficients of cooling of the two metals. Yes, there were companies in the past that made cast iron (actually gun iron, not low grade grey iron that new imports are made from) anvil bodies with tool steel faces. There was a patented trick to it. Nobody does it any more because it is neither time nor cost efficient.

Those are shipyard blocks, about 3 or 4 feet long. Glasgow, Scotland was famous for them.

There is a reason folks from around the country save up vacation time to go to Quad State Roundup: only in Ohio does all this stuff show up.

Digging tools are meant to be tough not hard. Even hoes are meant to be soft enough to touch up with a hand file in the field. Full size commercial wood chopping axes top out between 60 and 80 points of carbon (0.60% to 0.80%), so I would expect picks to be 40 to 50 points, same as pneumatic chisels and pavement breakers used by road crews. Consider using them for hardy tools: cut the eye in half, and use the pick as the shaft. Railroad spikes are usually under 35 points, and they won't hold an edge for beans. By the same token, they are made to bend, not break under any condition. Bowie knives, bush knives and machetes are in the same impact range as axes, and made from similar springy steel alloys. Truck springs, old saw mill blades, etc. Smaller blades tend to be made from higher carbon steels, 80 to 120 points as a general rule. Which brings us around to old files as fodder.

The really old wrought iron mining pick heads that I have run across have all been fairly small and light, which makes sense in a confined space. They also had canoe shaped openings for the handle, made by splitting the grain.. Later railroad picks and mattocks made from mild steel tend to be bigger, heavier, and with an egg shaped wider opening for the handle that may show signs of being drifted over a mandrel.

The inherent value of an anvil is in the utility of it: you can shape metal on it. The price of a thing depends on the utility of the object to the prospective owner, tempered by emotion. To some people, it has no use and no value. Like shampoo to a bald man, to use a handy example. The cost is how much YOU paid for it. Market value is how much someone else is willing to pay you for it. Fair market value is what someone without an emotional dog in the fight would pay for it. Replacement value is how much it would cost you to find another one with the same utility. Reproduction value is how much it would cost to make one just like it. Insurance value is usually somewhere between Replacement and Reproduction. Sentimental value........

Unfortunately, decades of Scottish games and associated antics has left me with only a few 'G' rated jokes. The rest, well........ Yes, and a hollow swage block in the other hand, taken at ABANA Rapid City, SD, 2012.

Hence the term "after action reports", because some units have already been de-briefed. (Thank you, I will be here all week. Be sure to tip your waitress, and try the veal.)