John McPherson

If you have a spring fuller or guillotine tool with good alignment, one whack would also make a set of dimples 180 degrees apart.

It is the topic that will not die!!! How can you kill that which has no life???? Next up, how many angels can dance on the head of a hardy, and other mysteries of the universe.

Read, read, and then read some some. Start with the "All the Stickys" and "Finding a Blacksmithing group near you" at the top of the page here. Also look for a book called the $50 Knife Shop by Wayne Goddard, about getting started on the cheap.

Hmmm, the DNC is coming to town this time next year, might be a silver lining to this cloud.......

It looks from the weathering pattern like it may be old enough to be wrought iron, and not modern mild steel. The way to check is with a nick break test: wrought will have fibers visible, and is worth more to smiths doing traditional work.

$20 an hour is what you charge for a day laborer, doing unskilled work, using minimal tools. A skilled craftsperson should charge 4 to 5 times that, heck, the shop rate at the muffler place on the corner is $80. Your hourly shop rate has to cover your highly skilled personal time in the project, from initially answering the phone, to putting the crated project on the dock for shipping. Then there are the shop costs to consider, usually referred to as overhead: taxes, business licenses, power and lights, heat, rent*, tools and consumables. *Sure, you are living and working at home now, but if you had to move out and build or rent a shop space in the next few years, do you really think that rate is going to cover the down payment? If you are turning a profit, is it not fair to *offer* your folks some return on their letting you get your business established on their dime?

IIRC, one of the ancient Hebrew miracles was the first pair of tongs, because it takes tongs to make tongs. Anybody have a source for that story? You can use pliers or wooden strips to grab the rivet out, but the best way to heat small pieces without burning them up or losing them in the fire is in a small can (usually a one shot deal), or better yet, a short length of pipe capped on one end with a wire handle wrapped around it.. Coal is nothing more than vegetation laid down in a swamp, and covered with sediment, ages ago. Sometimes storms will cause an influx of muddy or sandy sediment between the layers of coal as they form. High grade veins will be many feet thick, with very thin layers of mineral content. Think of it as a layer cake, or marbled beef. That gets snapped up by the big buyers, power plants and steel mills. Lower grades will have more mineral content, and that is the stuff us po' folks get, leftovers. The coal dust makes everything look black in the bag, but it is not all carbon. Anthracite would burn, and different grades are not normally found together in nature. Anything that does not burn steals heat from the fire. Sometimes they store piles of coal in the same graveled yard where they sell other building supplies, and scoop it up mechanically, mixing in the dirt and gravel. If you have to go to the trouble to wash your coal and separate it by hand before use, you are either desperate or dedicated, and I am not sure there is a clinical difference. Whatever does not burn is usually the silica (quartz) sand or clay layers. If you get it hot enough, silica will melt and turn into glass, flow down to the bottom of the forge, and form clinker. Clay just bakes into pottery-like fragments.

Egos get in the way of quality and even safety everywhere that there is a power differential. Marriages, companies, religions, the list goes on. A benign dictator is still a dictator. Just listening to a show about how they tried to reduce infection rates in hospitals, but could not implement it because no one at the hospital could hear any suggestion from an underling as anything other than a challenge to their authority. No nurse would even dare say "Shouldn't you wash your hands first ?" for fear of reprimand. Planes crash because pilots over-ride co-pilots due to seniority. You can be terminated on the spot if you complain about fire doors being chained shut because managers don't want employees sneaking out for smoke breaks. And then there was New Coke. Beth, wasn't it Oliver Cromwell who said " I beseech thee, in the bowels of Christ, pray consider that thou art wrong" ?

Yes the firefleas sting your skin, and burn tiny holes in your shirts. But they are part of the romance and mystery of the forge. Watching them is primal, like a campfire. No one sits around camp staring at an electric light. This is a reduced copy of my desktop background, the original is too large to upload. I took it at a museum demo I did last year.

Hayden, looking for blacksmithing stuff? I went to searchtempest.com, typed in the zip code for vernon TX, and found 3 anvils, 2 forges, a triphammer, and a pallet of tongs within a 200 mile radius within the last week.

Having had the opportunity to use both large and small anvils at other places, I broke down and bought a 336 pound Euroanvil when it came up for sale locally this summer. It is night and day different from my hundred pound Mousehole with repaired edges. It has not made me a better smith, but it moves metal more efficiently. Either weight will make a grand shop anvil, but 400 pounds is relatively rarer to come by than smaller anvils. Here is Philip Simmons anvil, and shop. It is open to tour, if you are ever in Charleston. There are also walking guides to his work, and other public ironwork.

If your dad means guys in overalls sharpening plows and fixing stuff for dirt farmers for pennies, yeah, that trade is pretty much dead outside the third world, and good riddance. You will never get rich demoing for farm museums. (Ask me how I know). If he means high end artists with complete modern fab shops doing custom gates and railings for millionaires for $300-$3000 a linear foot, well, that trade is alive and well, for those who can do it. Have him look at Dean Curfman's or Danger Dillon's stuff, for starters. And of course, there is everything in between.

Sell them and buy some steel toe boots to wear in the shop. Other than a Brazeal style swage tool anvil, some nice jeweler's or bench style anvils could be made like this one (found on the net) .

List price on that was $450 new some time back, so I would say you got a heck of a deal! At a little over a dollar a pound, and throw in the stand, even our beloved Thomas P. could not complain about that price. Welcome to the addiction healthy hobby of whuppin' on hot iron.

My friend, you are suffering from the scourge of the information age: Paralysis by analysis. Just because you *had* umpteen years of math drummed into your head does not make it the *best* or only path to a solution. Here is an alternate way that will use the same side of your brain that an artist blacksmith works with in the forge. Get some modeling clay, form a punch/drift of the size and shape desired. Trial fit it on some hammer heads for grins. Lay it on some graph paper and take some pictures of it so you will have some dimensions, or just sketch it in a notebook. Now, scrunch it into a ball, and roll it out to a cylinder, or whatever shape your tool steel is in. Measure it. Mark that length back from the end of the bar, and forge it out, starting with the point. Cut it off when done, no tongs needed unless you decide to heat treat it.

Whether you buy coal or coke, what you use when the fire is going is coke. You are burning off the volatiles in green coal to produce coke as you feed it from the edge into the center. Coal can be smoky, and have that oily sulfur stink that many find objectionable. Do many folks still heat with coal in your area? If they do, it would be more likely to be acceptable locally. Coke smokes less, but is harder to start, and harder to keep lit unless you have an electric fan blower. Two minutes without turning the crank and it goes out. Hardwood charcoal is always 'traditional', plus it just smells like you are grilling to the neighbors. That is what I use when I demo in public with my own rig.

Looking for forge plans and pictures like these?

Not an anvil, but the jaw part of a cleverly marketed** combination tool that was sold to the masses. Check out page 7 of the 'Show me your vise' thread to see the whole tool. You will find that this is a curio, but not a tool. Clean it up and put it on a bookshelf. ** There were sharks fleecing clueless consumers long before Ron Popeil and Harbor Freight got into the act. I can hear them now, "Step right up folks, and if you purchase today, we will throw in the deluxe turnip twaddler."

Culvert pipe, the type that goes under a driveway, is relatively cheap, heavy wall, and rigid. They have used them at the NCABANA state fair site for years.

Anybody know what a hydro-axe is?

I have seen a marked decrease in all sorts of old tools at flea markets and tractor shows over the last 13 years that I have been looking for blacksmithing stuff, the same way that I have seen fewer relics every year for the past 40 at gun shows. The heyday of all this stuff was over by the end of WW2, but it was saved, hoarded and/or amassed by my fathers generation, and is now being trashed, scrapped or sold by their kids or grandkids. Totally off-topic ONR, I don't blame the Yankees for busting anvils, if they ever actually did, but I do blame them for policies that caused a century of grinding poverty afterwards that crushed the spirit of a whole section of the country. The poverty and lack of industries results in a scarcity of all old tools, and the huge increase in the population after Air Conditioning made the south livable just spreads it even thinner.

There are 1000 drill presses on Craigslist for every grinder suitable for a knifemaker. It is all about availability, when will you see another one? Is this particular machine worth the asking price? "Hard saying, not knowing" as Bob says. You did not say what brand a mk-1 was, or how old or in what condition. Next question is, what kind of motor and speeds does it have? 120V, 240V, 480V? Step pulleys or variable speed DC drive? How many accessories come with it? I am 54 years old, moved across country twice, and still waiting for a dedicated shop of my own, I do work out of my basement, in the back yard or driveway, spare time at work, wherever, so everything I own has to be portable. There are plenty of stories of guy who built the perfect shop, only to have to sell off the big stuff when they moved. Don't wait for perfection, settle for adequate. You have a garage, count yourself lucky. My fortune cookie advise: Bloom where you are planted.

All trade schools offer the same basic list of courses. Here in NC, courses are either accredited statewide under the state college board, or not. The quality of the instructors makes all the difference. Ask about years of experience, and any credentials, affiliations and training they have. Also see if the schools training programs are qualified under the AWS SENSE program, NCCER, or equivalent.

I recommend that all the Olde Pharts (like me) who weld, get out and buy a set of 2x4 cheaters (plastic magnifiers) that match a set of readers that they can read the fine print with at 12". That is perfect for TIG on 2" pipe and MIG open root, where you are trying to get up close and personal to control the bead. They are less than ten bucks, and you can't weld what you can't see. If you are doing stick or flux core or plasma cutting, you **need** to be further away, so you just put the regular plastic lens cover back inside your face shield.

How big is your welder? Wire size? How many passes are you trying to do this in? Since you are not calling this a 1F lap weld, I can guess you have no formal training. To do this in one pass, I would recommend a 350 amp welder and .045" wire. Preheat to 300+F would not hurt, either. Spray arc would be better than short arc. To do this with a little 115V and .023" wire, well, that is going to take some doing. Grind clean, preheat to 500F, 3-5 passes. Weld a little, wait 10 minutes for machine to cool, repeat. Flux core would be better than solid wire for this. In any case, skip weld to avoid distortion. That is to say, weld opposite corners and skip around, rather than going around in a circle.