Jeff Seelye

Do you think he might have been asking, what types of thing you create, and what era were the things you created from? Some Smiths do "Medieval" or some do Civil War, Colonial, modern art, architectural, etc. I have some people who could care less if I do it in a gasser and finish with a Bridgeport and some that would like me to use coal with an oil lamp in my shop when I forge ( and will watch to prove it was done that way). Just a thought

Matt, that is incredible information! I spent several years working in heat treat shop with High tech equipment with all vaccuum furnaces. (I guess you could call it a furnace programing job)I never had that problem but the program must have done it. Thanks again for the great link! My old heat treat manual was where I got the temps from and It never said anything or explained it like that. My info was basically just like Stewartthesmiths. I just added 4 pages of new info to my old manual.

Sounds like you didn't get it hot enough to be able to anneal it. O1 must get above 1400 degrees F to anneal. Try to stay below 1500 degrees F. Try vermiculite, the slower the better. If you have a furnace that you can control drop the temp about 50 degrees F per hour till you are below 1000 degrees F then do the hot sand thing. Hardening is a trick to. Slowly ramp it up to 1200 deg. F then go to 1450 to 1500 for a half hour. Oil quench. 500 Deg F for 1 hour will give you a temper of about 56 R/C

Surface rust would not indicate galvanized, but, when you heated it did it flame on the surface? Zinc will burn off leaving yellow dust & white ash. The dust that floats is really bad for you to breathe. Usually hot dipped galvanized will not have sharp corners either.

That is a sweet original idea!

Mark, it looks sweet! you've got a lot of work tied up into that.

OK Thanks, I still haven't seen your hammer yet (got to the JYH pages though. I just finished the guard for the pulley and the rod. My ram has a bottom bracket welded on to change dies. I like the idea of a guard on top though. I bought springs for mine too. Won't be back here until Fri.

I am building a "rusty" as well. Where do the springs break? Are you using new springs or car springs? Got any pictures of the Guard? I was more woried about protecting the shaft in the back. Thanks, Jeff

Good Questions! I have done all of them. If it is very complicated I would gladly pay rather than engineer. Other times I did the "engineering" and made prints for others. Bought, sold, traded, was gifted, and/or gave away

Sorry, no pictures, but I like a good long handled fire poker with a hook that sticks in the ground to hang it on. All my boys want to play with the fire so this is a lot easier than a stick that has coals on the end that fall off. We have marshmallow forks, and a spoon-like tool for doing foil wrapped stuff in the fire too.

They didn't sell it but they did manufacture precision measurement stuff and the piece I have was for a 18" caliper. Why ? You guys got some too? wanna get rid of it. I might be able to get a few more like it. ~ 12" - ~ 2' (1"x0.5") Next time you get one of these... advertise it on E-bay. You can probably buy enough knife stock to keep yourself busy for the next year. just my thoughts, Jeff

When a Good Blacksmith makes a post, with a great discription, and an explanation of why he likes his design better that any other design AND attaches some great pictures, I do not believe he is advertising. He is allowing me to duplicate his design or at least give me a better idea for a tool or project. If I choose to ask him to make me one, that is still not advertising. Help me out here, but isn't this where we go for great information like this? Please guys, Post more stuff like this. We are all in different stages of learning. This curve concept has me thinking of several other tools I have with straight cutting edges.

this piece came in a case with spectrometry measurements packed in cotton soaked in some weird red oil in a bag then in a plastic case. Darn piece of paper telling test results. Agita, are you possibly making a knife out of a precision mesurement gauge?

When I see LOL, I usually wonder if they really are. I think I need a LQTM (laughing quietly to myself). But Frosty, I laughed out loud!

Welcome Sean, The class you mentioned that was cancelled... Find out who was going to teach it. Whoever it was, probably was a smith. Maybe he might give out a few pointers or lead you to others who can. Try to find contacts & connections. Jeff

Welcome Chris, Im fairly new to this site too. It's got tons of information that will take months to go thru. A lot of questions I would have asked, I have already found looking thru old posts. Lots of good people on here. Jeff

Thanks Thomas, I also wondered if this was not just in the welding process but if a eyebar was to short, they could have prick punched each end heated stretched the center. Either way it was an interesting detail of how the bridge was made. Thanks again! Jeff

I work occasionally with a guy who does historical bridge restoration. Several of his bridges have eye bars with a prick punch at each end before the eye. They were forge welded bars. Some have welded eyes, some look upset and split with the forge weld being in the middle of the bar. My question is, were these punches used to locate length overall or do they have some other significance? Sorry, he has no pictures. Do we have any historians who want to chime in? My "semi-educated" guess is that they needed an overall exact length and they went from mark to mark. Jeff

Randy, MABA can be reached at www.miblacksmith.org It's a great group!In April our meeting was at Kevin Casey of kevincaseycustomknives.com All he did was demonstrate damascus and pattern welded steel. What a cool afternoon. We meet all over the state so you can usually catch some meetings. Got Coal? MABA has it. Glad to have you on IFI. Jeff

And if your ID is bigger than your OD, then your pipe is inside out :-)

That's one of the beauty's of the "Rusty" plan. You can make whatever size hammer you want. One other difference I have noticed is that with a spring, you have a "slap" which adds enertia. It's like using a 3 lb. hammer, when you raise it over your head and strike, you don't just deliver 3 lb's of force to the metal. I don't know how to calculate it but a 20 lb. Rusty hammer will deliver more force than another type of 20 lb hammer. When you order the plans from Jerry, you get the plans for Rusty and Dusty. They are VERY adaptable to what materials you can find. You can make it very crude or as clean as you want, as small or as big as you want.

Last year I started looking at the differences too because I don't have a big compressor or the funds for an air hammer yet. I have never actually seen either opperate in person. I've seen both on You-tube.I have never liked the idea of a whole bunch of parts moving close to my face. Yes, I know they can put a guard in front of it. The "Rusty" idea just looked so simple and Jerry Allens plans are so easily adaptable to whatever you can find in a junkyard that I started building it. Clay's might be be better but I should have this one running by July (in my spare time). I asked a lot of questions to Jerry, on here, and to BS friends and made some changes to the original design myself. Some of these changes require machining so I am waiting on parts to get finished (you can't rush bartered or traded labor. My idea was to just build something, eventually if it works out I will probably trade up, sell it and buy an air hammer eventually. At scrap steel prices now, I would make money just kicking it off the tailgate at the scrap yard.

Sounds interesting, I've never worked it either but,it is probably a Martensitic Stainless(as opposed to Austenitic Precipitation Hardening or Ferritic stainless) which should put it in the 400 series probably at the high end (around 430?). It can be heat treated. Looked it up in the ASM book. It says to forge above 2000 degrees to 2200 degrees and never below 1600. If you want more heat treat out of this book I can send more info to you If you have any more info on it maybe I can look up more stuff for you.

Ok, I am going to assume that you preheat this to weld it with lo-hi. For hardening, (I probably should have shifted to the hardening section)do you flame harden this and oil quench, just surface harden it, or heat the whole die. My problem is I worked in a heat treat shop for 2 years and I get real comfortable with "time and temp". I know how to do this in a Hayes vaccuum furnace but I have never worked with this in the real world. Any pointers?