jason0012

Boye was originally casting those in D-2, and they got pretty favorable reviews, though heat treating D-2 isn't for the novice. Probably best to stick with simple alloys and grind or forge the first few.

I've cold textured lots of stock. 1/4-2 inch It warps a bit, but isn't too big a job to straighten out. It tends to be good money for not much work, and, the shops I always did it for usually used me for that job on a nearly monthly basis. I couldn't estimate how many thousands of feet(or even miles) of 1/2" square I've knocked the corners off of! It can be hard on your dies if they are soft, and you will quickly learn about keeping stock level in the hammer! Nothing about this work should hurt the hammer or cause excessive wear to the dies.

I run a 100# Bradley upright helve. Its a nice little hammer, and while I would like a larger one i definitely don't have the room! On tooling, somewhere I have photos of ALL of Clifton's tools. I dragged them all out and snapped a shot of everything in his shop , and even have notes as he had stories to go with everything! I think I have only tried about 4% of what I saw at his place. Despite that,when I culled all my junk recently, I tossed a half ton of tooling ! I can Imagine how many tons of tooling are in his place! That stuff really piles up after a while.

Rebuilding a Bridgeport head was the most godawful project I have ever tackled in my shop! That thing has a bazzillion parts and they all seem to become airborn whenever a screw is loosened! None of it is really all that hard, just frustrating. Wholesale Tool lists replacement parts pretty cheap, and with a manual you should be able to get the thing running.

I have considered this myself. I think it would far far cheaper and produce a far better machine to use burn outs of heavy plate. To function without developing serious fatigue issues an aluminum frame would have to be 3-4+ times the cross section of one in iron. So a 100# frame for a 25# sounds right. The question is, why not just buy an old 25 ? Before spending over 1000 hrs making the patterns, furnace flasks and handleing equip for pouring 3/4 ton aluminum castings I am pretty sure you could scrounge enough $ to buy some old LG. In fact, you could probably buy one with the money you could get scrapping that aluminum!

I don't know the durometer. He simply guessed based on the rubber used for die springs. I believe I payed $150-250(it was a while ago) I don't own a compact but an upright, so that was a total of 5 cushions. A friend with a 100# compact has rubbers that were simply bandsawn from 3-4" sheet rubber(I'll bet that wasn't much fun). The new rubber I am using is a lot snappier than the originals, though it seems a lot harder. Rubber technology though seems to have advanced a little bit in the last 110 years! Pressumably one could cast these yourself, though I will freely admit to knowing very little about casting rubber.

Sorry it took a while to find. I'm not even sure the address is still good. The last I spoke with this guy was in 1998. His name is Jeff Starke. He is an engineer for a rubber manufacturer and made a set of cushions for my 100# upright. The adress I have is 3071 Kerlikowske , Coloma Mi 49038. His number was (616) 849-1239. I hope he is still there. The cushions he made have been running in my hammer for quite a few years now and work quite well. I will warn that the bright blur rubber is quite the change from the old bone white/grey of the natural latex! I should also add that I have tried to buy parts from Cortland years ago and found them to be quite disinterested in helping me. The one part they were willing to replace was the rear bearing at $3600 for the raw casting! They also quoted me a 6 month lead time on it. I found a local foundry that was more than happy to pour a new one using the old as a pattern . It took less than a week and they only charged $600.

I got an e-mail this morning from Steve Kayne. He didn't have kind things to say about this hammer. Apparently the clutch is poorly designed and the motor it shipped with was quite problematic. He didn't go into a lot of detail but seemed to think it had potential if someone wished to invest some time into re-engineering it. He did not feel that it was worth the effort however to get the thing market ready so lost interest. While I don't have the highest opinion of Little Giants I don't think it is fair comparing a 50#LG to a 3B Nazel! Kinda like a bicycle trying to compete in the Indinapolis 500! Reminds me of the time i got to use Kurt Ferenbach's 600# Erie, then went home and went back to work with my 25# LG !

Thanks for posting some real answers. I figured surely someone here would know a thing or two about this. I think I am following what is being said . But I do have some questions. So the ash and clay form a sort of "can" to contain the weld? I expected some fluxing reaction as the ash is alkaline and should reach a liquid state. I know from experience that clay will melt into a glassy vitrious substance if it reaches a high enough temp. (I have melted firebricks before) How is slurry applied to hot steel?

They make some decent looking belt grinders too.

What/ where is that hammer? It looks a lot like the Indian hammer. I saw this company online years ago with a name like "Rattan" or something . I e-mailed about it but never got a response. At the time I was actually serious about buying one. There are advantages of a mechanical hammer over an air breather. This looks like a pretty good design. There were a number of old machines like this, the names elude me at the moment but I have seen the stroke adjustment like that before. It is my biggest complaint with the Bradley that the stroke requires loosening bolts to adjust. Being able to change the stroke while running sounds pretty good, though I'm not sure how sturdy this machine would be. I was curious how much the beast would cost, and how prohibative shipping from India would be. Kinda a moot point now as I don't have the spare cash to get one but I'm still curious if anyone knows.

Crane cable, and rigging cable are high carbon and usually not galvanized. I am fairly certain that you will be able to find some sort of crane/rigging source in Austrailia. You may try companies that move machinery, or repair heavy equipment. Cables have to be changed out when they show wear or fray. They still will have enough material to weld up into a nice billet and have nothing left but scrap value, so you can get the stuff cheap to free. Here in the states OSHA requires condemed cable to be cut into lengths that can not be used for anything again. It is certainly more convienient to cart home 3 ft pieces than a 200 ft coil!

$9 an hour costs the employer $18, who charges their customer $36. The money you take home cant pay the shop bills and still pay your paycheck. Thinking along those lines will have you out of business quick! You need to charge enough for your work to pay for the shop and materials and your take home pay. It might seem that your shop costs nothing since you are paying anyway, but you aren't running the forge 8-10 hrs a day, 7 days a week yet. There are also numerous costs involved in doing business that will eat you alive should you base your price on expected take home. Insurance, taxes, and advertising can eat twice as much of your income as you do! Anymore a shop rate below $50-60 isn't enough even for a hobby shop!

I feel your pain on that job! I have worked in many such places. As long as I am treated ok its alright, the moment the boss decides that the employees are ripping him off it all goes to xxxx. A big reason for that is that there is a lot of stress that goes with running a business and more so with having employees. Its still no excuse to abuse those who do the grunt work in the shop. If you are only making $12-15 an hour it shouldn't be too hard to replace that income. You need to bring in about 2-3 times that to make it your take home income. It really depends on what sort of work you are doing and how much it costs you. It is somewhat harrowing relying on your home shop to pay the bills , but after a few years it will change the way you forever view employers and employment.

Unless you are using some mighty special materials your material cost will be next to nothing in knife making. (I work in silver on occasion and very rarely with gold, stones get pretty expensive too) Materials like ivory, pearl, exotic woods, titainium, stealite, ect are kind of expensive bot not enough so to come close to the labor cost involved in making a nice knife. You are willing to work for $10 an hour? Can't recall the last job I worked for that kind of wage, I think it was back in high school! You need to charge enough to pay 1)you, for the time you invest 2) the shop, so you can make the next one 3) then enough to cover the materials 4) anything left will be profit, most of the time there isn't much left for this one , at least in my experience. I see a lot of very fine knives selling online for about 1/5 what I would charge, and I am not well known at all! I am impressed to see hobbiests turning out such nice work but so many are undercutting themselves selling entirely too cheap! I recall when I was turning out a lot of custom knives there were a lot of collectors who tried to convince me that the way to get famous and sell more of my work was to practically give my work away . I have never found such people to be worth doing business with.

Funny, I have never had the least bit of trouble welding 5160 to its self or just about anything else. The one exception was the time I tried welding it up with 440C( that didn't go well) Lots of people will tell you something is impossible without trying it. High chromium steels are touchy about welding, but 5160 just has a little chromium and doesn't seem to have that problem. Remember, lots of old forging texts claim that no steel should ever be forge welded to its self, that it doesn't weld well! When I started in blacksmithing there was a common myth going around that it was impossible to forge weld in a gas forge! It was the first thing I did when I switched to gas! I have welded literally tons of 5160 into damascus, axe edges, and lots of various tools. It welds fairly easy, forges easy (its soft), and heat treats easy, to make a vary durable tool. the heat treat on 5160 gives it quite a nice range of hard/tough properties so it is adaptable to many different types of tools. Oh yeah, unlike 4340 , its really cheap too!

The original rubber was a natural latex. The rubber that came with my hammer may very well have oozed out of a tree in Brazil over 150 yrs ago! They fiddled with the formula quite a lot over the years. The new cushions I have are composed of an ether based urethane(I don't recall the durometer) They are bright blue and the consistancy of "super balls". I don't recall the name of the fellow from Michigan who made them for me, I am sure I have it written down somewhere. He explained quite a lot about the chemistry of rubber and the development of rubber products over the years.

I would also suggest that you forget the "traditional" blacksmith tools only. This sure doesn't sound like a good start. Unless you have an angle I have yet to encounter (in 23 years). The truth is, if you intend to make any kind of living at this, you must either be well established with a museum of some sort, or use modern tools. I doubt there are any professional smiths who operate without power tools. In this field those power tools often hold value fairly well too. Mills, lathes, and grinders are all part of a modern shop, as are plasma cutters, mig welders, drill presses, bandsaws and powerhammers.

I have welded a LOT of bandsaw blade damascus. I have also used quite a lot of files and leaf spring. 5160 makes a fine blade, in damascus will etch a light grey. The file steel will etch a dark grey-almost black. I dont usually weld up anything with mildsteel aside from nickle or stainless. It really detracts from the blades hardness considerably. I have rarely ground the teeth off of files also, only when they are really deep or some special gnarly form like aluminum files or milled files. most surface crud gets burned off in the fire, and anything left gets washed out by the flux(that's what its for) The bandsaw blade was my primary damascus material before I owned a power hammer. I started with an average of 21 layers so triple twice and then double and I have about half the forging in on the piece as I would if starting with 5-7 layers. Welding thin stock is a quick way to get layer count up without working yourself to death. You could also try some shim stock. At work I see spring steel shim stock in .002-.065 thicknesses. (I have never used it but always meant to) The real thin stuff could get a whole bunch of layers in a single weld (50-150). Working by hand I always found about a 3-4 cubic inch billet to be a good starting size(1x1x3-4)

I had a lot of trouble with my 100# with the factory set up like that. It squeeled and squaled a lot, burned through several belts and had terrible pickup. I am used to the controls on a little giant so i set out making it run similar. Going from the little pulley to the big pulley you driven side has a tremendous mechanical disadvantage at starting. The contact area on the little pulley is quite small in comparison to the hammer pulley. I switched from a 3 1/2" pulley to a 14" and get good responsive single blows now. I also don't get the squeeling or burn through the belts. Now this did require redesigning the whole drive system, and of course adding an additional jackshaft. Now on the 100# hammer I have a 16 or 18" drive pully and the 14 was the closest I could find. I would have prefered an 18-24" but hey it works. Flat pulleys seem near impossible to find! Locating a match for a 26" could be problematic especialy 9" wide!

It is awfully easy to bash the chinese hammers for the quality of their castings. How many hammer frames have you cast? I would personally rather have a Nazel/Bradley/Beaudry/Chambersburg and in a 300-500# range. We dont always get what we want though. The Kiss 50 is a good hammer and has customer service which is actually such a foreign concept I can only vaugely grasp its meaning. It is in fact very much a one off custom machine. Therefore it will come with all the pitfalls of other one off or discontinued machines. This isn't really a huge problem as lots of old iron is still running and running well(my own hammer is pushing 110 yrs of pounding steel). The Kiss is a well built machine that runs beautifully as lots of skill and engineering went into its design and construction. The Kiss as well as the KA75, and the Phoenix hammers are real, serious, production machines. All are custom built in small shops. There simply is no big factory in this country producing an off the shelf kind of hammer. The Striker and Anyang both impressed me as being far better machines than the fabricated frame variety that dominated the market through the 80s and 90s. The price of the Kuhn was far beyond reasonable and I found it to be somewhat mechanically lacking. I think the entrance of the chinese machines fills a much needed gap in the available machinery. While I am no fan of the chinese government or the fact that they seem to have suplanted ALL manufacturing worldwide, there really is no alternative to theses air hammers. Nazel never built a 33# hammer. They certainly should have but they didn't. Little giants and other old hammers are getting scarce. newcomers to this field need an alternative. I have learned from my students over the years that not everyone has a desire to understand the intricacies of the tools they use. Many simply want it to run. For them a self contained hammer is the only possible machine. Why worry about the availability of factory service? Short of Sid Sudemier is there any factory service still for domesticly produced hammers? Despite this many still pound away. Perhaps it is that I am used to buying old iron and having to tear down/rebuild everything that the QC on chinese machines doesn't bother me so much.

This discussion degenerated didn't it? I don't think the origin of the hammer was ever in question. john fails to mention the one single domestically produced air hammer he could have purchased. I suspect that if the Kuhn seemed pricey he probably would not have had the room in his budget for a $200000-400000 Chambersberg. That's why there is no more Chambersberg Engineering Co! This is a capitolist country. Everything here is controlled by the almighty$$. Business, government, schools, health care, everything. If a product can be produced cheaper in some communist country and imported here at a huge profit is not that the ultimate capitolist ideal? I see so many people these days spouting mindless coldwar propaganda without considering what exactly they are saying. Have any of you who bash the china hammers shopped at wall mart? If you have your authority to xxxxx about a chinese company that fills a niche market that no American manufacturer has been succesful with in decades is quite suspect! More domestic jobs were affected by the closing of textile mills, steel mills, plastics manufacturers, car parts manufacturers ect, than by the importing of a chinese air hammer! My point about the dissapearance of the striker tool co was more a querry into why they might dissapear after landing a nice fat gov contract. Obviously it is a stretch to call the striker a US made hammer.

I have several old CO2 tanks in the shop that are past their safety date, empty and the supplier that had rented them to me went belly up about ten years ago. I was kind of thinking they would make superb quench tanks with the head cut off. Any reason an old tank wouldn't be good for this?

Dies from the manufacturer? I know not of that of which you speak.... I use 4140. My reason? I came into several tons of the stuff when Naval Ordinance closed! I had some 2375 and some T-15 but mostly its 4140. I gave away the 2375 years back and the 21/2" round T14 just doesn't do anything when I put it under the hammer! 4140 is easy enough to work and pretty commonly available. I do have a friend who buys old drop forging dies aneals them and cuts them up for his hammers. The steel is some special Finkle alloy, expensive stuff but I am not sure its worth the trouble.

After giving some further thought to the question, no blacksmithing is not a "good career". But it is quite worthwhile and if you truly feel inclined twords it, by all means jump right in! It is more than possible to make a living at this. I have sold almost everything I have ever made, so there must be a market. It is simply not an easy way to make a living. But that goes for any career in the arts. Our world would be a far lesser place if there weren't those who dedicated their lives to seemingly futile pursuits. As bad as things have ever gotten with my iron business I have never gone hungry or lost my home, car , ect. I have faced long periods of not being able to buy gas/coal/steel/ect, and long stretches where I had no idea where the next project was coming from. That is part of the adventure! And for every lean time I have had some good booming times too, you just have to find the right project/product.