dbrandow

To play devil's advocate, though, if it ends up looking virtually indistinguishable from something a machine would have made, then why not let the machine make it?

My understanding is that Steve Hansl is the Canadian distributor of Anyang power hammers: http://www.hanslpower.com/c41_1_power_hammer.html If you are interested, Dan Linkenheld is leading a group of us who are going to be building some JYH up in Collingwood.

Germany.

Just putting this out there - I'm stuck for a day by myself in Frankfurt tomorrow, anybody know of any blacksmith-related tourist sites in the area?

March 10th: David Brandow's Shop: 5050 Whitelaw Road - RR #6 Guelph. http://g.co/maps/43k4h Mick Smith will demonstrate making a stool using traditional joints. Demo starts at 10am sharp. Darrell Markewitz mounting a secondary demonstration 'Building and Operating the Aristotle Furnace. Bring Iron in the Hat. Southwest corner of Highway 24 (sometimes known as 124) and Whitelaw Road just outside of Guelph. Parking will be available at 5068 Whitelaw Rd. April 14th: Martin Bakker ‘s Shop. 456145 45th Line. Embro, ON http://g.co/maps/n6uxa Dave Kritz will demonstrate miniatures. Martin's residence is between Woodstock, ON and Stratford, ON between Hwy #59 and Embro Line. It is located North of Braemar Side road and South of Road 88 on the 45th Line. May 12th: Bob Young’s Shop: 285 County Road 22, Brant, ON http://bit.ly/a5jFVs We hope to finish the table that is being made to donate to the ABANA conference. June 3rd: Waterloo Region Museum. 10 Huron Road, Kitchener, ON http://bit.ly/hMhIQU We will be having a forge-in at the Doon Heritage Village living history site at the Waterloo Region Museum. Members are invited to bring their portable forges to set up on the village site across from the blacksmiths shop. The site opens at 9:30, and demonstrators are asked to arrive early to setup, as no cars are allowed on site while it is open. Pets are also not allowed on site, lunch will be provided for OABA members. Ongoing: Last Saturday of every month: Open forge day at the Fergus Forge. RR 3 6723 Jones Baseline, Fergus ON http://bit.ly/ahc7h2 Mick Smith will be hosting an open forge on the last Saturday of every month Starting in January. Just drop in, bring a project or an idea. Phone the day before in case Mick's plans have to change. 519 843 6655

Get a hold of Dan Linkenheld sooner rather than later, from talking to him yesterday, they are getting pretty close to starting. Hard to argue with $1000, give or take a couple hundred, for a power hammer, though.

I'm at a loss to explain how that differs from what I've been saying.

I guess I stated that poorly. What I was referring to was where you aim, equivalent to a follow-through, not there is an actual follow-through. What I was trying to get at is that if you aim at the very surface of the material, your stroke will end prematurely, at least when you are trying to draw something out. There should be an expectation that your hammer will continue moving past the surface. Now, obviously, its not very much past the surface, particularly compared to hitting a baseball, golf ball, hockey puck. Frankly, I do think its similar to chopping wood, the axe is going to slow down dramatically once it hits the surface, but it should still keep moving. Obviously the depth below the surface you are aiming for is dramatically shorter with hot iron than it is with wood, but I still think its there. Again, one man's opinion.

I'm just a hobbyist, so I'll always defer to people who actually know what they're talking about, but one factor I'm surprised I don't hear talked about more often when it comes to applying a lot of force is using more than just your arm. Think of it like a swing of a baseball bat or, for us Canadians, the swing of a hockey stick - the real power comes not from your wrist or your arm muscles but from your entire body, its a transfer of energy that starts in your legs and works its way up. The other tip I learned from years of cutting firewood is not to aim for the surface, but to aim for a point well below it, the equivalent of having a good follow-through.

Alan Easton, John Heffron and David Mitchell are also in that area, too.

That's fair. I would certainly concede that any energy that ends up moving the anvil is wasted energy. That being said, I have a relatively similar setup to you, a 200# anvil fastened to about 100# of log. The advantage, I find, is that I can swivel the anvil about if I need to come at it at an angle that would be inconvenient with the material I'm working.

I find that point to be fairly specious. Based on that logic, the anvil itself is irrelevant, considering the relative mass of the anvil and the Earth and you could just as well hammer on the ground. Naturally, of course, that doesn't work, earth has virtually no rebound. Rebound is clearly not just a factor of mass, or even primarily a factor of mass. I'm no physics or chemistry major, but presumably rebound is determined by compressibility/moveability. The more the thing being hit compresses and/or moves, the more energy it absorbs from the blow and thus the less it rebounds. So your point about attaching it solidly is a valid one, but your point about the relative mass of the anvil and the Earth is not. The reason the original blacksmiths used rocks was because they compress less than earth or wood, their other choices. They then switched to iron/steel of increasing size once production techniques allowed them to do so, again, because iron/steel compress even less than rock and is of course far more durable.

Congrats and welcome. I'm fairly confident I'll be there, the Big Cheese/El Presidente will definitely be there, David M. will almost certainly be there (I'm assuming), Larry and Lloyd usually go to the Lang meeting as well. Above and beyond that, we'll have to wait and see.

Have you tried Jackhammer bits? They are pretty much the right size, and extremely easy to get your hands on.

I like 'primitive', that's a good suggestion.

I don't want to be seen as pretending to be something I'm not, and I'd rather educate the public about blacksmithing to my own detriment than mislead them by omission. You are probably right, though, that I am being overly sensitive about this, but I guess that's just who I am.

I can certainly understand your point, but I believe in calling a spade a spade. My wife, as an example, grows and sells plants for a living, and is very forthright with her customers about how they look when they are ordering them. Her customers appreciate the honesty, and can't justifiably complain afterwards about the size of something if it said 'tiny' on the order form. To go back to my work, I think its important, however few pieces I do produce, to explain to people looking at my work that it is not yet representative of the quality of what professional blacksmiths are capable of producing. That's not to say that what I produce is not worth having, by any means, simply that it should be viewed for what it is.

The tree was a trained-monkey sort of a task, so I've probably only got 6-8 hours in that, by the time you figure in all the welding and painting. The DNA structure should have been faster, but my first couple attempts at how to get it to twist didn't work, and drifting those holes takes a while by hand, so I'm probably 6-8 hours into it as well. The chair...let's just say I've got a lot more of hours into the chair than I'd like to admit. I would imagine that somebody competent would be able to do these things in half the time, or twice as well, or some combination of those, so I suppose I could use the $100 figure and go with $300-400 for the tree and DNA. Does that seem reasonable? No idea what the chair should have taken, though. I don't imagine by hand it'd be possible to do the legs any faster than 8 hours, given the number of drifts and the size of the material, and the back is probably another 3, assembly (harder than it looks) and painting another 3, so figure 14 hours, give or take, so maybe $700 for the chair?

I guess we'll agree to disagree. At no point did I state that all my costs were all zero, simply most of them. I completely agree that I have costs for electricity, coal, equipment and material. Using those formulas doesn't give me a price of zero, but it does give me an extremely low price which I don't view as something I can morally use.

While I appreciate the response, I think you are missing my main difficulty, which is that these rules, and others like them, only apply to people running businesses. I am not running a business, I'm just trying to avoid pissing off the people who are. As a concrete example, my costs for Advertising, Business Commissions, Donations, Dues & Publications, Freight, Insurance, Leasehold Improvements, Mail, Mail UPS, Office Expenses, Propane, Rent Paid, Sales Tax, Show Fees, Supplies, Tax Preparation, Taxes (Federal), Taxes (FUTA), Taxes (Unemployment), Taxes (State), Taxes (Town), Taxes (Personal Property), Taxes (Real Estate), Telephone, Travel, Truck (mileage), Water, Welding Gas are all zero. I have no expectation of a salary. So based on those estimates, all I should be charging is my raw material cost, which means I'd end up charging extremely little for pieces that a fulltime blacksmith would charge significantly more for, which would look for all the world like I was trying to undercut them, or at least that I was devaluing the value of blacksmith-produced materials.

I'll be selling them at a 4-day long gallery as part of a conference. I'm not sure I'd be offended by anything somewhat reasonable, but perhaps that is a good way of thinking about it, I'll have to ponder that, thanks for the idea.

I have a specific question further down, but first I wanted to set the table a bit. I'm an amateur blacksmith, and a fairly unskilled, if enthusiastic, one at that. I'm not overly interested in the money, although it never hurts; my primary motivation in pricing is to avoid offending the fulltime blacksmiths in the area. I can't use standard fulltime blacksmiths formulas as I don't have shop time that costs me anything too significant and it takes me far longer than a fulltime blacksmith would need. Normally I try to figure out what something comparable made by them would be worth and then discount for the lower quality. In this case, however, I can't find any comparables to go off of. So, long story short, if somebody would be willing to suggest some ballpark price ranges that won't be too low as to seem like I'm undercutting but at the same time won't be too high as to seem presumptuous, I'd really appreciate it. In all cases, the closer you get to them, the worse they look. :-) DNA structure, 2 feet high, all mortise and tenon joints (except to the base), no welds: Tree, 4 feet high, all sloppy stick welds: Chair, 4 feet high, all mortise and tenon joints, no welds, no torches: Three coats of industrial (expensive) primer, three coats of black paint.

As others have said, borax is a nice cheap solution. Try sprinkling in some iron filings left over from using your drill press.

That reminds me of something I read a while back, although I don't remember exactly where. A charity needed lawyers to help them out, so they started off by offering them an honorarium, something like $50 an hour, in exchange for their help. And nobody volunteered. They then suggest that instead the lawyers volunteer their time, which would be $0 an hour. And they got the volunteers they needed.