fciron

Frank, Is that the Japanese toolmaker who came to the ABANA conference (in Wisconsin?) with some apprentices? They did some very cool stuff. It is really interesting to see people doing almost the same work we're doing but with almost no common history (in terms of metalwork). I got to work with some Japanese smiths for a week at the Metal Museum. It was an eye opener, really made me think about how and why I was doing things. Sorry, I know nothing about sens. (plural spelling?) Now I'm thread-jacking. I may have a picture of the strap and wedge arrangement used to clamp the work while finishing with a sen. I just remembered I also have one of the japanese style forges which I got at the conference auction. Why do I have that? :unsure:

I moved to Louisville, KY in 1991 because I found a job in a blacksmith shop here. Almost immediately I noticed there was a building that said 'blacksmith shop' on the side. It was in an old industrial area right between where the downtown business district ends and the residential neighborhoods start. I ask the smith I'm working for about it, he's says it's an old guy who doesn't want to sell. I peered in the windows a few times, but never caught anyone at home. Several fairly eventful years later, I'm back in Louisville and I've got my own shop now, I drive past the mystery shop and the lights are on! I stop in and introduce myself, there's an old fellow in there sharpening hammer bits. We chat for a bit, he's the third generation of smiths in this shop and it's got one hundred years of blacksmith accumulation. Fred gives me an old bit to make some hardie tools. I stop by and show him the tools a couple of weeks later and I try to spin by and show off if I have some interesting blacksmith stuff in the truck. After a few years I find out I'm going to be losing my shop space to redevelopment. I stick my head in and ask Fred if he knows of any space available, it's an old industrial area and it sure looks like there are a lot of half-full buildings. A couple of weeks later I get a phone call, Fred's only been coming in to keep the lights on, why don't I rent his place? I sometimes wonder about the stuff that must have gone to the scrap yard to make enough room for me to squeeze into the shop. Then I look at some of the stuff that didn't get scrapped and think that the stuff that left must have really been junk. I'm sure it's a little of both. I bought the shop from Fred a few years ago. It was not a financial windfall, but I feel really lucky to have it. I did a lot to put make it possible for that luck to happen and I tried to be prepared to act when the time was right, but I still needed a little luck for that preparation to pay off.

dang it. Now I'm hungry for stake! ;)

I get my copper at a roofing supply place. They don't stock the heavier stuff, but they can get it. Might be someplace like it near you, plus they have lots of other cools stuff. :P

That's thinking outside the box. I'll save that for when I want to make a 60 degree block, which would be the correct shape for forging hex. I found a rejected piece of the hex-pipe forging and I apparently was able to forge hex right down to a point ten years ago. I welded a piece of solid stock in the end of the pipe once it was drawn down to a manageable size. It came out quite well, I'll take a picture later.

Larry made an interesting point that almost slipped through. He said he knows a lot about how metal moves under pressure. I often tell people that being a good smith (in the able-to-hammer-stuff-out sense) is in the head and the eye, rather than the hands. I know how the metal moves, I know where I want it to go, so I just hit it in the way that will make it go there. (I also try to do things that are possible ) If Larry were forced to work without all his toys tomorrow, he would mostly need to build up his hammer swinging endurance, not his smithing knowledge.

Coal dust in the flooring is only nominally flammable. If you had a pile that was all coal dust then it might sustain combustion, but little bits of dust mixed with clinker and dirt won't produce enough fuel in any one spot to sustain combustion. Plus, a lot of that dust is actually ash and already burnt. Did I read it right? Eight inches of airspace inside the wall? (edit: eight inches clearance on the stuff shielding the forge.) Wow, I'm really lucky to have a brick building.

Guerreiro, that is a sweet little anvil. I made a little track anvil and I think I had a good idea that I'm trying to give away. I welded a bunch of round bars into the web of the track to fill up the empty space, it adds mass to the anvil and keeps it from vibrating on top of those skinny legs. I used round bar because I had access from both sides and I could fill the gaps in between with heavy weld fillets by putting the bars in one at a time, so, even though it wasn't one hundred percent welded, most of the space was filled. Lewis

My first tongs were scroll tongs too. I was sent out to the scrap pile for an old spring, so, even though mine are butt-ugly, I'm still using them 17 years later. Bart, yours are really nice, I'm jealous.

Ditto! :D

Ooops, missed one. David, one can forge hexagonal shapes by rotating the bar in 60 degree increments instead of 90 decrees. KISS I made a 120 degree v-block forging pipe. Some how I wound up forging heptagon! :blink:

Caleb, I made it sound sarcastic, but the 'if you're good' bit is my addition. It's usually like that thing Phil just did, he said this wasn't the job for hex but never said what makes the right job for forging hex. Confirming that it exists, but not explaining it. (As I said before, I appreciate the input. Phil and some other folks on here are very gracious in sharing their hard-won knowledge with others.) Southy, I do a lot more at the octagon stage than just rounding up, but I hadn't really considered sticking with octagon the whole way. I think I would probably treat it as forging two different squares, rotate 90 degrees a couple of times, one 45 degree rotation, back to ninety degree rotations again. I would worry about piping in the center of the bar and getting too oval if only rotating one side at a time while doing any significant reduction. (I think Grant described a similar process in a discussion of forging titanium.)

Hmmm, I think that I made the transitions from 'leg' vise to 'post' vise without even noticing it. Should I switch back? Another weird renaming accomplished by the internet is the "camel-back" drill press. No one knows where the name came from and they bear no resemblance to camels, but the name has stuck to old drill presses with horizontally mounted pulleys.

Sums it up well for me.

Um, you two are the guys I look to for answers. I thought it might be so they could tell the actual tools from "random hunks of metal on the ends of sticks". I have a piece of pipe with one end forged square, it's a handle for several different things, so I wrote "Ceci n'est pas un pipe." on it. It's seems that there are a lot of tools that look like scrap metal to the uninformed.

It's almost like you get a free octagon! That's why I only said it might be useful, in theory if you want to finish round the smaller the flats you make, the less rounding up there is to do later. This may not be true in practice. I have found forging to a hex very useful for working with pipe, the corners don't get as sharp, and you're already using light careful blows. It's just one of those tantalizing hints I always hear industrial smiths toss out without any additional explanation. A little throw-away sentence at the end of an explanation, "...Oh, and if you're really good, you can draw hex too." (Phil said that this was not the job to use hex for, but he didn't clarify when to use hex, I think it's some kind of industrial smithing conspiracy. I'm not really complaining about Phil, the first batch of commenters thought that drawing hex was a figment of my imagination. These tantalizing hints are kind of like a challenge.) So I tried it and it seemed to be a fairly limited technique. I brought it up here because I thought there might be something really obvious that I was missing or some special trick that had been left out. Since no one has volunteered the secret to drawing hex shapes to needle sharp points I'm going to stop worrying about it.

Mr. Turley. I think you're assessment is right on, that's what I was trying to describe in my first post. I was only able to work with the hex when the stock was proportionally large for my hammer capacity (so I had a very fat lozenge), once I got down to efficient forging sizes then the bar deformed too much with each blow (normal lozenge). I think that if I wanted to draw a round tenon that was larger than the inscribed square on a large bar it might be useful. Put another way, if drawing to a sharp square would make the part too small, then I might find drawing hexagonally useful. somehow, I see him withstanding just about anything. :lol:

You and I are young. Ask some the guys on here how many blacksmiths were around in the 60's and 70's.

I was at a workshop where a fellow had some power hammer tools he had made welding h-13 bits into mild steel holders using 7018 rod. He said that they had been working fine for about a year. The difference is that his welds were holding the bit into a socket, whereas with yours the bit appears to be getting welded to a flat surface, so the weld will be holding things in alignment and be under more stress. Shouldn't that collar be snug up against the bottom of the press ram or am I misunderstanding?

It was fixed when I got it, so I don't know how it got broken. Oh, and STOCK! instead of a counterweight, Grant's favorite modification, this one came from the factory with return springs.

It's not just the twist, it's that the bar is twisting instead of drawing and I spend a lot of time fixing it. Time I would rather use drawing the taper. I've reached the conclusion that drawing hex is not suitable for this job, maybe sometime in the future with bigger stock.

Smiths in Africa still work harden the edges of their blades, scythes in America were work hardened as part of the sharpening process right up into the twentieth century. Early iron producers very likely used work hardening rather than quenching from hot, just like their African descendants. This has been mentioned a couple of times but not pursued.

I agree, those are nice sets and the wooden boxes are excellent, but they are by no means handcrafted. I still like mine.

JNewman, the fact that I always hear about it but never see it should have been a big clue. ;)

Looks fun. You might want to do something to hold that anvil down. You will need to open some windows to let in air if you get a forge. Oxygen depletion is the forgotten side of the carbon monoxide equation. Heck, how cold does it get in Georgia?