fciron

wow! You really got the beads finished out nicely from the earlier pics. Looks good, congrats. You should certainly make your own crucifix. Visually it's the focal point of the piece, so it seems a shame not to have your work there.

I sometimes find it useful to make a holder for repetitive jobs so that the vise does not need to be repositioned each time. Once it's positioned for the first piece then all that is required is swapping out the parts, with an occasional accuracy check. A center drill or spotting drill works well to start the hole accurately. Probably too late for this job and not apropos your bit breaking problem. Glad to hear it's going better.

Part of the reason that you're breaking bits is that they are sharpened for steel: the edge digs into the soft copper and it self-feeds in until it jams and breaks. The trick with a stone is not to actually dull the stone but to change the flute angle, if the end of the flute is perpendicular to the surface it will scrape off a chip rather than digging in. Typically the recipe is higher speeds and lighter feeds for softer materials. Usually higher speeds have lower torque, thus are less bit breaking. (Although it doesn't take much at 1/16".) The idea is to deliver the right amount of force to cut the smaller chip and to go faster so that there is less depth on each pass. ...and, as you seem to have noticed, LUBRICATE!

You should word it as a ransom note: Buy this rare example of early american industrial history or I will weld up the face! I know a thread you could mine for victims. Kidding aside, it is both considerate and good business to give the collectors a crack at it first.

Point one: that's a fine looking crane. If you don't like the wing you can make the next one better. Point two: Be careful with ugly ironwork. It took me 15 years to get the first (and ugliest) poker that I ever made back from my mother. I had to make an entire set of dragon-head firetools and then sneak the poker out a couple of months later. She loved that thing.

Several folks have mentioned the importance of getting the scarf right and it hasn't really been picked up on. So I am going to say it again. There is some debate about what scarf is best, but no one really talks about why the scarf is necessary. If the ends of two bars were overlapped and welded without scarfing they would be joined at the longitudinal surface where they originally touched, but the ends of each bar would not be welded, so, if you forge the overlapping area down flush there would be a crack halfway through the material at each end of the weld. A definite weak point and stress riser. A poorly made scarf could also leave a small crack that would be a stress riser. I can easily imagine a smith using the slopes left by the hot cut as the scarf for his weld and making no further refinement. (He would have been fine most of the time too.) This would correspond to the spot where the OP's tongs are broken. My two cents. (If I write about a mistake, it's usually from first-hand experience.)

the pivot bar can run the entire height of the fireplace with round tenons/pivots in the brick roof and floor. If the top tenon is made longer then it can be inserted first and then the lower tenon can be dropped into place. No mortar at all and I've seen pictures of very old cranes that appear to work this way.

Slice off the protruding tool with a cutting torch and then cut or drill out the mass of the drift and then drive out the remnants from the bottom? Most of the other methods seem like more work than making a new drift. Did I miss something obvious? Great project!

Philip, It's because it says 'traditional' in the subject line. Nothing generates controversy like tradition. :)

300 years worth of abuse? All done in less than 1/3 the normal time with our patented process! :P

Umm, I'm pretty sure that's the kind of answers that you have gotten. They're not laid out as 'if-then' statements, but that information is there and I think folks have been going out of their way to try not to offend. I don't usually go in for the mutual congratulations threads, but I gave you a pat on the back for a nice hardy earlier in this thread. I did it precisely because I know I offended you in the tongs thread. When someone says that blacksmithing is more an art than a science, they're not saying some mystical BS. They are saying that it relies upon judgment born of experience. Even if you spent thousands of dollars on pyrometers and computer controlled forges there are still things that are going to be learned best by getting a piece of metal hot and making mistakes with it. You made mistakes went you built your first forge and you learned from them. You had trouble making tongs and you're a better smith as a result. You have now successfully made a nice hot cut and a punch and you have some helpful suggestions from your online friends for improvements next time. What is the problem?

Not a leader, the opposite. The cinch I've seen was a bar a couple of feet long with a big ring on one end and a poker like barb on the other. Lift the bull's tail and insert the hook and then drop the ring over a fence post. It's a cinch the bull will stay put! :P

Cool. Nice stuff. I have a coffee table book of French Garden tools that was sold here in the US at Pier 1. Many similar tools. Ok, there's no picture for tool #178, 'Hand bull leader'. Is this related to a 'bull cinch' and does any one here know what I'm talking about?

Nice hardy. It ought to give years of service and I like the line of the flare. As a bonus your son got to smash something with a big hammer. (dang it, Phil K posted while I was typing.)

Ok, I just assumed it was the same stuff as the jewelry because of the similar color. Now I know what to do with my five gallon bucket of scale, too. :rolleyes:

Looks like a nice job and you look prepared.

The black scale that forms in the forge is an iron oxide that forms at high temperature, as compared to rust, which forms more slowly and at lower temperatures. All that scale flaking off your steel is chemically the same as hematite, but those thin flakes are really hard to make jewelry with. Since it's related to temperature it occurs in both gas and solid fuel forges. A lot of smiths feel that gas forges actually create more scale. Personally I don't think it's inherent to gas forges but a result of the material sitting longer at scale forming temperatures in the forge.

Astro Al, 3-4 inches is HUGE! I hope you have a very serious hydraulic press. I would definitely look into aluminum or bronze, either copper or steel will oxidize quickly under the influence of sweaty fingers. Bronze will darken, but at least it will still look like art; copper will go from brown to green and steel will rust. Silicon Bronze is a real pleasure to work with, but shows fingerprints. Architectural bronze is actually brass and seems very stable in my experience. I know that some of the architectural metal suppliers sell small disks. Try King Architectural or Texas Metal Industries.

I hope you mean that you will flatten two corners that are opposite each other, not two sets of corners. I make 1" hardy tools out of jack-hammer bits and they fit fine. Even if they didn't fit the hole completely it is not really necessary that they corners be filled. Flat contact on all four sides and the collar on the face of the anvil will be plenty of support. Grant, what is 'balling a jack'? It's mentioned in a few folk songs, I thought it might just be running a jackhammer, but if you can clarify that would be cool.

You are not imagining it. They were used in jewelry manufacturing with coining or stamping dies. I believe most of the fly-presses I've used had tags from Gold Machinery in Rhode Island.

My Carpenter Tool Steel book says explicitly that H13 can be water cooled in use without harming the tool. They wouldn't say that unless they were very, very certain.

Oh, I got the die ground down last Thursday, so the hammer was running for Friday forge day. (I light a fire and hit something whether I need to or not, just to remind myself I'm a blacksmith.) I tapered some square that gets scrolled into curtain tiebacks and flattened a rusty lump from the scrap pile just for fun. With new bushings in all the arms and links, a new belt and new square, flat dies it sure is a nice little hammer. I think I might concentrate on rebuilding the 50 that came with the shop and quit dreaming about new hammers. But first a new gas forge!

Well, there goes the rest of Tuesday. http://babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_txt is a big help if you really need to find out what one of those fellas is up to.

whodathunk my little 25 would ever have anything in common with a Nazel? B)