fciron

I'm not sure what you're planning to do with the kitchen stuff,but I think you might need more air than you get from the foot pump. Get 'hardwood lump' charcoal, not briquettes. That works great, it is the original metalsmithing fuel.

Really need to know what's wrong before making recommendations. Nonetheless, I'll shoot off my mouth. I have not seen a Mousehole anvil with a flat, level face. Mine was missing a big chunk of the steel face, so I did build it back up with the welder and got several years of good use out of it before trading up to something larger. but even with all the welding and grinding, the poor thing was much too sway-backed to restore to level. The sway was thicker than the existing face, so I just learned to work with it. How often are you hitting on the whole face anyway? What sort of work are you planning on doing? IMO it is not necessary for the whole anvil to be dead flat with square corners; there should be some flat, smooth spot for finishing work; there should be a couple of inches of fairly clean edge on each side that can be used for forming shoulders and offsets; a variety of curves on the edges is ideal. I'm mostly doing decorative work, if you're doing blades or tool making your needs will change. When you say 'reface' I think of major operations, like welding on a new steel plate, which usually wind up being things that we do because we want to, not because we need to. I have heard of people having anvils surface ground or blanchard ground back to flat, but if you've got a half inch variation in height there probably isn't enough steel there to survive that.

My apologies for jumping on you there. I hereby recant my rant.

I think both of us agree that existing in latter half of the twentieth century was probably the greatest threat to any anvils that survived the scrap metal drives during WWII. I don't think either of us is going to be executing any radical modifications on an old Mousehole in the near future either. In answer to the original question I think that the US may have had a shortage of 20th century anvils that leads us to see them as relics as much as tools. The perception is that vises, hammers and tongs are all available (in a way) at the corner hardware store, the anvil needs to exist on it's own before that. In the US lot of guys get started precisely because they somehow found themselves in possession of an anvil. I was in London for fifth form and I first got exposed to blacksmithing in my Design & Technology class. That may have a lot to do with the difference between American and UK smiths in their attitude towards the 'ancient craft' of blacksmithing. As SouthShore said, we don't have a lot of 500 year old buildings around, so tools from the early 19th century are part of the building of our country. Thus we get all misty eyed about busted old anvils. :rolleyes:

What constitutes 'trashing' an anvil? What is the benefit of an 'historical' anvil sitting in my shop unused or, worse, making my work difficult because I refuse to clean up 200 years worth of wear and tear? Does it really hurt the historic value if we repair 20th century damage, like torch gouges and chisel marks? Yes, there are anvil collectors and they are welcome to preserve their anvils however they see fit, but that doesn't mean that all anvils should be collected. I'm not advocating YoungDylan's approach for all anvils; most Mousehole anvils are already very thin behind the hardy hole. so it's not really necessary. SouthShore, I suspect that we are going to continue to disagree.

Robert, First, congratulations on forging things. Second, there are reasons that certain patterns and techniques become the standard, in tong making as well as burners. It is because many people have used them successfully over a long time. In the case of tongs, there are literally thousands of years of practice bringing us to this point. I would strongly suggest trying the instructions John B posted first and then modifying them to suit your tools and equipment rather than trying to invent new techniques from whole cloth. (Unless you are trying to reproduce the method in Gearhart's video that YoungDylan posted, in which case I recant my rant and point out that that's a power hammer and much bigger stock with drawn reins.) In answer to your actual question: There are a lot of fairly subtle things happening in tongs, for instance the transition from the pivot area to the jaws. The jaws should come right out of the pivot area at full size, in John B's picture he has the tongs over the edge of the anvil at an angle so that the jaw thickness fades back into the pivot. Your tong jaw is on the end of a tiny square made of those two parts smallest dimensions. This part will bend very quickly in use. The stresses are greatest close to the pivot point and the base of the jaw is where most tongs break. It looks as though you have the basic geometry right, if anything it's exaggerated. It looks like your jaws will be 1-1/2" apart once the tongs are assembled. The method I know that is closest to what you are doing is to bend the S curve first (the 45 degree bends that you did last) and then lay the bar over a small block (1"wide) and flatten the entire pivot area at once. This leaves the stock full size where it comes out of the pivot and gives clean shoulders and a nice flat bearing surface for the eye.

Looks good to me, I can see that bit on the tail being incredibly handy. I agree with you about some of the anvil worship. Unless you have photographic evidence of Paul Revere using it a mousehole anvil is most valuable as a tool, not an historical relic.

Oh, now he's raised the hook standard. I guess all of us are going to have to do a little better than a plain old S-hook in the future. Keep up the good work. I originally thought the thread was for a project that was nine years old, not the smith.

That deep throat and wider jaws would be handy as all get out for working sheet metal. I've seen other vises with similarly elongated jaws attributed to sheet metal work.

Bill Gichner told me it was the best book of its kind. I'm not gonna argue with him or you. I still peruse my copy occasionally. I completely agree that the concept of constant volume and the way he develops forms are eye openers. I have even used some of the mystery machine parts to make my own found objects. I'll just sit here quietly and wait for the morris-dancers to demand an apology.

If you were, then you could afford Mark Aspery's book in just a few short weeks!

Everyone jumped in to take the mickey out of morris-dancers.

You just made a bunch of big, burly, would-be full-time bladesmiths cry. Welcome to the madhouse.

Hi T, I'm in Louisville. Located in a old blacksmith shop with a little bit of everything. Never shoed a horse, I'm a decorative iron guy, but look me up when you're in town. I'll be having some kind of get together when the weather cools off. I'll let you know when something is decided.

I think it might be too much stress on your striker Many of the limiting blocks built into the jig wouldn't function as neatly with a sledgehammer. I think the flippy thing for forming the offset in the first step could be a handy anvil tool. IMO the rest could be done the traditional way over the edge of the anvil just as easily as with a tool. Also, in hand-forging tongs I was taught to hold the tong(?) at a 45 deg. angle in the second step (jaws off the far edge, eye being flattened) so that the shoulder of the horizontal jaw material would extend back into the vertical section of the eye. This almost doubles the cross section at the root of the jaw, one of the places where I have seen many tongs broken. It looks like this should work with the jig as well.

You're giving Lillico too much credit; even Americans like me know that there are still morris-dancers. No one has ever asked me to make a knock-off and I live near mining country. (Actually, I've been frequently asked to make another kind of knock off.) By you're own argument (Lillico is as out of date as coracles.), we might also be able to ignore his advice about not welding tong reins? :unsure:

Cool. I tweaked some hand-made scissors from Iran for an oriental rug place here in town. They were much more obviously hand-forged, but I still enjoyed getting my hands on them. They had a number of nifty blacksmith made tools for reweaving rugs, if I run across the pictures I'll share them.

The very first thing I would do is choke off some of the air. I have used the 'piece of paper' choke technique and it works great. This will let you experiment with your air fuel mixture and get some ideas for your final design. It should also let you get some metal hot so you can have a go at hitting something. It sounds as though you are well and ready to do that. A forced air burner is a very simple and robust thing. Provided that you have a way to control the amounts of air and gas you should be able to get a stable flame out of just about anything. Flame retainers and permanent chokes on the air are necessary refinements for down the line but right now I'd concentrate on getting something hot. This page has the old Hans Peot gas forge plans from that ABANA used to distribute. I think the flame holder is a little complex, but you can see that the whole thing is pretty simple. You could make a manifold to feed the large tube to your smaller burners. Edge, I try to avoid using residual heat for a relight. If you do run into that trouble again try putting your hand over the burner intake to choke it back, this will temporarily reduce the velocity at the burner end and the flame may burn back into the forge to your burner. My couple of thoughts.

Water-jet? Do they still sell cable saws? I think I have seen omni-directional blades for coping saws but you might have to build your own extra deep frame to reach the work. Hole-saw in a brace? Grant, nice looking blower, but I didn't see the OC name mentioned anywhere.

Whoops, my bad. Depending how many times it rolls you could double the layers one or more times. Gonna be an interesting weld though. ;)

Keep in mind that folding it 4 times will yield a stack with 16 times as many layers as the original (2x2x2x2=16). Folding it twice will only yield 4 times as many layers (2x2=4) Twisting and other manipulation of the bar will affect the pattern, but not the number of layers. The thinner (and more numerous) the layers the more consistent the final billet.

Fixed typo. Middle of the bar hotter and it should move first. I have also seen the vise used to create a cleaner shoulder in the bar too. I might try that, 1/4 x 1 can be a little small for extra steps.

I have a similarly shaped hammer I picked up in Cameroon in West Africa. I'll try and get a picture of it. It was being used to dress the edges of knives and similar tools. It is thicker at the face and has a huge eye, but I think it's shape is as much a function of the found object it was made from as an attachment to a traditional shape.

You should be able to flatten 1/4 x 1" flat into 3/8" round without too much trouble. The trick is to address that edge thickening early. I will dress those thickened edges back in by hammering on the wide face at the end of each heat. You want to maintain a rectangular profile all the way through the process. (It seems counterintuitive to hammer on the flat face when you want the bar to thicken, but the edge thickening has to be fixed to avoid cold shuts.) Very hot steel and very solid blows will help the blow to penetrate to the center of the bar, but some corrective hammering is inevitable. If you can work over a fuller that will also help because it concentrates the blow in a smaller section of the bar. If the part you're reducing is long enough you might try working over the horn. My 2 cents. Lewis

I've seen plenty of broken tongs with no welds in them at all and several pairs with welded reins that broke elsewhere. Generally, it's the eye to jaw area that is weak.