fciron

Good deals, as you may have gathered, are dependent upon location and desire/need. That's a fairly small picture, and youtube says the video has been removed, so there's not a lot of info there. Everything I am about to say could be wrong That press looks like it has a single lead screw , so it will give more of a squeeze action like a hydraulic press than a hit action like a hammer. Most folks maintain that you need a faster screw for forging, but it depends to a large degree on what type of work you're doing. A faster press will allow multiple blows to the work, because the contact with the work is shorter and there is less heat lost. A slower press will give more of a squeeze than a hit and will rob more heat from the work. A shorter lead on the thread means that you will have a shorter range of motion, most of the presses you see being used for smithing have an inch or so of travel within a 90 degree arm's-length stroke; a press like this may only move a 1/4 inch or so in an arm's length. This may not seem like much, but most of the time you don't want to make multiple spins of the handle, just a simple pull with the arm that's not holding the work. The nature of the action means that multiple impact type blows will continue to do work whereas squeeze type blows reach a maximum pressure and are done. I suspect that this will be less of an issue with this press, since it is still a a momentum-driven, impact type blow, loss of heat and the slow movement of the screw will be the thing that will limit the number of blows available. If you want to do hammer type work, you could be disappointed. If you want to make a lot of tooling and do press-type work, this could be great.

I pulled a couple of egg-sacs of some sort out of the airbox of my girlfriend's Honda motorcycle last week. Unfortunately, that did not fix it. My first summer in this shop some doves built a nest on the outside chain-hoist. It only gets used occasionally, but when I need it, I really need it. Sorry, guys.

It is frequently recommended to remove the end of the old chisel since it's got surface contamination that you don't want to hammer into the steel. Tapered dies can be as fast as a closed die set up under the hammer, require no flash removal, and can be used on wide chisels or points. (You can even forge your new point behind the old point and then cut off the end with a couple of licks at the anvil; it's a specialized kind of flash. ) There are several threads on sharpening describing a couple of different die set ups. I am sure that Larry has done his homework, if he decides not to reinvent the wheel then round is probably the best shape.

That's a valuable business lesson for all of us. Thanks for the refresher course and good luck with the job.

Ok, Monster and Harris both posted while I was typing. It took a long time because a roufus-sided towhee appeared in the living room and we had to rescue it from the pets and take pictures. I'm going to guess that they arrived at $1.50 based on their cost of sharpening in-house. That price may be based purely on labor and possibly fuel. I doubt they are figuring building overhead and other costs into the job, since they are paying those costs whether they sharpen or not. They probably didn't figure wear on the equipment into the cost either, but they know it's there. If they are going to willing to outsource it, then it is because they feel it's cheaper to send it to you than keep it in-house. I'm pretty sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know but I'm gonna ramble on a bit to try and make sense of it. You need to make sure that your costs are going to be covered: labor, overhead, equipment maintenance, etc. The wear from a job like this is less on a large hammer than it is on my little 50 pounder. You've got the ability to dedicate space and personnel to the job, so the opportunity costs are less (you won't lose another job because of it). I expect you'll buy or build some special dies to speed things up. I don't think their guy is banging them out in a minute apiece, so if their price is based on his labor, you get a little boost there. These are all factors in your favor. So, if a buck-fifty apiece equals about a minute apiece, then a 40 hour week in the summer would cost them $3,000. One month of that would probably buy them a pretty nice hammer, so I don't think the price of equipment is scaring them off. I've got an old estimating book and they recommend a 5% miscellaneous personnel allowance and a 25% fatigue allowance on any job "calling for much physical effort". That knocks your weekly output back closer to $2,000. I bet most of their cost goes into wages. You and your son may be more motivated than the average employee and thus able to work more efficiently, but you're still gonna go a lot slower at the end of the day than you did at the beginning. If you don't figure a safe pace for the work you're increasing the chances of someone getting hurt or something getting broken. So, the conclusion of my ramblings is that I don't think they're trying to screw you. My musings line up with their claim that it's not worth it to them to keep a guy on it full time. On the other hand, I think they are passing some costs to you that are not included in the price that they're offering. You know what they're getting for the final product, so it's safe to assume they think these things cost them $3 bucks apiece in house, so you've got a little negotiation room. (There needs to be some advantage to them for outsourcing this work, so I wouldn't expect them to go for $3 apiece.) Of course, if I'm so xxxx smart, how come I ain't rich? That's just my analysis of the situation from 2,500 miles away.

The shop I am in remains a blacksmith shop after 150 years because they spent most of the 20th century sharpening breaker bits. That business had already slowed when I came in, so I have fairly limited experience with it. I do know that it was hard on the equipment, as has already been stated. There are several pairs of dies here from the fifty pound little giant that have been worn hollow to degrees I didn't think possible. (That is a small hammer doing this work full time.) The corners of all of the anvils were chipped back a good 3/4" from doing this work also. Anyway, for comparison, I set my price at $7 for a bull or chisel point on a 1" hex, more for clay spades or larger bits. On the other hand, I haven't seen any sharpening work for about 18 months, so it may not be a good comp. ;)

Why does the firebox need a top other than the evaporator pan itself? I suspect the pan heats more evenly because it is full of liquid and that it doesn't get much above the boiling temperature of the liquid. (I suspect for syrup it's well above 212 degrees Fahrenheit.) The pan also has sides which help to stiffen it.

Well, I found a sorghum boiler in one of the foxfire books. It seems it does get boiled, but the pan in the photos was quite light. It appeared to be a sheet-metal-lined wood frame. That would seem to confirm my memory that evaporators are lightly built. I just reread your first post and see that the 1/4 plate is part of your firebox, not your pan. Whoops. The process of warpage is still as I described. It seems to me that the surest fix would be to bring in the firebrick lining so that the pan rests on the bricks rather than the warping iron.

If I understand your description properly, you have a brick fire-box with an opening that is smaller than the pan you are heating. To me this suggests that you're producing a lot of heat and it's being directed at the center of your pan. As the center of the pan heats it will expand, the edges of the pan are not getting as much heat and are not expanding to the same degree, so they are squeezing the center of the pan. That's why it's buckling. (Uneven expansion, as Fe-Wood said.) If your pan fit was the same size as the opening in your firebox, then it would heat more evenly. Trying to go to heavier plate could get ridiculous, because all of your time would be spent heating the plate, rather than evaporating sap. Which brings me to this: the evaporators I've seen (an entire two) have been lighter sheet metal affairs on open frames. The sap is evaporated below the boiling point, so the fire is kept low and the temperatures involved weren't high enough to cause warping. It's possible that in trying to heat the 1/4" plate you're building a bigger fire than you need for the evaporation process and thus over-heating the plate. I am not sure about that analysis, I will check my firefox books later.

The ones I've seen that were marketed with the label "Blacksmith Rules" where 2 foot brass rules with one fold and an integral hook on the end. Still sounds like a good find. I'd snatch up on any metal folding rule with a hook.

Finally took a picture of my heading tools for the vise. They are pretty simple, I think the single one holds 3/8" and the double is 5/16" and 1/4". Heading tools by fciron, on Flickr

There are two main ways you can do this, either draw the round down from a square the size of the head (as Doc suggested) or upset a round bar the size of the shaft to get enough material for the head. In neither case do you need to form the square head in a special tool, just turn the bar 90 degrees a few times and you'll get a square. If you use the drawing method you will definitely want swages and a heading tool for things to come out neat and tidy. The heading tool can be nothing more than a bar with an appropriate size hole in it. I would chamfer the edges of the hole just a little (a countersink will do a good job of it) to avoid a sharp corner. (1/16" is probably more than enough, it still has to work as a bolt.) If you want to upset it you could try a clamp that goes in the vise. A lot like a modified swage, but the holes need to be a bit undersized to grip the material. (There will be half a hole in each side, but we're interested in what happens when they're put together.) I usually achieve undersized hole like this by clamping my parts with a business card or two in between and drilling down through the center. If you can put a back-stop of some sort below the clamp it will help to control the length. If you don't back it up the part will slip down in the clamp until it is upset enough to stop sliding. After upsetting you'll have a round head that can then be forged square. If you have a lot of bolts to make I have seen some shop-built upsetting machines that use air chisels or rivet guns, but I haven't looked for any online.

I've got a new style 25 lb. Little Giant. Both the sow block and the cone-shaped part of the frame it sits on are hollow.

Bentiron, I retracted it in the same post. My mistake if I wasn't clear. I'm still not sure if the part with the slots (attached to the bottom of the straps) is cast or plate. It did look kind of oven-ish to me too, but I'm still not convinced it's original to the forge or that the cone and lid went with the lower section attached by the straps. Kinda Frankenstein looking. :unsure:

I looked at your forge cover and it's rather unusual. It looks shop-built; it's made from plate connected with riveted straps, while your forge is mostly cast iron. If someone built it later, it could have been for a special purpose or just a bad idea. That's a nice big blower and a nice big tuyere, so you're gonna need more exhaust than 4x6 inches based on my experience. It is possible that a larger pipe will have enough draw to suck all the smoke through the smaller opening. A lot of side draft exhausts have a smaller opening than the flue size. Huh. The upper part of your cover is cast iron. I'm out of ideas, but I still don't think it's original to the forge.

I saw the small opening on your forge 'hood'. However, I know from experience that 6" pipe won't even handle the start up of my little hand-cranked riveter's forge. That top might have been designed to work with a powered exhaust system rather than natural draft.

I would go for the roof, you'll get better draft and you won't have to deal with the fire issues as much. I also expect you'll want something more than 6" pipe. 10 or 12" is more suitable for a forge. Remember that you're forcing air through the fire, so you are burning a lot more fuel than the size of the hearth would indicate. I've seen several folks talked into 6" stovepipe by the heat-and-air guy or sheet metal place and then have to replace it with something bigger a few months later when they realize it can't handle the smoke. Lewis

Here is a link to the Herefordshire College of Technology, they have all of old CoSIRA blacksmithing books available for download as well as, for this conversation, Lillico's "Blacksmith Manual Illustrated". Lillico shows some porter bars with angle iron on the end that can be clamped to the work. I've made one with a T-handle and it's quite handy. Better than trying to make a giant set of tongs for a one off piece. http://www.hct.ac.uk/Downloads/craftpublications.html I also am a big fan of tong rings for anything over about 3/4" across. Blacksmithing is too much like work to wear yourself out holding the tongs closed. ;)

Looks like a cool project. If I'm not too late, this is exactly the kind of piece where upsetting by dropping the work on the hot end works really well. If you've got a big block or an anvil you can set on the floor it beats hammering on the end in that tall leg vise. The weight of the bar is much more than the sledge, and you can work more ergonomically. I also second the idea of welding on a porter-bar for drawing the taper.

It looks like more of a dent than a hole. In a monkey tool (for dressing shoulders on tenons) the hole usually goes through to the 'eye' which is actually just a cross-hole for clearance. I would have guessed a set tool, like a rivet header, if it weren't for the sharp cross peen on the other end. I don't think it's a rare, valuable artifact, so go ahead and grind it down.

Brian, you left out the hard part. "a heat, a hold, a hit, and stop when it's finished." I don't believe there is a universally recognized standard of difficulty. Small mechanical parts, such as locks, present one type of challenge, while big pieces of steel present another type of challenge. Blades present an entirely different sort of challenge. According to my 'Forging Industry Handbook' beryllium is the least forgeable of the forgeable metals used in industry. However, their definition of forgeable is 'the tolerance of a metal or alloy for deformation without failure, regardless of forging pressure requirements.' I am pretty sure that most blacksmiths would define hard to forge as either 'requiring a lot of pressure' or 'tending to fall to pieces at the most inconvenient time'.

I guess this means we can't cuss about having to untwist the results of wire nuts on other occasions. (It's not a bug. It's a feature.) MB, I could have used that trick yesterday. I'll remember it for next time. Thanks.

The leg is actually the least important feature of the leg vise. The important features are they are made of a wrought material, steel or iron (as John B. stated) and they have a floating screw that is not rigidly attached to the jaws. Cast iron is brittle and can break suddenly, wrought will bend rather than break and I have even straightened out a few leg vises. The screw and box on a leg vise pass loosely through holes in the legs; this means that they will not be strained or bent as the vise flexes in use and are much less likely to break or bind as a result of heavy hammering or twisting. Obviously, the floating screw and long distance to the pivot means that leg vise don't mount on top of the bench. This necessitates the leg. If you can get a good deal on a legless leg vise (It happens1) simply make a bracket to secure the lower end to a post or the corner of a workbench and you're back in business.

I'm not sure how you ended up with a saw-blade in your tool post. Perhaps I shouldn't ask. Are you using a slitting saw blade in your lathe? (They are little circular-saw blades for metal.)I think Phil K was suggesting that the work be clamped to the carriage of the lathe (remove the tool post and compound slide) and then mount a small, metal-cutting sawblade on an arbor in the chuck of your lathe. In your lathe I would actually feed the work from the back of the lathe toward the front, so that the work is going against the rotation of the tool. Are you using cutting disks or grinding disks in your angle grinder? Cutting disks out to be able to do a fairly neat job of things.

The small 7" benchtop shapers by south bend and Atlas fetch a premium price with the home shop/ hobby machinists because they fit easily in the garage or basement. Larger floor machines are often cheaper, but they to take up some space, remember that the ram sticks out behind the machine on the backstroke. $1,100 still sounds high, they're usually 7-800 in the midwest and you could have it shipped and still come out ahead. It seems like a 7" would be just big enough to make hammer dies for a small hammer, but running a machine at it's limits means you'll have to work slower and still risk losing accuracy and excessive wear on the machine. How many dovetails could you pay for at that price? You could buy three sets of dies from Little Giant or the whole quick change set for that money. I'd drop six hundred for a larger shaper in a second, but you've already said you don't have the space. If you only need one or two dies, it hardly seems worth $800 and if you'll use it a lot then you're gonna want a bigger machine.