kraythe

Well I am building a ribbon burner but that is probably not a beginner project. The Rex burners are great but they won't teach you anything except how to buy. If that is tour goal then that is cool. You can also buy ribbon burners. If you want to build a burner, a T burner will blast the Reilly in performance and ease of build.

I am sort of sick of borax eating my insulation and was wondering if anyone had tried making a metal pan to insert into the bottom of a forge to catch the molten borax. How did that turn out? Any ideas in that area? Thanks in advance.

I have settled on using pleated wool to insulate the body of my new forge which will have a ribbon burner as its primary burner source. The forge is composed of a box type shell with front, back and side doors. The burner will enter through the top of the forge in perhaps a 4x6 block (I havent decided exactly how big or how many holes but I am thinking of Grant's design using crayons to cast the holes. The doors of the forge will be hinged with heavy duty hinges and the bottom of the forge will be hard firebrick. in point of fact the bottom of the forge simply doesn't exist. The whole thing is designed to sit on top of a pile of insulating bricks with two layers of hard brick over top of the insulating brick. The idea is that when the bricks get torn up, they can be replaced. Every wall and door will have 2" of insulation to work with. CAD images are attached. The insulating will be 1/2" pleated "Safe" Wool from Thermal Ceramics. On top of the wool I had thought of a thin layer of refractory mortar or ITC-100 or both. That would be another question. What I am basically seeking is the best manner in which to mount the pleated wool to the forge. One idea is a stainless steel rod welded and piercing the pleats of kaowool across the forge from side to side. However, there are hot faces such as where the doors meet the wall, so on that have nothing to weld the other end of the rod to. Another idea I read was to use steel rods to mount at the bottom of the pleats every X number of pleats. Of course I would still have to figure out how to handle the hot faces bit it might be easier if I use the rods at the bottom of the pleats. Are there any other options I should look at? If I were to do the anchored rods at the bottom of the pleats, do I need to use stainless or can I get away with mild steel and why? One think I want to make sure is that the pleats dont fan out like an accordion on those hot faces at the doors, I need them to be flator it wont work. Thanks in advance.

Hmm I am encouraged by what you say about the lazy flame. I can deal with that. I also thought aobut cutting a hole in the feed tube and welding it over with a thin layer of steel to create a pre-calculated weak spot in case of an explosion. I looked into solenoids but it seems they would cost as much as my blower!! Another thing that interested me is people talking about building the burner tubes out of steel tubes and then using refractory only for the ends of the tubes. Would you cast them like flares for venturis? I can imagine a cluster of 1/4" tubes in a bundle acting as a burner but I think they wouldnt stand up to the heat as well as castable tubes.

I have been thinking about building a ribbon burner with some spare castolyte that I have around here somewhere. However, the one problem I have with the setup is one of safety. If you lost the power to the blower you had better re-establish it quickly or be seriously on the ball with turning off the gas or the flame will back up into the plenum and burn back into a large amount of mixed air and propane with unfortunate results. So the question was, how could I do this safely without causing all of these problems but gaining the benefit of the ribbon burners. After all, if it was just me I might be more inclined to take risk but my family depends on me so I have to be more careful. It seems that the prime benefit of the ribbon burner is the increase in surface area of the flames. The increased surface area allows the burner to more efficiently transfer heat to the forge. At least that makes sense in my mind. So I began to wonder how I could get the increase in surface area without the ribbon design and the idea struck me of using micro venturi burners. These burners would be constructed on a 1/2" size or even 1/4" size instead of the normal 3/4" size. The burners could be arrayed into the roof of the forge to provide distributed coverage and remove hot spots. With the proper gas flow they should draw air without needing electricity. (oh by the way I dont use black iron but rather welded Ts to reduce turbulence. I was thinking to use 1/4" tube with 1/2" tube on the top of the T. The gas jet would be located exactly centered on the 1/4" tubes and would probably be pretty small. I would have to figure out a viable way to introduce gas into the system. My current method of MIG tip isnt going to work and it seems to me the gas jet will have to be much smaller than the .025 tip I am using in my 3/4" burner. I havent quite figured out that part. The flares would be as I have them now, essentially they are cast out of castolyte with a nipple for attachment embedded in the refractory and then coated with ITC-100 to provide heat transmission as well as smooth out the flares. The 1/4" tube would be about 2" long following the 8 to 1 ratio that i have seen works well. The cross tube on the T would only be 1" long or so. What I need after that is some kind of needle to introduce the gas. So what do you think? Am I psycho with this? Can you think of a safe way to introduce the gas?

Im not fundamentally opposed to doing it the old fashioned way. I just need to know where I can get good files. The ones at my local big box seem to be miserable. If I could file the fork to a mirror polish, that works for me.

I am using mild steel 5/8ths round stock. I wish I could find enough thick spring steel but I have had no luck funding it.

I have been making my own tongs for some time now. I feel like I am able to do it ok given that I dont have a power hammer to make the job easier. My general process is to start with a 5/8" round, taper back to one end from about 6" up the bar to form tapered handles, then set down the jaw half way with front half face blows, then set in a shoulder with far radius side half face blows and then flatten back to the start of the handle taper. So the tongs are strongest near the boss area. The problem i have been having is that the tongs are continually breaking on me. Every time I think to make a second set, the first set snaps usually on the jaws area. I try to make wolf jaw tongs with a v-grove because they seem to be the most useful. At any rate the frequent breakage is seriously getting to me and I am looking for suggestions on how I could do better. I thought about making them out of spring steel that seems to be more resistent to getting hot but that is a LOT of work without a power hammer and I have never been able to find a coil spring that thick. I use the tongs in a propane forge and dunk them regularly in water to keep them from overheating and changing shape due to overheating and pressure. However, sometimes they still get too hot and they end up oout of sorts and I have to reset them. Any tips you can offer? Thanks.

OK, next phase. Now I heat my piece to yellow and do some thinning with my power hammer, a.k.a. my 14 year old son with a 4# hammer. Its a decent power hammer but eats too much. I have thinned it to about 5/32" thick and about 3/4" wide. This should make a good size. Moving that metal is tough even at that size. Its amazing how hard you have to hit this stuff. After thinning and sizing, I straightened it, heated it and brushed it then took the angle grinder to it and cleaned off the scale. Then I used my 8" bench grider to polish it to some level though of course that is the wrong tool for the job of polishing. I need to find a way to get cold molten borax off the floor of my forge and the borax is eating my insulating brick in my brick pile forge (basically a bunch of bricks stacked up). For this reason I am seriously considering casting my new forge out of solid castolyte because of how the borax acts on the insulating brick and KAOWool. Castolyte and ITC-100. Anyway, the next step will be to form the fork out of the billet. I think I might do it on a test piece of mild steel before I go for it with the cable billet. One thing I am proud of is that it is DEFINITELY welded. I would be stunned to find any cold shuts in there at this point. Pics included ... note the first one reflected the light so strongly that we had to take the shot in darkness which then isnt polished. Cant win. :(

Thank. I am rather proud of myself on this one. I did hit it with an angle grinder but I need to do more work with the grinder to either carve off remanent ridges in the billet or forge weld them in. I will probably go for option 1 as the ridges are not too high to manage, only 1/32" or so. What I really need is an inexpensive belt grinder and a solution for polish grinding in tight areas. I thought of using dremel bits in my drill press but I don't know how well that would work. When I polish the carving fork I will have to get in some tight areas. Any suggestions?

Yeah, I actually have a video from smartflix on cable damascus. Flux - twist - flux - twist - flux - hit around like rounding square bar - flux - square it. Played with one of the smaller cables tonight and got it certainly welded into one piece. Results are attached. I actually tried to do a bit of grinding on my wheel grinder but it is seriously the wrong tool for the job. I wasn't able to get a good grind, therefore my impromptu end only etch didnt produce any results. I really need a belt grinder but alas, money is tight. Tomorrow I am going to fold it a couple times and hot forge it into a carving fork. Then I will figure out how to grind it mirror smooth, say to 1200, then try and etch the result. I thought of using a deer antler for handles somehow and cold rivet the handles to the piece. This would allow me to use the most of my damascus in the fork and only a small amount in a tang. I am going to have to do some research into how to finish a deer antler handle and then go look for some drops.

So I went down to Mile High rigging in denver and asked if they had any spare pieces of cable. Mile High Rigging is a company that rigs cranes and other heavy equipment with steel cable. I had called on the phone announcing myself as a hobby smith and they said I could come down and pick over the remanents. I snared these beauties. The smaller ones are about 3/4" and the big ones nearly 2". I havent measured them exactly. Of course they are coated with nasty grease but I am sure my forge will take care of that in short order. I wish I knew what kind of steel they were made out of exactly but I am betting it is high carbon for that industry. At any rate I will be cutting off a piece of the smaller one, say about 6 inches, and stuffing it in the forge and seeing if I can make some cable damascus. Wish me luck! If I manage it, I might make a damascus carving fork. That would be cool if I could keep the patterns standing out. Oh BTW, cost was .... zero. I like that price. Well I did have to pay for gas but almost zero.

I heard from another site that is a knife maker that stainless can be welded inside a capsule of carbon steel to exclude o2 and then grind off the carbon steel. http://www.aescustomknives.com/docs/tutorial16.htm I havent tried it but it looks intriguing. Much better than horribly toxic flux. As for the welds I have spent a bunch of time welding and testing via destructive methods. Im not jumping in blind here.

I have been tuning my forge welding skills and I can pretty much nail welding two pieces of flatstock together every time. So I am wondering if I might give some thought to going the next step to create a pattern welded knife. In a beautiful world I would be able to replace all my chef knives with pattern welded, hand crafted knives. I think the easiest one to start with is the 10 inch chef's knife. I like pretty much standard german chef knife form so it should be a relatively flat blade with a curved tip. That being said, Id like to run some questions and ideas past you guys. For steel I debated getting some cable. I thought about doing stainless cable but that may be a bit too hard for a first knife. So what variants of steel will give me the best corrosion resistance for a chef knife? Or should I actually try to do stainless? If I were to go high carbon cable steel, is there anything i should be looking for especially? Have any of you tried to weld stainless cable? If so, can you provide any lessons learned that I might find useful? When it comes to the grind, I thought it might be great to have the blade be hollow ground on the first half an inch or so and then flat ground from there to the back of the blade. Do you think that is a workable plan? EDIT: When I get a couple knives under my belt I would like to try a cable pattern welded filleting knife but what I was wondering is what would be the best process to get the required flex in the blade? A filleting knife should be able to bend 90 degrees over its 6 inch length and be thin. I have some Elk antler lieing about and was thinking of making the handle out of that with three rivets holding it to the tang (set cold with a pneumatic hammer). Any thoughts there ? Thanks

Torch welding is like TIG but with a LOT more heat being put into the piece. As you preheat the piece it gets very hot and not in the localized manner of a TIG torch. The whole piece gets hot which can lead to warpage and a ton of other potential problems. Also with a torch it took me 2 years to learn to weld in odd positions and 1 year to learn to do good fillets. With a torch it is insanely easy to blow through the vertical piece on a T fillet weld or even the edges on a corner weld. Doing vertical up is not super hard but the puddle runs much faster because of the enormous amount of heat into the piece. With thin metal you WILL blow through it or not achieve fusion in your first 200 beads or so. Finally torch welding is much much slower than MIG welding. Don't get me wrong ,I don't regret doing it but it is significantly harder and might frustrate a newbie to welding much more. Also in the area of safety the OxyAcetylene torch is probably the most dangerous thing I have in the shop. Run the Acetylene at over 15 psi and the bottle could spontaneously explode, forget to allow the acetylene to settle and get acetone in your regulators and you could get an explosion. Dont chain your bottles to the wall and knock them over and you can turn the O2 bottle into a rocket that will blow through 2 foot thick cinderblock walls. Get Pure oxygen on your clothes and the smallest spark will make you go up like a roman candle. Touch the torch tip to the welding work when lit and if you dont have a flashback arrestor, the flame can burn right back through the lines and blow the acetylene bottle. Dont have backflow preventers on your lines and high pressure o2 can force its way into the acetylene bottle with potentially serious unfortunate results. An OA torch is something I advise everyone to take a class on safety. That is where you will learn rules like "always A before O" and so on. Also if you have a cheap ***** harbor freight torch the backflow preventers and flashback preventers might be crap or completely missing and mocked up. My torch is a 600$ Victor Journeyman torch and worth every penny. Go to smartflix.com and rent the MIG and FLUXCORE welding videos from wall mountain company. Then with an inexpensive welder you can run beads like a champ. Stay away from 120volt machines because they dont have enough umph. With a MIG / FLUXCORE welder, .045 wire and .025 wire you can weld anything from thin sheet to half inch plate in a single pass.

It does, you should see how much my 14 year old eats! But still he isnt always around when I want to swing a hammer. I am going to have to consider building a power hammer. Have any of you adapted a harbor freight press to do forging work? If so what success have you had?

I dont know if I would reccomend torch welding to a newbie to welding. A torch is a great thing to have around the shop though. A good mig welder is cheap and can use fluxcore wire for better penetration. Stay away from 120v machines as they wont have the umph you want. I use a Lincoln 180HD with .045 flux core wire most of the time. Just learn the diff between a pretty weld and a good one.

Quench for anneal? Really? Why is that Grant? I had been thinking about messing around welding some stainless. I know you have to exclude oxygen in the weld usually via a capsule but why would you quench the anneal?

I am facing a problem with my forging. Right now I am having issues trying to work with 1" or thicker metal and often high carbon steel in trying to make anvil tools. I cant afford to buy a power hammer and even if I could I am not sure my neighbors will be happy to see it. I am worried one of the jerks will call the cops or something if I used it after 9:00 pm which is often when I get a chance to do some smithing. I would like to get a fly press but then I dont know what size and 2 grand is only going to be in the budget if I get a big bonus from work this year or a big tax refund. So there you have it, I want to work with heavy metal billets, hardy shafts and so on by hand. Right now the best I can do is use a 4# hammer and slam the crap out of it in 50 heats and that is getting tedious. Even Swaging the shafts through the anvil is becoming tiresome and when working billets of pattern welded steel, drawing them back out is the definition of unfun. Furthermore, I like to work with old jackhammer bits to make tools because those bits are great steel and thicker than coil springs but that steel is murder to move by hand, often fishmouths when I am trying to make hardie shafts. So I am asking for suggestions on how to do this better without fishmouthing everything or blowing a fortune that i dont posess right now. (and if I had a grand I would probably buy an ozark pattern 400# anvil anyway). Anyway. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Lets say the budget is 500$ and under.

I have been debating getting a fly press or Power Hammer for the shop. Basically I want to get one because working with large steel has become rather a chore manually without a press. I have been pounding old jackhammer bits into hardie shafts and once you get them swaged, they work awesome. However, its multiple heats and a massive amount of work to do it by hand especially with the small anvil I have. Now I thought about a fly press because my neighbors complain about the pounding which means I cant forge later at night and often that is the only time I get to swing a bit away from family duties. I investigated shooting the neighbors as a possibility but the stupid bleeding hearts say its illegal or something. So new tooling is on the menu. A power hammer would be much more expensive (like 2 to three times) to get a production tool but I don't know if there is a lot I couldn't do with the fly press that I could do with the hammer. I could potentially build one I guess for a grand or so. Sure the hammer might be faster and sexy but then I would be back in the "bloody neighbor is pounding again" late at night. Another potential idea is some kind of hydraulic press but I don't have an air compressor and the ones i have seen at harbor freight would require air or a heck of a lot of manual pumping. Furthermore, the noise again might be a problem. Another potential idea is to take a screw jack and shove it into a press frame. A 20 ton jack doesn't seem very costly and I am sure i could overbuild the frame enough but then speed of operation makes me wonder if that is worth it as well. So that brings me back to Fly press. I am sorry for rambling a bit. What I was wondering is what size press I would need for hot forging, straightening and smashing cable damascus billets and pressing large steel. There are a couple offered by Pieh Tool but the right size that I would need is something I dont know. I could possibly scrape enough for the big one (tax refund permitting) but do I really need a number 6 for the work that I will be doing with it? So any comments on this, admittedly, rambling post?

I have three tanks that I would like to manifold together to create one large tank. I bought the appropriate copper pigtails and T junctions but when I assembled the setup, it was problematic because it started leaking propane. on the back of the collars for the pigtails (see photo). I thought it might have been that one pigtail got slightly bent (that stuff is soft as heck) but even with a perfectly undamaged section I had the same problem. Last thing I want is propane pooling on the floor of my shop. That doesnt sound very ... uhh ... healthy. Any ideas on why I am getting those leaks and how I can make this happen?

Greetings, I have finally gotten around to working on my new forge. I spend the weekend last weekend welding up the frame out of 2" x 1/8" wall angle iron and flat stock. The forge is essentially a cube with a missing bottom. Its meant that the forge bottom will be one layer of insulating firebrick and a second layer of hard firebrick. The whole idea is that you can replace the brick when borax eats the floor or even take out one insulating layer and increase volume. The whole forge will sit on a table top composed of insulating firebrick for the same reason The construction involves welding up modules that make up the walls and roof and then assemble them. I have done this step already and i am now ready to assemble. Each of the modules are designed to have 2" of insulation between hot faces and the metal shell. The whole thing will be powered by a ribbon burner placed in the top. So basically I need to put insulation on the 2" thick walls and I have been debating what would be the best strategy. Id appreciate other opinions if some have them to offer. With any strategy, the hot faces will get a good coating of ITC-100 for efficiency. IDEA #1) Create a complex insulation structure with KAO Wool. In this idea, I can take 2 layers of KAO Wool, one at 1" and the other compressed to half height. Both would be "glued" to the metal shell using refractory mortar bonding agent. First I would cut the panels to size. Then I would soak them in rigidizer and then the compressed layers would but put under a compression jig which would be basically backer board with a 1/2" high frame to get the correct compression. This would give me a wall thickness of 1.5 inches. The final half inch could be either 3200 Degree Refractory Mortar or 3000 Degree Castolyte Castable Refractory. The advantages are that the outer insulation would be uncompressed and should retain a ton of its insulating power even though the inside layer might be somewhat diminished in insulating capability. Since the hot faces are coated with mortar or castable and then ITC-100, releasing harmful fibers into the air if accidentally poked will simply not happen. The concerns i have about this are achieving appropriate bonding of the insulation to the metal wall. I worry that the stress from heating and cooling might separate the insulation from the metal wall and separation of the rigidized KAO wool from each other. Although this structure would be the lightest in thermal mass, it is much more complex than the others. IDEA #2) Take the module parts of the wall and pour them in solid castable refractory, perhaps mixed with stainless steel needles to inhibit catastrophic cracking. The benefit of this is that adhesion with the wall wouldn't be an issue because the wall would be cast right into the castable. The disadvantage I see is that the forge will have significant thermal mass and that could make it less fuel efficient. Also that structure would be considerably heavier than the KAO Wool insulate version. However the solid wall might be less complex. IDEA #3) Cut only 1" panels from KAO wool, rigidize the panels and then pour 1/2" stainless needle reinforced castable, place the now rigid kao wool board on the poured castable, then top off the rest with more castable. One advantage is that the castable would find all the pockets in the rigidized KAO wool and bond it solidly to the outer layer of castable. In adition, there would be areas that the castable would go all the way through (such as corners) so the structure would be very solid. The fiber blanket core would reduce the thermal mass and use the better insulating capability of KAO wool. Again the construction is complex and this idea would have more castable refractory than IDEA #1. So ... any opinions out there? Any other ideas?

Well Kentucky is still a 20 hour drive from Colorado. And to go there on the hope to get something is silly at best. Heck the gas alone to go there and back would be 400 bucks and the time needed would be hell. That is the point. Back east (and kentucky is east) you have it good. Remember that even kentucky is MUCH closer to the east cost then to colorado. I keep thinking I will have to buy one but the problem with that is cost. And yeah I am aware of the difference in the two kinds of presses. The actual mechanism of the fly press is pretty simple, its the cast steel frame and screw itself that are tough to manage. If I built it I would build it oversized for safety so that you would bend the screw before the frame. The problem is I am not even able to find anything like CAD drawings or plans on the internet. One idea would be to use railroad rails for the heavy steel parts and high quality bolts that are tested to twice the force the press can deliver. Of course you have to calculate the force of the press and so on. I am thinking the construction would be simple if you had the parts. For a C Frame you need a large wheel well balanced. If you cant find one from a scrap yard you can probably fashion one from steel stock. Railroad rails can take the stress of the frame for sure and if you used construction techniques such as that used for old style steel framed buildings it could work The weak point would be the actual joints where the uprights and top beam meet. The frame should also be under considerable tortion from the impact of the hammer. Its an interesting thought experiment. As I think about it more though I wonder if something like a treadle hammer with a screw head mechanical advantage would be more useful. It would be controllable with the foot (something fly presses cant do) which would allow you to keep both hands on the stock. You could have the lever power something like a flywheel with an oblique gear and then have that fly wheel power the screw which would then impact the work. The force would be multiplied by gearing ratios and lever arm lengths. That could be something interesting to design. Again the trick would be making the frame strong enough. Anyway, just thinking out loud. Its not like I am going shopping for parts or anything.

Thomas: that may be true out east but I have spent extensive time in Colorado trying to locate such items on auctions and whatnot with no luck whatsoever. By the time I journey from Colorado to the east, buy one on auction and ship it back, I might as wellbuy new. That is my problem currently. Out here, they just aren't around.

I was drooling over a fly press and I got to thinking about the mechanism and the power that the press generates. As I understand it a fly press generates most of its force via inertia rather than mechanical advantage of the press. As I researched this a bit more I found a site by a guy named Ron Reil on the fly press. On the bottom of that page he has a press that he picked up but is based off of mechanical advantage rather than inertia. He said it can generate over 100 tons of force which I thought was incredible at first. Then I got to thinking that with the right combination of basic machines (levers, screws, etc) why not? The only problem, I would think, would be to make it easy enough to use without the hands and also to make sure the materials wont fail under load. A load of 100 tons is a lot to put on a screw I think. So that got me to thinking. I would love to have a fly press but alas I am monetarily challenged so spending a grand or more on one is out of reach for me. But I was wondering if it would be possible to fabricate a press in an H frame style (which should be easier than C frame I think, that would allow me to generate say 20 or 30 tons of force with a simple pedal. I can imagine using some four bar linkages for driving the press and some other basic machines. What i wouldn't know is where you could get the materials such as the screw that could handle that much force without stripping. Does anyone know someone who has tried to do this? Are there plans out there i should be looking at or books? Is there any reason people can think of that it wouldn't be possible. BTW. I did think of using one of the common plans to build a hydraulic forging press but discarded the idea for a couple reasons. First of all I have enough problems with my neighbors complaining about me hammering that if I was running power machinery all the time, I would get run out of town; so I need it to be quiet. Second of all, I like staying with basi, human powered, simple machines and so on rather than power equipment. All reflections on this topic will be appreciated.