the iron dwarf

guess what you are doing on june 30th and july 1st smoggy?

here they are Das, components and assembled, just need clean up and paint and then 2 wine glasses and ready to sell

sold out at last event, will get a pic today when new ones are done Das

got 2 forges ready to go, one collected by a customer and one being posted tomorrow, need to make more as another is going sometime this week and a large custom one on monday or tuesday. made up some baskets from a 4" disc and 6 strips as components for wine glass and bottle holders ready for an event ( 2 small pony shoes open outwards to put glasses in and a larger shoe with the basket for a bottle fitted on a stake about 3' tall, stick in the lawn between a couple of chairs ). next event is at a farm and the owner is into horses, it is a land rover event so they should be popular

I make several stake tool holders and hot cuts are a popular item to go with them

I am away for the weekend now at the major oak woodland festival near mansfield UK if you are going say hi

imagine a level area of loose sand or dirt with a half inch thick layer of concrete on it now imagine hitting that all day with a 14 pound sledge hammer what do you think will happen? this is what happens when you have a thin hard layer over soft wrought iron, your ball bearing was not enough to damage it and it still bounced. a thin layer of hardfacing will do the same. repairing this will cost a bit unless you only want a garden ornament

maybe some light work on pewter or lead but be careful not to miss or you will mess it up.

" I would love to. I'm having trouble finding someone local to learn from. As we discussed in PM I might get in touch with your colleague and arrange a visit but its a fairly long way. Thanks. " well john is off to cornwall, 300 miles each way and that is not far to drive and my next event is about 80 miles away after a full days work, sleep in drivers seat of van and then 2 days of work and drive back and unload. yes brundles are ok when you have opened a business account with them and they deliver yup, better than dying of ignorance

brass contains zinc until it gets hot, zinc causes metal fume fever which causes serious lung damage. lots of metals are nasty when hot learn some basic tests before putting unknown metals in your forge is it magnetic is it rusty is it plated spark test break test file it to see colour and get an idea of hardness

this lump of WI came home with me yesterday, at a guess about 120 lb

sounds about right, also if you cant identify the metal you have you will have lots of failures you waste wrought iron that you could have put to good use because you thought it was steel, WI is worth a lot more than steel and earlier you got brass or something else in your forge that can cause many problems you can carry on haphazardly until you do something newsworthy but it is better to learn to do things safely and profitably

we get real charcoal locally, within a few miles of my shop is a copice of about 10 acres which supplies charcoal to restaurants, they want the bigger stuff and we buy the fines. also you can talk to john about fire management if you are visiting sometime

getting blood tests today but it dont bother me. there are many phobias, even one about being watched by ducks

many things affect the hardness, if you could guarantee an accurate identification of material no matter what the heat treat,work hardening, temperature, thickness, physical abuse the sample has suffered some may be interested. for example could you positively identify samples of ansi 1016, 1018 and 1023 if one was normalized, one annealed and one hardened and one sample was 1mm thick, one was 10mm and the last was 100mm thick. if you could prove you could get it right 99.9% of the time no matter how the above were mixed up I may be interested, if not it is of no interest to me and if I need to know an unknown sample more accurately than my own tests I would get an XRF done

if it works its good

you want to know about ageing things, that is easy get 2 rusty bolts and try electrolysis one will get clean and the other will get worse and deeply pitted quite quickly also get square headed bolts not hex

not everyone is a member here

I see lots of old stuff, maybe will be picking up some items made from crucible steel possibly from the tyzack works, will get them to play with

and remember In rust we trust

you can buy unplated bolts but you need to go to better places than b+q or screwfix I get plain bolts for the forges

dont know if it is right, was just one source I had handy

EN45 – Silicon Manganese Spring Steel Flat Circular C. Si. Mn. S. P. min. 0.50% 1.50% 0.70% – – max. 0.60% 2.00% 1.00% 0.050% 0.050%

got the details and ordered the screws got 4 of the 1/4 here the tread is known as UNC and 20 of the smaller ones which is here known as UNF, each of which used to be common here before metric took over thank you guys

this is my first place to look TP will look at the small screw again in the morning Kozzy as #10 32 sounds likely can get them locally but not at 21.45 on a friday nite but at least I have a starting point, thanks to all