Borntoolate

Drat, I was hoping not to have to go so high. This presents a bit of a problem as my flue would be at the edge of the structure and not nearer the middle. Meaning, I'll have the tall, slender chimney I'll need to support somehow. It'll look weird and in South Louisiana we have hurricanes. Thanks all.

I have my forge under a lean too set up (roof)
just off a roughly 7' high by 8' wide opening to the back of my shop.
The shop is 30' x 30' with probably an 18' high roof peak.

The lean too is open on most of 3 sides.

Smoke swirls and blows in all directions when I forge. I am wanting to put a flue and extended stack on the lean too roof. The lean too roof is roughly 8' high. How high do you think I will need to build the stack in order for it to draw sufficiently. I understand if this were in the shop proper that I need to go above the roof peak. But I am hoping that because I am just under a lean too off the back of the shop that I can go short of that. here is a pic looking out the back of the shop towards the forge. You can see the lean too roof at the top of the pic. What diameter do you think I would need. I have some 8" stainless chimney line I can use. Other than that it will be sheet metal and wood.

Also, does anyone have a good way to keep the rain out that won't impede having a good draft?

Try a second hand store for cheap cold weather clothes that you don't mind getting dirty. Perhaps go the route of multiple layers of clothes that can be shed or added to in order to get just the right amount needed.

Wow, I am in Southern Louisiana and yes winter has arrived here too. No Snow or sub zero weather. I was thinking similar thoughts about getting out in all that cold. You know, we were pushing low 30s (fahrenheit) last night! I guess I should not let this stop me. especially when you are just now saying the winter has arrived. But we have a wet cold down here not that nice warm dry cold you guys have up there. Blows right through you... My suggestion would be to move south... way South. I used to live in Iowa and have made the move due to the cold.

Sorry, this probably wasn't much help.

To install a draft hood over my forge so I can quit breathing as much bad stuff. As it's been I prefer to light it up as opposed to make the mods necessary to make it more healthy.

I think.... That many times we over think things.

Yup, water is too agressive! My Touch Mark has a crack. IT was the square tipped one. It works so far but no telling for how long.

eye protection is always a given.

"Life is too long to Go through it without all your parts" - Professor Stephens - University of Iowa - 1991

He was referring to the big shiner I got from playing Raquetball with no safety goggles.

1. Heat to prep for Quench. Make sure there is heat away from the tip.

2. Quench. While quenching I was swirling and trying not to splash too much up the shaft. There may be a better way. Or maybe beacause this is COLD water I should just move it only slightly.
Mattbower, I read your comment after doing this. My water is probably in the 50F +/- 5F today. Oops maybe??? BUt one hole made so far. I am curious... Does a crack typically show up in use pretty quickly? I cleaned them on the 2x72 with 220 grit and inspected for cracks.

3. And quickly file, sand away scale to see bright metal at/near tip.

4. Watch colors. Seems most people run to straw but it depends on what you want. It was hard to get good pics of the colors. The one shown is the one that was the best as far as even seeing anything.

5. When you see the color at the tip you want to cool the tip (quench) and go back to step 3 until the colors quit running. I don't have a rulke of thumb for how far up to quench the tip. Perhaps someone does. I think I was about 1.5-2" up. If you quenched to much and the colors won't run then I guess you can do this to get some heat back in the handle so it can run into the tip.

6. Finished. Three chisels and a soon to be touch mark. Plus one hole (two heats and just a little over 1/2" thick) Didn't need to harden the soon to be touch mark but I was on a role. I may also use it the make the guide hole fit tight. Brian also said to bang the finished product on the edge of the anvil near the tip to make sure it's not too brittle. Don't want it to break when you have it in hand, near hot metal, hitting with a hammer.



If I did anything particularly wrong here please correct me and I will correct the post. I'm still a newb but I am at the stage of "do something! Even if it's wrong".... Within limits of course

How do you like that Oak leaf I made... It's made out of real... Oak Leaf. :P

I am getting ready to heat treat a couple punches today. Perhaps I can take some pics. I am planning to to do this like Sparky in post #8. This will be quenched in water using coil spring steel. I don't know the material specifically. I don't currently have any other medium to quench in. I have used motor oil but I'll pass on that. These were drops that Brian brought whne he visited that we made punches from. One I ruined the tip on and the other was never very round to start with. So time to redo them. We used beesawax if I recall as a quench medium. I think that was an experiment but it worked. IF water is plane wrong well someone will say.

REgardless, that is what I am going to do. If something goes wrong I'll redo or make new ones

I will probably be on my own so Pics won't be very easy. I am also not an expert or even close so be gentle but please do correct me where I am wrong.

When I give these away I always promise that thay come under warrantee to be altered according to whatever the new owner wants.

John B,
When you are setting the gap for making a collar do you give yourself a little clearance on the tool? If so how much? does this depend on if the pieces you are collaring are straight or curved? OR do you go for tight and rely on the heat to expand the collar a bit and then shrink to fit. Or maybe I am just thinking to hard...

JohnB thanks for the posts and pics. I like the adjustability of the tool you have. I could easily moddify the plate I have to be similar. Maybe even some T-Handles on the adjustment bolts. I am out of town so away from my shop. So I wake up in the morning thinking about how to redo the tooling when I get back next week. This info helps feed my thinking. -_-

Nice tooling, John B, my first thoughts were a similar adjustable device, but I went with the simpler gap tool that I came up with because of the cost of duplicating it. I think every metal shop should have this technology, because it is the most efficient means that I have seen to join pieces of metal together and form structures. There are a lot better ways of loading and driving than one at a time by eyeball and hand. I'd like to have a machine that cut, loaded, drove, and spit out the collars. Kelly, you did miss a very key piece of the collaring tool. Look back at the third and forth picture in the 34th post in this thread, and you will see it. You are missing the pieces that fill in the gap between the shoulders that stick up. Other people have done the same thing, and it won't work without them. Also, if you look on the 4th post at the second picture, you will see the collaring tools of a specific gap that I mentioned to do larger jobs on a layout table that you can hammer on. With those you can close the collars while every thing is together on the layout table. Give me a call anytime if you have any questions. We thought about stopping by the other day on our way back from Texas, but Karen wanted to get back home; we were gone a week.

I am not forming complete collars and then re-opening them to insert onto a structure to then recollar. I could see this as a good way to make and install a very critical single or few collars on a complex hard to get to shape. But for trivets as shown I don't see the need for all that.

On the other hand I am wanting to rely on some simple, versatile tools to make this fast, easy and tight. A saw some stuff about making the collar, fitting, folding the ears, unfolding, affixing and then finalizing. This makes sense to me for a difficult hard to reach single, gotta be real tight collar. BUt when access isn't a challenge I'm thinking this can be done very successfully without all that effort. Make a collar, fit it to the structure, fold the ears, done. If you can do it in one heat... fabulous. Otherwise two heats max.

Then again my brain has wiring that is generally different than most. SOmetimes that is good. Other times not. The other thing is I generally say what's on my mind. I appreciate a challenge to my thinking.

My thoughts on what a good collaring tool would need to have:

1. Easily adjustable for various collars both for making them and attaching.
2. Has the ability to hold the piece you are collaring in place so you can focus on collaring and not on where a third hand is going to come from. This implies a table or some sort of outrigger type set up.
3. I think a foot petal would be nice as a way to squeeze a hot collar tight as well as release the collar with ease when done.
4. Something that makes it easy to hammer over the ears with damaging the tool. Accurate hits would still be good.
   

So making the three C-Scroll circle wasn't hard after all. I needed only two for the time being so using the same concept of the circle tool above I made a slightly undersized wood circle on the Band saw. I also made a cut out for ease of overbending.



I probably could have hammered the hot end into the wood but I figured I could get this right on the horn or with a hardy bending tool. Especially since 95% of the circle was already bent properly to reference too. So nothing earth shattering there. BUt I could see using a wood tool for cold bending in the future. Maybe some would say this is not blacksmithing. Oh well.

Now for the Collars and collaring. This had it's challenges. Back during thanksgiving the brother in law and me used the following makeshift Brian-like stackable collaring tool.



Well this worked only ok. This is incomplete as shown. THere were more bits of metal to make the right gap. I did not have all the right bits of metal though to make the right height for the two uprights particularly for when I was containing the collar during the actual collaring. This set up was ok to get the gap for making the collars. But in general the metal pieces did not stay secured very well. Partly due to the too low edges that stick up on either side of the metal stacked bits. I guess they aren't really stacked but layed out in a line. See Brian's pics previously to get a better Idea if this is not making sense. I was tired of the thing bouncing and falling apart... I could have modded it but....

SO. I made this hardy tool from some of the stack bits I using. THat's why they are not in the pic. It worked ok but the mild steel did not survive well. A few stray hammer swings and so forth ended up making it look like this by the time we were done.



By the time we were done it was so deformed that after you hammered a collar onto a form you could hardly get the thing out of the tool. When you hammer a collar and then spend the next 2 minutes trying to work the thing out without loosening up all the other collars really starts to xxxx you off. So I never got happy with how I did the actual collaring. Making the collars was fine. I did not attempt to make collars and collar all in one heat.

Here is how I did the last few collars and it worked just fine. I did them hot so they would shrink and tighten when they cool. I heated, applied the metal to be collared, stepped on them to hold them down deep in the collar. Then hammered over the ears on the floor. And before the collar lost a red heat I squeezed them tight with some channel locks. Not fancy but I ended up with noce neat tight collars. So now my thoughts are on making a different collaring tool. I know brians works fine but I think I could come up with something slightly more to my liking. When I get that figured out I will repost.

Ok so this post is just for fun and some pics . Me and Wife Andrea actually worked on this together. She got to running the forge while I made the C-Scolls and hammered out the collars. SHe hammered some too. BUt anyway here are just some random pics.

This one doing the overbend of the circle using the gap on the jig.


Setting up to make a collar


Collar hammering


Interesting that the collar "chisel" is made from this RR springy thing. This seems to be tough possibly Tool quality steel. It sure as heck is hard to unfold.

To Start off me and my brother in law were planning to cobble together the tooling to make the collars. Well actually I had decided and since this is how we do things he had little choice but to comply with my holiday request. WE made a serviceable two C-Scroll collared trivet. Like this.


This one is incomplete with some collars not finished.

Learning. This certainly can be done and it worked. However Brian mentioned something about if you can get at least 3 collars on all the given structures then the structure will be strong. assuming your collars don't suck (more on that later). Well.... I would say that three is a good number and that having a three C-scroll trivet is better than a two C-SCroll Trivet or "Structure". THis is just a theory and there are more ways to skin a cat. So I think this is preferable.


THis one does not have the outer ring yet.

On circles and such...

WHen me and brother in law made the two C-Scroll trivet we needed a way to make a circle that would fit the outer perimeter of the 2 scroll structure. QUite accidently I had a near circle that was VERY close and we made this bit of tooling.


It worked fine. It was time consuming to heat each section and bend it around. THis was slow going. The bending fork was a huge help. I mean heating about 6 inches of metal and then fitting to the circle, bit by bit for a roughly 32" length is slowish. Plus the hot parts want to roll on you as you progress around the circle. This causes a lot of fork tuning to get the circle consistant with no little bumps sticking out. This is hard to explain. As you try to bending the less hot section it wants to bulge out the hotter piece just behind it. So this could make this a 2-4 inch at a time progression. That is a lot of heats to make a circle. Here-in are some learnings that happened by accident.

Here is the bending fork in simulated action.


So this is not a pic of the bend hot. This is after the fact just to show. Here are some interesting learnings for me. NOtice that I did not have a full circle. THere is a gap. THis is a good thing. Because this gap is there it allows you to overbend the metal because the jig flexs a bit at this opening. What this really means is that you can heat one end of your circle and get it nice and well fit to the right radius using the fork. Then, because you can slightly overbend the circle due to the inward flex at the edge of the circle jig gap this allows you to bend most of the remainder of the circle cold. Using the leverage you have of all that metal. Then when you get close to the other end you can heat and fork the last bit neatly. NOt sure this is making sense but it made making a circle WAY WAY faster. Just to clarify when I say OVERBEND this means you can pull the metal cold just a little bit smaller than the JIG radius such that when it springs back it is at the actual jig radius. Be careful not to bend the jig. This can be done by hand with no fork. You just have to take it slow or you would get a very lumpy circle.

The other thing about the jig opening is that it is handy to be able to insert your tongs into while finishing the circle end hot. as simulated here.



So the next problem is I did not have anything close to a Three C-Scroll circle jig. I also had all sorts of issues with tight collars. MOre to come on next post. Hope this is useful

I discussed some recent work in a few other threads that weren't related to Scrolls and collars but that was the subject. It seems like this is the right place to put it. I learned a lot. Let me first say that it was Brian Brazeal that got me started in this work. I have copied much of what he showed me. Or at least tried to. I have probably not applied it as well as could be but perhaps my struggles and learnings can be of use to others. The following few posts are about our progression in making some Trivets simlar to what Brian posted above.

Brian Brazeal has a very different anvil. It only has about a 3"x3" flat area on it. The rest is a few different shapes and edges. This got me thinking. For a hammer blow you really don't need more space than this. In fact 3x3 is probably way more flat space than necessary. If you can hit reasonably accurate. So I'm thinking you have flat space in abundance and the gash in the top will be useful for something. You sort of have an anvil / Swage block combo...

I would suggest that you just get started. You have a plan, it might not be what I or others would plan but that don't make it wrong. You'll learn a lot from doing it and using it later. You'll know more about what you want or don't want in an anvil. Sometimes you have to go with the saying "Do SOMETHING! Even if it's wrong."

I made my Collaring tool out of 3/4" by 1" bar with the same smaller bits of 3/4" by 1" welded on for the raised bit where the collar fits between. Mild steel. I was surprised that after only a little use I have actually hammered open the cap in this thickness of metal. Initally this was hammering cold so that is more stress. Might just be my welds. But sounds like I may need a new configuration and or used some steel that is hardenable. Just the bit of hammer side swipe used to bend over the ears has opened the gap. Regardless. the Hot collaring did the trick to get the Trivet / wall decorations complete. I'll try to get some pics this evening if they haven't been wrapped and mailed out...

Unforgivin, I was thinking the same thing. I took my battery apart and was pondering how to make them easily replaceable by puting some springy metal clips in there that would make contact in the right areas. Then all that would be needed is to open up, replace and screw back together. I did not do that though. I bet someone could invent a kit that changes a given battery pack over to this kind of set up. I should invent that. I mean we already have that in flashlights. There isn't a lot of extra space though in these battery packs.

Interesting that when I got into forging I actually was having a bit of tendinitus in my hammer arm. This was pre-existing and not caused by blacksmithing. I worked through that and it has healed. Since the tendinitus cleared up I have been using the larger hammer and recently moved to 4#. I have no issues with tendinitus or pain whatsoever. I am now having some tendinitus in my other arm. Maybe I need to start hammering with it!