ThomasPowers

I was on oil drilling rigs when they were still "throwing the chain" to tighten a pipe joint. I got to see one where the chain broke. Due to extreme luck it was the dead of winter and the hands were wearing a ton of layers of stoutly made canvas and quilting. It didn't cut him in half, just some broken ribs...

Now throw in slang in different languages, (I'm going to include the cajun rig hands in this one...) At least nowadays folks can take a picture of something with a phone and say I want one of these only dis-discombobulated and in blue...

Noise shouldn't be much of an issue as my next door---across the field---neighbor irrigates with a dedicated diesel engine connected to a 8" output pump. I'd have to be egregious to out noise that; of course he is on Farm land and I'm on House land. If I could have kept that field I'd qualify for Farm zoning...but couldn't have afforded our house. My big sales are generally at the State Fair, I don't know if they will be having it this year and it generally was a couple of hundred; nice scrapyard money but not what I need to call down lightening from the heavens, Mwa-hahahahahahahahaha... I thought about drilling down into the Socorro Magma Bubble for heat/steam; but it turns out the state is fussy about magma powered home smithies. I could rig up a small engine to run the powerhammer as they don't care how the shaft get's spun---I saw water driven, both wheel and turbine, air hammers in Germany; but the increase in production would require power to my Bader, a tumbler, Lights, etc. (And the welder would be nice...) Drat, nobody seems to want a kidney, extra sweet! I have a cunning plan; I'm going to tell my wife that we are moving out to the place we looked at further out---dirt road, 4000 sq ft shop, 600 sq ft house. Then I won't have this problem anymore and everyone can come to the estate sale...

Interesting; I've seen several smithies with a hoist to lift oxen off their feet to shoe them; but that method looks like it would work better when you were on the road/trail and not near a smithy. There used to be the "Camino Real" going from Veracruz Mexico through El Paso Texas and up to Santa Fe New Mexico that had a lot of oxcart traffic on it during Spanish Colonial days. It passed within a mile or two from my house.

Not a horror; a proud veteran of many years of heavy toil and still ready to put in a long day's work. I lift a toast to it!

That's what apprentices were for! Journeymen for Strikers. Having only a single smith in the smithy is a modern perversion!

No Poles in my area, all under ground. To avoid the septic field they want to go straight from the buried mainline 91 feet to the shop and set a transformer on a pad and put up a meter on the shop wall. Transformer is free. Base cost is almost double the couple of thousand I'd saved up. Wife says no. I should have looked into it when I was still making big bucks down along the border. Depressing++

Hard vacuum and moving to the desert; both are big helps with rust issues!

I really wish my Father was still here to have seen it. He worked for NASA during the 1960's; I once asked him his thoughts about commercial spacecraft----he was all for them, said that anything that got us working in space was a good thing!

Soaking your shirt with sweat also decreases it's flammability, must be the salt... A heavy layer of sweat also helps with forge fleas. (Used to forge in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the summer when I was younger.)

Finally you do know that RR spikes are not a good alloy for knives right?

No the worst time for a beard is when it gets long enough to get caught in machinery! I've forge trimmed mine a few times but never kissed a lathe or drillpress.

Note that they blow on both the push and the pull stroke only at turnover does it stop pushing air.

Just got the estimate from the CoOp; it's about double what I have saved up for it and that does not include the electrician's cost. So it looks like it won't be anytime soon. Anyone know if postmortal temps are appropriate for hot rasping? I know the sulfur is terrible for the steel...

Any place local that does crane or large equipment repair? If you do buy online make sure that you are getting a ball bearing and not just a steel ball. Plain steel balls are sold for a variety of uses but are not hardened like a Ball Bearing.