ThomasPowers

I have several old ones made that way. I don't notice a difference. Your grip is the overriding variable in transmitting shock---though I will admit that steel handles tend to be painful to me. One tradition is to make a welded up jelly roll of wrought iron for the body and weld on the face(s) The advantage of this is that WI has a very specific direction to it's structure and rolling it up along the length means you are not getting possible shear faults running from the face into the body. I was cutting some 1" WI rod with a hacksaw Sunday and I would cut about 1/3 the diameter in and then break it off using my large postvise. You could really see where the bars used to make merchant bar were welded as it would preferentially run down the weld line a bit before breaking off. I strongly encourage you to make your hammers and use them---but then I have a notorious historical bent and have been known to forge with a 200 year old hammer on an anvil made in 1828 (date stamped William Foster) and use a postvise dated to before 1800... It would be interesting to check out the shock transmission; but to do so properly would take quite a bit of set up: one way would be to cnc a steel hammer to the exact shape of the forged one and install some sensors in the handle or around the handle at the grip and use a robot arm to swing them identically against a standard target---anyone need a senior project in school?

Any idea on their previous use? I recently brought home a large outer bearing race to use as a dishing form that's about that size. I'm overdue to make some cauldrons again...

EXPECTO CURMUDGEON! Why? Learning to tune your forge by eye and by ear will let you use any propane forge properly even your own when the gauge gets dinged and is giving you a false reading. There is no "magic number" and folks arguing about what they run at is pretty much like folks arguing about their mpg on their trucks with the added caveat that their odometer may be as much as 50% off! Last Wednesday I adjusted the regulator several times depending on what we were forging and how many people had steel in the forge at the same time and how wide the front door was ajar to get it all in and out. Never looked at a gauge; kept an eye on the colour temp of the inside of the forge; how much of the firebrick was screaming hot, how hot the steel was getting and how long it took to get there. Since you are tool poor at the moment why waste money on something you don't really need?

I got a 6" post vise out of an *old* car repair place once (old as it had been in continuous business at the same spot since 1918! and so of course they had a complete smithing set up left over from when that was the way to fix then newfangled horseless carriages!---also wood working tools from way back when the bodies were often wood based) Most of the other tooling was buried in dark corners but the vise had been in use continuously and had a hammered patina over every inch of the upper section.

Print out the info on him and ask about their St Dunstan's Day Discount!

Might be a nice one for Postman to have a photo of!

I'm going to ring the anvil in his honour--- St Dunstan as the story goes Once pull'd the Devil by the nose With red-hot tongs which made him roar that he was heard 3 miles or more

Yup it's all there and in very surprisingly good shape! Most I've seen/owned have been beat to flinders *and* were cast iron not steel. A neat trick I once saw in Stroud OK was where a 5th generation smith had built a frame to hold one flipped over---the original face was beaten up but the base was smooth and made a good "table" to flatten plow points to. I use mine to hold items in the hardies. (currently a 100# CI ball and at the other end a bench mount whitney punch)

So how much are you looking to pay for this apprenticeship? Over on this side of the pond we've had long discussions and came up with for every hour of 1 on 1 instruction by an expert there should be about 10 hours of "grunt labour" and most small shops don't have enough grunt labour available to trade.

leaf spring is a quite good die material for this sort of thing and found most places in the world these days.

So; I visited my favorite quite small local scrapyard yesterday; told the jefe that I had my allowance on me and hoped to find some good stuff---so he directs me to the large bottom of a water tank next to the scales and I proceeded to drag out 4 WI wagon tyres of differing sizes; the rest of the yard only produced: a cast iron skillet (remains of last meal in it so I know it wasn't used for lead), a 4' wagon tyre strap, a small thin bit of WI, 20 large nails 12" long, 3/8" diameter---nicely rusty! A strip of rock screen made from woven rod to use to hold harding tooling with 1" stems, a 2' chunk of 7/8" sucker rod with the male end on it. Oh yes a bit of old chain for wind bell use. 130 pounds for US$26 and over 100 pounds of it is wrought iron... (and yes I was wearing the disreputable red hat with the WI dowsing horns on it...)

If twice a year you ground of a 1/16th of an inch how many years before it became too small to use? Compare that to your statistical lifespan estimates. Times a wasting---get to pounding!

As a gedanken experiment think of how you would reword your original question if posting was free but you had to pay US$10 per line of answer. Would you have included all the information we didn't know to start to avoid paying for the "I already know that" lines? If you think about it; asking people to spend time on your questions is asking them for money; many of us do it as a method of paying it forward---not to mention inflating the market for our hoarded tools when we age out of the craft...Anyway it behooves the questioner to make the job of the people donating their time as easy as possible. Some folks here are very very good smiths but nobody can read your mind----save maybe Frosty: there's been a number of times I would write out a long post only to drop it when I saw that he had posed the *identical* post a minute earlier! However the voices assure me that he's not monitoring me on the mind control laser satellites he forgot to pay his bill... If you don't like 5160, 1070 or even 1084 can be used. I would avoid most high alloy steels until you have a proven track record heat treating them. In general the higher in carbon you go the more brittle you can end up with without special cautions. If you realize that the cutting edge on many Japanese swords is like a shallow hardening 1050 that the clay hardening techniques leaves glass hard and brittle---traditional japanese blades tend not to be "strong". If you take lessons on their use they will teach you how to straighten bent blades as that is a fairly common occurrence---and look up the role of ashi! Now if you want to use non-traditional methods I highly commend L6 to your attention both for machete and katana---look at some of Howard Clarke's L6 katana blades!!!!

Last time I visited the fleamarket in my home town I ran into another smith there who told me that there wasn't any blacksmithing tools there so I might as well go home. He was amazed when I showed him a hand made hammer he had missed...constant vigilance is the key to "finding finds"

I thought it was Leif the Lucky....

Depending on where you live; it's 60-70 miles each way from my shop.

I see a birch wasn't enough you are going to try a locomotive this time....(a friendly bump)

I used to live in the blacksmiths' happy hunting grounds---central OH and I finally put a limit on how many post vises I would own at one time and then would trade up whenever i bought another one that was better or pass it on if the rest were better. my limit was 10. Now in my shop I have 2 post vises, a big and a 4" one, mounted on 2 separate work benches (4) + a big one attached to a utility pole supporting the shop roof, a portable vise for Demo's a smaller *old* vise for historical demos (evaluated as being pre 1800) (6) One on long term loan at my church where I teach smithing on a regular basis (7) and I still plan to mount a large vise in a gazinta in the middle of the floor of the shop for a removable vise with 360 degree access. (8) leaving only a couple for future use...

Yup Biggs is still there though the young folks stationed there are more restricted from Juarez these days. Still hot and dry---we stick stock into the forge to cool it down and into the sunlight to heat it up!

The anvil is right by the bed---how sweet! My wife already says I have a "harem of anvils" and is quite insistent about them NOT showing up in the bedroom...

Closeness has a thickness function as well as not marring the work if you are doing it in 1/4" material they should be spread quite far apart but in 1" material they can be quite close---just far apart enough that a hot piece doesn't get the other holes marked on it's surface during use.

*yes*

And the bottom; what shape is any indentation?

Rebound? though the flat horn shows the make was clueless about what an anvil horn does...like seeing a car with sq wheels...

As another "non-compost-mantis" fellow All I can add is that you don't want a burner too close to the front of the forge as the hot gasses don't have enough dwell time. Set it up and use it and decide how you want to tweak the hot spot(s) in your forge and when you go to reline make your tweaks and see if you like it better that way. Forges change over time---would you expect to wear the same set of clothes the entire day if you were going hiking and then swimming and then to a formal dance? A forge will change as your needs and likes change.