ThomasPowers

Since you are in the USA; look up the cost of a several million dollar liability insurance policy---don't forget to mention to the agent you plan to use un-certified equipment. This may put the cost of effective shielding in perspective. Of course it you do serious damage to someone's eyes with arc burn expect to be giving them 1/3 of your income for the rest of your life...

Many places will require one of their own pattern makers to do any patterns they cast to be sure that shrinkage and drafting is taken into account. Secondly can the bearing cap be made from Bronze? You should be able to handle casting that at home!

An easy check is to turn it over and look at the bottom the HB's are well known for their Hourglass shaped indentation---though on the early ones it was quite shallow and may wear away to flat.

Isn't it refreshing to be getting closer to the earlier days of the craft where a smith had to examine and test each new load of metal to know what they had and what it would be good for! (Moxon mentions this in the 1703 edition of "Mechanics Exercises")

scale is a high grade iron ore and a smithy produces quite a bit of it. Not knowing where you are I can't suggest whether magnetite sand might be found in streams. You can also buy magnetite as a pollution control material (as I recall shipping was more expensive than the material---had a friend buy 400# of it) Bog iron is available in several countries especially Northern Europe and places on the eastern seaboard of the USA. I don't advise pre processed taconite pellets as they are optimized for blast furnaces and are way too slaggy for a bloomery) 10% is a very low ore for a bloomery especially for someone with no experience; expect to make nothing but slag with it.

anvilfire has had a weight calculator for years calculates weight for a wide range of metals too.

Of course such listings are notoriously iffy---like bearing races being 52100, the small ones are; the large ones are more likely case hardened 9620. Also the jackhammer bits being S5 We had a fellow who has sharpened over a million of them and only a handful were anything fancier than a medium carbon steel. (Machinerys Handbook says that S5 would be good for jackhammer bits and it certainly would---of course Titanium would make excellent car bodies and solid gold makes a truly superior frying pan ---you see any around?)

I certainly hope you are being appropriately remunerated, very fine work especially by hand!

Is it mild steel or is it A36? I have some sticks of A36 do that and others not. I attributed it to the nature of the beast.

Be sure to tell them what you want it for! Many places are afraid of passing on a damaged piece in case some fool tries to use it on their forklift and injures themselves or others.

Stop by my place Saturday and if I'm not working in Mexico I'll give you a couple of pounds of "knife grade" steels. Don't know about buying stuff at big box stores they are always so much more expensive than fleamarkets, junk stores, garage sales, scrapyards and road kill steel... Seems like most mechanics have a pile of coil springs around the place somewhere too. 1 of them cut down opposing sides makes a dozen or so ( pieces each one suitable for a good sized knife and having a lot of the same stuff you can actually figure out the proper working and heat treat of it! (actually for a beginner 3 cuts would be better as you want to start with smaller blades to shorten the learning curve)

Can't help you the dozen or so years I was part of a bloomery team we used clay and straw and silt---going for a Y1k scandinavian short stack bloomery: 3 shovelfuls of sandy silt, two head sized bundles of chopped straw and on shovelful of powdered clay mix with your hands with so little water that it's positively painful! Now there are plans for a bloomery in "The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity" Rehder using modern materials and designs; appendix 4 "A furnace to reliable make a bloom of iron"

Maybe we can get Frosty to slide down to Quad-State sometime!

And where did they say the ones they get from time to time come from? I'd ask around farm implement dealers and repairers too

I prefer my upsetting block on the floor.

Yes! No! Maybe depending on the projects and how you work. They are good basic hammers and I pick them up when I find them for under US$8 at the fleamarket. I would agree with dressing the face(s) and adjusting the handle to your hand is a basic for most all hammers. You may also want to put in a positive indication of which end is which in your handle---had a lot of students using one switch ends without noticing it until they hit their workpiece.

But your excuse is better than my excuse!

I have an original motor mount but it will be a couple of weeks before I get back up to my shop. I will try to remember to shoot it. It's off the hammer at the moment and so I can get shots in all directions. Mimic??? it's pretty massive.

Naw Fred Moore's anvil collection is just dimpling the space-time continuum making all the good stuff to slide towards us and away from the coasts...

I think she means rotated 90 deg so the handle sticks *up* compared to that. I have a travel set up where I use the blower with the handle up and so far it's worked.

Yes that sounds like the weight rather than the serial number ---weight would only be missing 1 digit where a serial number would be missing several. Where is the 79 located on it?

Buying a 60# hunk of steel at a scrap yard would probably be better than either one and at my local scrap yard would cost US$12.

Got a feed store nearby? Post a "wanted" poster on their bulliten board with tear off phone numbers. Are you a member of any groups in your area? (church, scouts, social, political, etc?) send the word out! I found an anvil in anvil poor NM in a day just by mentioning in church that I was hunting one---fellow *gave* it to me! Wating for folk to post ads trying to sell one is the slow expensive method.

Anything used to crush ore is going to laugh at a hand hammer---get to pounding!

Note that for over 2000 years an anvil generally has looked like a good sized chunk of iron/steel; for about 200 it's looked like a london pattern anvil. Don't get stuck on it's shape. You may want to search this site for "striking anvil" to get some ideas.