ThomasPowers

Look in old newspapers for information on the building of it too. I have an old book on prisons I got for the pictures of the blacksmith shops in some of them. Don't know if it would help and it will be several weeks before I get back to my research library---which seems to be gradually migrating down here question by question...

Generally tools are made from a medium carbon steel so they will be tough and not brittle. Try a small knife and see how it hardens.

Sorry for the typo; rereading it Fresh it leaps out: it is in the NE not NW

So if there is a member that lives two hours away from where they meet and he has a coal source an hour or two further away that puts it in Kansas City you are not interested? I am currently 5 hours away from my coal source; but am willing to share it with folks that live in the big city only 1 hour away from it.

Exactly what is "huge" to *you*. I prefer rectangular forge tables to have room for tongs and not so much room on the working sides of the forge. A third arm is much more helpfull than excess room on the working sides. I'd suggest doing a quick and dirty mock-up and test it! What you like may very well be different than what other people like.

And it's handy to have both large and small vises I have one of each on two workbenches at opposite ends as well as my striking vise---a large one near the forge tied into the building structure---telephone pole buried 4-5' and concreted in....

Traditionally you celebrated the finishing of a copper roof by buying the roofers a barrel of beer and having them apply the results to the roof to start the patina off---so another ammonia process....

and the stuff you can't see is carbon monoxide which builds up over time so best to keep your exposure lower than the clearing rate!

I'll mention that the Meteorite Mashers are a great group! The others are too I'd bet; but I know some of the MM's.

Cute! Since I often work high carbon steel I tend not to have water in the shop at all just for that reason---a hot piece of high carbon will put an Olympic Gymnast to shame hunting for a container of water to self destruct in!

Weaponsmithing, the first scene in Conan and katanaphilia all in the first post! Are you sure you were not at the Albuquerque medieval faire last Saturday? Perhaps they were your doppelgangers... Looking at the one you built I would say that the working end needed to be about twice as deep---with a way to get the metal into the proper zone. Also are you using compressed air? That looks like a quite small pipe leading to it. Charcoal doesn't require much pressure and a fan of some sort will generally work much better than a compressor. (I've always wondered about the folks that want to put hours on expensive machinery rather than cheap stuff---when the cheap stuff will do a better job) Far more important than set up are skills---I once welded up a billet using charcoal sieved from desert bonfires in a sheet steel fire pot using a hand crank blower and a piece of RR rail for the anvil and a carpenter's claw hammer---showing a person how it was done. Too many people waste time waiting for the perfect set up never realizing its the time spent working with what they have that will help them improve the most---and learn what needs to be improved rather than what they guess would be perfect.

The answer is simple: to quote 'Big Trouble in Little China'---"Marry them both!"

IIRC the IBA conference is the first weekend in June; yup "INDIANA BLACKSMITHING ASSOCIATION 2014 CONFERENCE to be held at the Tipton County Fairgrounds in Tipton, IN, on June 6-8, 2014." I'd make a wager you could find everything you need to get started there---and not too bad a drive; I'm planning to drive from New Mexico to the Quad-State conference in Ohio this fall. Hope to meet you there. Friday, given good weather, I should be wandering around in Lederhosen with a hawaiian and the disreputable red hat as a tribute for a good smithing friend who passed away.

Well I think that is a bit over romanticized. Remember that even 200 years ago a lot of stuff was made in factories. Know why native Americans used a chisel edge on their trade knives? A lot of them were case hardened wrought iron and a double bevel would soon wear through the steel part leaving a soft blade. A chisel edge has a steel cutting edge all the way up the blade. Not much pride in what they made. Ever read "The Jungle" not much pride there either. Look at the derrivation of the term Shoddy, pride in workmanship 150+ years ago? Not necessarily so. Some craftsman had pride in their work. some didn't----just like today!

I'd cast them in AL; probably more than a hundred backyard AL casters for 1 cast iron caster.

KUBUNTU anyone? Hmm I got my favorite pair of tongs in Ohio at the South High Fleamarket in Columbus---cost me US$1.50; I bought another neat pair at Quad-State a couple of years back was in a big pile of ugly tongs for $10 a piece. I didn't slow down as I usually buy at $5 to $8 for "special" tongs. Then stopped dead and went back and paid $10 for 1 smallish pair in the pile---they were commercially made titanium tongs. If you can't get a-holt of NOB try SOFA

naw just studying this stuff for a long time. One of the things you learn is that the archeological record can lie though preservation issues---like we have almost no viking era/area linens or other cellouse fibers because the soil destroys them while preserving wools; but the tools for working bast fibers are found and references in sagas and other writing mentions them. An oddity is the one mentioned by Eric Sloane where he found an almost unused old tool once---only to discover the reason it was unused was that it was pretty much worthless and so had been discarded to be found unworn a century or two later. I am sure some cast iron ASOs are hiding in some basements and garages and will provoke unwarrented excitement when they are found 100 years hence...

swapping bottles is the higher cost method allright. Using a small forge with one of Stephen Gensheimer's burners a bottle seems to last forever. And I guess I do get a bit of a boost as my propane dealer counts the 100# bottle fills on my BBQ tank cards (100# bottle for the kitchen stove---the joys of country living) On the other hand our propane dealer came in on a Saturday once just to get me a couple of bottles filled! Small town living... If you have a good coal source close coal is DEFINITELY cheaper! If you have a good chimney set up you usually don't get smoked out with coal. A lot of people seem to have neither though. Coal smoke is NOT good for you---just the radiation aspects are not good deep in your lungs... All my propane comes out of my $25 weekly allowance + random sales and donations so I do track it fairly well as the allowance also covers books, fleamarkets, scrapyards and other vices and vises!

A couple of years ago I was at quad-state and I noticed that the "going rate" on vises had increased and so I figured I'd better stock up. So I picked up a 6.5" vise in good condition for $50 and a 3" very old indeed vise for $20 (had one expert say it was pre-1800) Now they both needed springs and mounting plates making for an enjoyable Saturday in the shop. In general I have found that if you *need* something fast they are quite expensive buy if you have so many they are piling up in the corners of the shop you will be tripping over them at garage sales for $5. The biggest factors in finding them cheap is "CONSTANT VIGILANCE" and "NETWORKING"

Of course some of this is an artifact of survival---the junk tools generally were thrown away or broken or scrapped over the years leaving the good ones in a higher proportion. 100 year old catalogs often show junk tools as well as good and excellent tools (Sears & Roebuck for example)

Falconer; do you have the high tech heat treating equipment to heat treat D2? It really needs the proper temps, times, ramping, etc to get the best from it. S7 is more forgiving; *however* as mentioned both those alloys are overkill for a hammer. S7 (and H13) is beloved by smiths for making tooling like punches, chisels, slitters etc as they have high hot hardness. I would save S7 for those items---or trading stock!!! D2: well if you don't have access to the high tech heat treating equipment I'd use it as trading stock.

Are you swapping bottles or getting re-fills? That price seems high propane was a bit over 3 dollars a gallon when I got my re-fill on Friday (and I got 20% off with my frequent filler card) my larger forge uses about $1 an hour and I typically make a "trinket" as the by-piece that will pay for the gas for the run. My smaller forge uses 50 cents an hour. Cheaper than a movie! (especially as the nearest movie theater is 50 miles away...)

I have to assume you are in the USA from the stores mentioned; but if you want more specific answers a general location helps a lot. Here in the USA, (Ohio and New Mexico), I have so far bought 3 buckets of ball peen hammers never having spent more than a dollar a piece. Note I do spend a considerable amount of time at fleamarkets and junk stores and the odd garage sale hunting stuff down; but I don't watch TV (don't have one!) and so it's part of my entertainment budget... Now most of the cheap hammers will need new handles and so I pick up a bunch of them when I find them cheap as well so that would bring the price for a hammer up to US$2... Note heating to the critical temp and cooling in air is NOT ANNEALING; it's normalizing. Cooling much slower than that is annealing and will make it softer. (I once showed an old trick to some folks trying to use Tremont nails for a viking boat build. They were having trouble getting them soft enough to use a rivets and I showed them the trick about massing them together and/or using a larger helper piece to provide enough heat to slow down the cooling. I liked to put them in a SS coffee creamer, heat to temp and then shut down the propane forge with them still in it.) If your reading has not discussed the difference between Annealing and Normalizing (though armourmakers often use the wrong terms!) and the need for a certain level of carbon in a steel to make it harden---heating to red and quenching in water will soften steel if it is extremely low in carbon!---I would suggest reading better sources: "The Complete Bladesmith" James Hrisoulas for example. If your local public library doesn't have a copy ask them about Inter Library Loan. Also look up "One Firebrick Forge" on the net, a simple plumbers propane torch will run a one fire brick forge up to forging temps and, as mentioned before, Drill rod is good knifemaking stock and available at good hardware stores.

" coal or coke is the hands down winner in all areas.Is quieter, makes for a hotter fire, welding is easy, is safer, more versatile. Less likely to burn yourself as fire goes up and out as it should instead of down and out and in your face. Pleasant vs unpleasant smell." I feel that perhaps you are comparing a specific gas forge with a specific coal forge; because in my experience almost all of those are the other way around for different forges! Like many things in smithing the devil is in the details! "Quieter": I've worked with a bunch of coal forges where the blower was noiser than a ribbon burner "Makes for a hotter fire"---I've melted mild steel in my gas forge; as has a friend in his as well. How much hotter than melted do you need your forge and WHY? Safer? how fast can you shut down your coal forge without a steam explosion? Toxic fumes? The City of Albuquerque Fire Marshal sure feels that a propane forge is safer than a coal or charcoal forge. For my Demo Saturday, his ruling was that a coal or charcoal forge could not be closer than 25' to a structure (So no shade!!!!!) however a propane forge could be within 3' of a structure---anvil and tools in the shade, forge just outside... "Less likely to burn yourself as fire goes up and out as it should instead of down and out and in your face"---guess you have never used a vertical propane forge or one with an air curtain. " Pleasant vs unpleasant smell" burning propane doesn't have much of an odor, burning coal can give me a raging sulfur smoke sinus headache for hours---I guess it's more pleasent if you are into pain... Finally may I point out that since coal is the "hands down winner" for a stationary shop it is very odd that many if not most professional full time smiths and industrial smiths don't use coal. Me I have about the same number of propane and coal forges and use the forge that suits the project and external factors---(can't use coal at my rental house; love to use it at my shop back at the house I own...; just did a day long demo where the city Fire Marshal mandated propane, etc)

First look through a good ornamental iron supply catalog and see if they have anything you can use. If not then think about doing green sand cast AL they will be painted after all...