ThomasPowers

to my eye it has the beauty of utility, simplicity and ingenuousness!

There is a caste of travelling blacksmiths in India whose wives (plural) are their strikers. I used to have a picture of one, the fellow sitting on his haunches holding the piece while his wives were doing the heavy work. My wife never appreciated it like I did...

start with a project that's not very exacting....besides which it's fun to see the fellows 30 years younger than you watch you casually strike one handed with a short handled sledge the same weight as the two hander they are using---and getting more work out of it too!

Striking anvil is a sound investment. I was breaking in a new striker Wednesday night---used my anvil with the broken heel. *MUCH* less worry on both our parts! Go over your commands before starting things like "Hold, turn, Me, Cold, Center, push, pull, etc. Also go over how things generally progress: "I'll pull the hot metal out and place it on the anvil and "set it" with a couple of blows of my hammer and then say "start" and we will alternate till I say "Me or cold" For things like drawing out I'll tell the striker to hit the same spot on the anvil and I will move the piece back and forth

I thought the "blue flames" on a coal/coke fire showed it was a reducing fire and indicated carbon monoxide was present.

Trained craftspeople were a recognized form of loot during a conquest rather than smash and grab raids.

I don't recall pre-dark ages butted mail; can I have a cite? All the early stuff I've seen is riveted. Testing has shown that riveted mail links are about 10 *times* as strong as butted links of the same wire and size and as early armour was a real top end thing it would be like expecting your million dollar sports car to come from the factory with a bad paint job. So I'd be real excited to get a good cite on it being used pre dark ages! (BTW "The Celtic Sword", Radomir Pleiner, is a great source of information on the metallurgy of early ferrous swords.) Now I can cite several examples from more recent times---the Negroli book (Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance) has an example of very fine butted maille that was Renaissance parade armour and I have seen a Moro shirt that was butted but it was made in the 19th century (and of course the tons of modern butted mail) If you want a good dark ages smithing set up, a hole in the ground forge burning charcoal of course and two single action bellows does well on the fire side and a 15 pound "cube" anvil with a spike for a stump handles the anvil side. It's possible to find tongs and hammers that resemble roman ones at fleamarkets sometimes. Or make your own of course. I like pre 1000 smithing myself but I do draw the line at bag bellows; it's hard enough to get a bellows thrall to use wooden top/bottom ones! (and hard for me to work on my knees anymore so I generally translate the set up to waist+ height like is shown on the Heylstad Stave Church carvings Almost forgot a couple pre-dark ages references: "The Mastery and Uses of fire in Antiquity" Rehder, and Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, Scheel. I have some Migration period sources too if that's not too modern for you. One is about "The double edged swords of the German Migration Period" (as I translate the title, it's in German), published in the late 1930's and includes quite a lot of great photos of items that probably did not survive the war. It's the photos you want anyway as the text has the nationalistic slant you expect from much of the European archeological work of that period, sigh.

At least get the conversion unit to run your torch off a BBQ sized bottle *MUCH* cheaper! 1 firebrick forges are based on soft insulative firebrick, using hard firebrick is like using them for window panes: sure they can fit but they don't work well to see out of!

Start getting quotes from engineers talking about how blacksmithing improved their university and job prospects. I know of at least 1 metallurgist on this board whose blacksmithing was a major factor in getting his job with a large company. (and his parents were worried that I was going to get him to drop out of university and become a knifemaker----HA! I was pushing him to stay in, graduate and let a nice large company pay for all his pretty smithing toys and provide health benefits while he does smithing on the side.)

Learning how to evaluate sources is a basic skill when doing research whether reading medieval texts or on-line discussions. I fall down for many people in that I don't deal with pictures. As I'm tossing this stuff out upon the waters it doesn't bother me if folks ignore it.

Ahh did you ask everyone in those stores about finding an anvil or are you dedicated to paying the highest possible price? You probably want to buy a good condition used one from someone who has no use for it but wants to see it properly used. I found one in just a day just by asking around at Church at the coffee hour after the service---they gave it to me too. It's the people *NOT* in the business of making money selling anvils that will give you the best deals and to find them you have to TALK TO EVERYONE! Had a fellow here recently who kept wanting to just talk with tool dealers at the fleamarket. ALL my anvil purchases that resulted from fleamarkets were from people NOT selling tools; they didn't have the anvils on-site but back at home---less competition!!! Lets see the ones I remember were selling: greasy car parts; plumbing supplies, cleaned out garages/basements and this was in the middle of the city!

Yes it's adjustable for a reason. You should adjust it for the height of your dies and/or the thickness of your stock being worked.

Nothing particularly special about that anvil. I'd go with the new one if it's a good make. (Have you offered the same amount as the new one for it?)

Frosty himself is a deserving fellow needing a really great blade to fight off the sons of birches that are swarming this time of year!

I've seen a sewing pin forged with the triphammer mounted on Ptree's hat. Not a cross though...

I worry about sag too; an adjustable top hinge to deal with it is a common thing when the design doesn't

This is a rather common question here, may I suggest you mine the pages of replys to it here? One thing to search on is TPAAAT. What era of historical recreation? Vikings used quite small anvils that look little like a modern london pattern anvils---and rocks at times!

I don't quite understand why a NA burning 1 gallon of propane an hour is less efficient than a blown burner burning one gallon of propane per hour. To get efficiency having a number of forges of different sizes will allow you to only be heating what you need to be heating. As for natural gas---closest source is 10km from my shop and I don't even live in a remote area! Very hard to compare forges/burners as the variables are almost never fully controlled. Taking a propane forge to camping events with NO electricity for a km or two has meant that my NA forges get a lot more use than my blown forge; but when I need to heat a LOT of metal the larger blown forge/gas hog does the job like my NA ones can't.

As you use the clutch to change the speed and force of the top die in use how do you plan to do this for the DC motor? Foot control?

Actually a quite thin dead soft silver liner can be made---cut a strip of silver and bend it into a pipe a bit longer than the ring and silver solder it and then slide it in the ring and burnish it up along the sides. Should last for years with normal wear and tear and easy to replace when/if it does wear out. This is rather trivial; but many comunity colleges have jewelry making classes that one can enroll in or ask a student to do so as a project. Note that such classes are generally excellent training for making knife and scabbard fittings as well

Very nice; how is the grillwork for the windows coming along?

Now to turn things on it's head; I've heard a lot of whoppers from smiths who don't know more than say 100 years of the history of the craft and so make pronouncements on it from a very recent and limited knowledgebase.

I try not to insult an idiot parent telling his kids mis-truths about smithing; so I have worked some lead ins less abrasive than "You stupid twit!" "While it is generally believed that smiths XYZ..." "In earlier times they commonly thought that..." "Hollywood would like us to believe that..." "Video games don't really portray reality..." "Many people have been told that..." And having a piece of scrap wood handy to burn with "cold iron" is always useful. I did a demo for a bunch of cubscouts once---a camporee---and what ended up being most popular was taking some 3/16" steel wire and making a couple of branding irons and branding their pack number on scrap wood for each group. (I missed being escorted out of the building for a lay-off and so spent a vacation day I could have been paid for; but it was time well spent---15 years with that company; but I expected it to happen.) My best kids story is of my younger adopted sister: raised in Las Cruces NM she went to visit our older sister in VA. After deplaning at Dullus they road through the miles of VA woodland and finally my younger sister leaned forward and said: "Who waters all these trees?" because back where she grew up in NM every tree was a *wanted* tree with irrigation to get it to grow.

Close to two decades ago there was a write up on the web about doing that; 2 different people doing it two different ways. Big problem is that the throw of a jackhammer isn't much so you have to have a system to keep it in contact with the work. Also the jackhammer is not designed to be held rigidly, (as the write up said it depended on the belly of the user hanging over it as I recall) The author used heavy springs to allow it to have some freedom. So it could be done and would probably be a LOT more work than building one of the common pneumatic or mechanical designs and not work as well.

Ah annealing *is* a heat treat, it's just not hardening!