ThomasPowers

You could have dropped double that and folks would think you did OK *especially* in CA! Nice little travel anvil---now to work on finding it's bug brother! I have a 93# A&H for my travel anvil and a 515# Fisher for the main shop anvil

Magnitite is magnetic, the black sand of gold panners and the iron sand of tamahagane smelters... limonite, goethite, etc isn't.

Shoot I don't even quench A36 these days, everything gets normalized. And I have run into HC support arms on old RR telegraph lines IIRC; thanks for reminding me. Of course mine were so old any Galvanization was gone by then...

Shortages in wartime are a big push towards figuring out different ways to do things. I once was able to attend a talk by the first woman Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs; turns out that a ship carrying brazilian quartz used for radios of the time was torpedo'd; and folks decided we needed to be able to grow our own and as she had the advanced degree in exactly the right area and would not be drafted...

SOFA has a neat trick for electric blowers---they have theirs routed through a foot switch so you have to stand on it to run the blower---a lot less coal used and a WHOLE LOT LESS steel burnt up!

Buffalo made forges from small little things to giant major shop ones; where does yours fit in? Try calling some local roofers about sourcing used tin---my shop has a nice hammered look to it due to a major hailstorm locally---and was free!

Me, I don't worry about that latter part!

YES and with normalization you can even use it for other things that do not require a more stringent spec'd metal.

I use expanded metal for my grate in my coal forge. Never had it melt through but it does scale away. I'm using some of the thicker expanded stuff right now and it's lasted for about 60 hours of forging including a lot of forge welding so far---It's nice to be able to pull the grate and hammer off the flux-cicles before re-building the fire. Of course I am using a hand crank blower; an electric one tends to heat things up more.

Folding usually decreases the carbon content---like in the japanese swords where they often start at nearly 2% C and by repeated folding and welding take the carbon content to .5%

Think also about getting a Fisher anvil thwap thwap instead of TING! TING!

YES! NO! MAYBE?--------Your question is indeterminante without more data; eg: Since your forge will be 40' from the wall and 20 ' from the ceiling and you will be doing only small items in a bean can forge you need NO fireproofing. Since your forge will abut the wall and the ceiling is only 4' above it and you are working 2" sq stock---your shop has already burnt down. Do you have to meet local codes? Insurance requirements? Business or hobby? The only general statements I can come up with is that having a fireproofed structure is just a good idea in general---never having to worry about a stray piece of hot steel flying across the shop and disappearing. Also forges have a controlled heat; I recently talked with our campsite fire marshall who wanted an enourmous area cleared around the forge due to the heat it supposedly put off. I pointed out that I spend a large part of 6-8 hours with my "wedding tackle" less than 2' from the fire wearing combustible cotton clothing with nary a singe... In my 20'x30'x10' shop I have all steel walls and ceiling---bar a section of fiberglass as a skylight located 15' down the shop form the forge area. It was cheaper to build that way!

My favorite is a straight peen; it's an oldie and the straightpeen part looks rather like a chunk of 1" round stock attached to the hammer (not made that way, commercially drop forged I believe) with that broad smooth peen and the horn of my main shop anvil I can draw out stock easily.

The scale that falls around your anvil is a high grade iron ore. Dragging a magnet in local streams should work too. Biggest tip is try to participate in a smelt with folks who know what they are doing first!

The first question is gonna be WHAT ALLOY? Followed by how did you heat treat it? Otherwise it's like asking "so I need to carry a load; is my truck big enough?" without telling us how big a load or how big a truck you have.

Just picked up a book on the painter Bruegel and saw a knife in one of his pictures that was a really good match for yours when it had a wood handle. "Classics of the World's Great Art: The Complete Paintings of Bruegel" copyright 1967 Standard book number: 8109-5502-4 The peasants' wedding. The book has a closeup that shows the knife well on the main table under the elbow of a fellow handing bows of something around.

There are *TONS* of blacksmiths in the Pennsylvania region; perhaps if you could narrow that down a bit we can suggest a local group to start attending meetings and getting to know the local smiths. And if you are near the western end it would REALLY be worth your while to see about attending Quad-State in Troy OH in a couple of weeks---I attend from New Mexico about 3000 mile round trip whenever I can! You can camp onsite to hold costs down and perhaps you could carpool to hold travel expenses down.

How about a |__| piece that has the ends of the open section mounted on the side of the anvil stand with some looseness so it hangs down when not in use and rotates up with a short rod bent around the middle and resting against the base of the anvil on the side to hold it up? My large commercial coal forge has a similar set up only the rod to hold it up reached the ground and slipped underneat the forge when not in use. (The lugs it fastened to on the forge were cast proud of the side so it came with it originally)

If you want to drill the hole with a hot piece make it smaller than the final piece and experiment to see what gives you the best "preform" to do the final heat setting. I like finding branches that have a distinct "pith" to form a channel that a hot rod follows. When I was on my camp out I found that I had left the drillbit to mount my postvise to a 1" plywood table top back on the counter at home. So I predrilled a smaller hole and then tapered a piece of sq stock and used it as a burning awl rotating it as I pushed. did a great job! Do they have pecan available in South Africa?

did you miss the part where he said he had removed the galvanization with muriatic acid before forging it? Once it's removed it can't kill you! It is unusual to have highC stuff galvanized though, OTOH some of the early car bumpers were made of highC strap stock---could it have been old chrome instead of galvanization? Were the edges nicely rounded?

so check out the face with the ball bearing test. If rebound is good go for it!

lets see I turn on the gas and light the forge; then turn on the blower with the air choked all the way off and add air until I get the loudest flame and the impingement zone glows brightest. If the forge is too hot then I back off the gas some and lower the air to match once again; if it's not hot enough I raise the gas pressure and adjust the air to match. NOT KNOWING YOUR EXACT BURNER SET UP I can't give you a pressure to start with. My blown forge runs fairly low---lower than my aspirated forge that I start at 10 PSI---realizing that gauges can be VERY VERY OUT of Whack! My suggestion is to visit someone using a similar forge and see how they do it rather than trying to guess if we are using the same terms the same way.

Mounting brackets are not vise specific as they are loose parts and can transfer between vises easily or get lost and replaced---I've done a dozen or so mounting brackets over the years; yet made none of the vises they are on! However the simple lines and the plain screwbox lead me to *guess* Columbian. Check carefully under the paint on thetop part of the back jaw as they are sometimes marked there.

See if you can find anything on Scrapmascus and a smith named Billy Merritt who could probably forge weld water and adamantite together...

The most fun has been adapting top tools as hardy tooling in the big anvils. It's usually fairly easy to forge down a handled top tool to fit the 1.5" hardy holes---especially using my large screw press to get nice smooth parallel sides. So top tooling that has been junked from mushroomed striking ends makes very nice bottom tools!