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I Forge Iron

ThomasPowers

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Everything posted by ThomasPowers

  1. Ten Hammers, I heard on the bounce, that my Grandfather thinks I'm the only one of the grandkids or great grandkids or great great grandkids that could weather another great depression---he taught me well!
  2. Note NOT a foundry mark as it was a forged anvil.
  3. Don't recall that my 500+# Fisher has any nubs...
  4. Repeat after me "E-BAY is generally a TERRIBLE PLACE to buy ANVILS if you want them CHEAP" "E-BAY is generally a TERRIBLE PLACE to buy ANVILS if you want them CHEAP" "E-BAY is generally a TERRIBLE PLACE to buy ANVILS if you want them CHEAP" "E-BAY is generally a TERRIBLE PLACE to buy ANVILS if you want them CHEAP" Now give it some thought: folks on E-Bay are trying to get the maximum price from their anvils they can get. They are often basing their expectations on what collectors anvils or anvils in extremely anvil poor areas have got. And then you still have to pay SHIPPING! (Often shipping is higher than what I have bought similar anvils for near to me.) Beating the bushes will get you the best prices *and* they will generally be local to you! Remember the internet is NOT the BEST way to go about doing *many* things! (And I've worked as a Software Engineer for over 25 years!)
  5. I got to see a "base anvil" where the top wasn't flat to it and cracked the bottom anvil when they shot it.
  6. I would have bought that at that price! (and passed it on to a student at a similar price.) Doesn't take much change in measurements to make a big change in weight when you are talking steel/iron! And style makes a different too, I once had an anvil with a 3" wide face, weighed 199 pounds (HB swell horned farrier's pattern)
  7. Viking ones tend not to be that heavy and definitely don't have handling or hardy holes in them. I'll go with "old" but not "ancient" and probably built in a blacksmith's shop rather than by an anvil manufacturer
  8. Seems funny that when you first start it can be so hard to build a forge that works; but after some experience it seems to be hard to not build a forge that works! Have you given any thought to twin single action bellows as were used in the middle ages?
  9. I would make a hardy tool that has a smaller horn, (actually I have several that I have made from structural steel line up pins) Making the tip of the horn any more pointed is making a tool to injure yourself. Many old anvils had a horn made from just low carbon wrought iron and that seems to have worked often for several hundred years.
  10. Sounds to me like 1: you did not have a properly dressed hammer 2: you don't have hammer control that comes with PRACTICE BEFORE YOU MAKE A BLADE 3: all of the above!
  11. In general you want insulative firebrick for a propane forge save for the floor as mentioned. You can use the hard stuff but you will use a LOT more propane to get and keep your forge at temp; more of the "I want to save $20 so I can spend $200 extra on fuel" sort of thing. Check for a local pottery supply and see what they have for kilns.
  12. Restrict the area of the tuyere---clay can work and lower the air flow, sounds like you were shoving way too much air in. What are you using as a blower?
  13. All of the early blast furnaces/finerys were run using charcoal. The ones I toured in OH finally went out of blast around WWI. Charcoal does NOT make it a bloomery. Smelting with coked coal came in with the 1700's and Abraham Darby so there were over 200 years (more like 300 in places) before coal was used and puddling was even later as I recall so nowhere near parallel the use of coal. (Not to mention the "famed" Swedish Charcoal Iron as the highest grade available even into the 1800's. I was originally wondering about ACW perturbations as I seem to recall reading that the south used some bloomeries during the war in desperation; then I saw your "Vermont" location... So probably a charcoal run system due to availability (as was done in Sweden). Have you done any testing on the bars? Low grade WI is favored by folks making knife fittings from it and you might have a great source for folks wanting to lathe chunks to shape over the more common wagon tyre. Offline till Monday!
  14. Recursion: see recursion. should have cut the baseplate into a skull too!
  15. Depending on numbers and finish required it might come down to someone retired doing piecework with the tinsnips...in the conservatory!
  16. I generally get about 1 good brand good shape anvil a year at an average price of under US$1 a pound so far for the last 15 or so years. Ohio is dripping with anvils and they should be cheaper there than just about anywhere else in the USA. NM has a dearth of anvils but since I moved here I've had 2 free ones (Bridge anvil and a swedish cast steel), one $1.34 (Peter Wright) and one $0.69 (Hay Budden). More work to find them out here though. In Ohio I never even had to leave Columbus city limits though I did trip over several while traveling elsewhere in Ohio. Granted I put some effort (but pretty much no cost save my time) in finding them. If you want to just walk up and buy one then perhaps the higher prices are to be expected. As an example of cosmic irony there is a local farm implement auction company 2 miles from my shop that gets smithing stuff showing up. However it's owned by a relation of NM's biggest anvil collector and so generally not worth my time to attend auctions there.
  17. 4'x10' sheets take a *big* rotating magnetic base!
  18. Do you remember the circle cutting fixtures for old O-A set ups? Basically a lot like a set of trammel points but the cutting torch fit on one of them. Instead of using a centerpunch to make an indent for the other point we used a speaker magnet that had a core with a central screwhole thus not putting a dent in our material. Sounds like you could do the same for the plasma cutter
  19. Come on David; I just moved a 515# anvil by myself, well I used my pickup truck and a lever too...and it took a while...
  20. A crude explanation, Patrick please feel free to refine it...: The chrome tends to get tied up in crystals in the stainless. If you heat it to such a temperature that it goes into "solid solution" and then quench it fast enough that it doesn't form the various crystals it has a more even distribution and greater availability to to form the oxides you want at the surface for the "stainless" effect.
  21. 1862 seems awfully late for a bloomery especially in Vermont are you sure they were not one of the indirect process systems?
  22. Which has absolutely noting to do with the idea of "peak wood" being discussed; which is dealing with historical shortages of wood just as today we are looking at "Peak Oil" and it's ramifications.
  23. Sreynolds so that dealer is buying them at $1 to $2 a pound. Buy them from the same sources and skip the middle man!
  24. Often when I see long forges proposed they are intended for swordmaking and so I will answer WRT that: In general you never want to heat more metal than you can work at one time---waste of energy, scale loses and for blades decarburization and grain growth as well. So for a sword forge the hot area should be around 6" long. Only time you need it longer is for heat treating and that is a rare occurrence compared to forging. As an analogy: a forge much bigger than you need for most of your work is like using a dump truck for your daily driver because twice a year you need to get a load of gravel. It can be done but you soon waste more in gas than actually getting a car for daily driving. In general smithing there are times you need a long heat. However I think it is better to build your first forge to deal with the normal tasks and think about the odd ones when you get to them. Make sure your forge has a back door so you can pass long bars through and you can get a heat in the middle of a long bar. (When I needed a long forge to box fold some 3/8" plate I dug a trench forge in my back yard. Took about an hour to build including making the tuyere. Used it to fold the plate and filled it in.)
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