ThomasPowers

The ski slope hardy tool was made from a piece of cutting scrap about 1.5" thick it had one flat side and then the top was a "hill" with two different slopes, one sharper than the other. To use you stick the stem in the hardy hole and then heat your steel and place it on the anvil face and the top of the tool and use the hammer to hit down into the gap between the workpiece, the anvil face and the tool. Handy to make curves on as your holding hand gets no hammer shock as it's a three point system. The two different slopes allow you to make differing radii bends. I saw one being demo'd years ago and finally made one when the right piece of scrap came along.

The local steel casting company used to use an electric arc furnace with 16"? diameter graphite electrodes and would discard the ends/broken bits. PatrickN got us a tour through there, it was an eyeopener listening to the furnace and seeing the gauge reading *kilo* amps

Charcoal wasn't only for smelting and metalworking. it was the primary fuel for heating and cooking in towns in medieval times. Wood was mainly a rural fuel where it could be harvested and used directly. Note that in medieval times "coal" meant charcoal and the rock stuff was "earth coal" or even "sea coal" as it washed up along the shore in some areas---causes confusion when folks say "I read where the rental for a piece of property was 3 loads of coal so they were using coal in the early medieval period!" (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...)

"As heavy as possible" it's being used as an anvil after all... We were making bent the hard way rings last Saturday and I was showing a new fellow a lot of different ways to do it: with long pieces using a jig, with short pieces using a "ski slope" hardy tool, bending around the horn, sticking in the hardy hole and bending. Almost all of them require flattening on a regular basis. It really is *much* easier to not worry about perfect circularity until *after* you do the forge weld and then heat as much of the ring as you can at one time and true on a mandrel.

It will need to be cleaned as oil/grease from frying tends to build up in the kitchen; so use something food safe and easily replaced on a semi regular basis. What I would have suggested would be to do it from Stainless Steel

take a look at the Tim Lively wash tub forge as used by the neo-tribals smiths. Then think of mounting it on top of a discarded propane grill cart. Easy to move and at a better height! Of course it's designed for charcoal. You could also set a brake drum into a sheet of plate on the grill cart and make a coal burning one---or as I do have the plate installed where the grill used to be and mount my propane forge on it.

As a hobby welder have you ever worked on a 150# hunk of metal heated to 350 degF before? As sharp edges tend to leave cold shuts in your work I would not suggest messing with it, there seemed to be at least one section that would be about as sharp an edge as I would want to do anything with.

like the fellow shown in Sachse's book making 1 tonne pattern welded billets? (or pretty much any smith who's doing bloomery smelting!)

They are called "old small vises". I don't think they are worth much as their function can be better done by a modern machinists vise. (I do own one for use with my 19th century historical smithing kit)

England---it's a relatively small place, smile (I live in one of the larger states in the USA, fifth in size IIRC 121598 sq miles)

I remember some smiths using brake turnings to help weld up "nasty" billets. Probably safer now that asbestos in the brake shoes is out! (about 20 years ago I once welded up a piece of chainmaille and thought I was doing good until Quad-State that year where a fellow had welded up lathe swarf into a knife...)

Ohio has some lovely large forests in the Hanging Rock Region that are the results of charcoal smelting of iron in the region. Each furnace would own enough square miles of forest that it could coal a section and then move on and when they finally made it back to the starting section the forest would have grown up to be ready to coal again! The last charcoal blast furnace in that region went out of blast around WWI and the paper companies (and the state) snatched up these massive woodlands and preserved them until modern times---we toured a bunch of old sites there when I attended the IronMasters Conference in Athens OH, (My friends were presenting on 10 years of short stack bloomery experiments at that one)

Lets put it slightly differently Making a *good* dagger is not that easy.

where you at?

Put the anvil as center piece in a creche!

Notice the "anvil" they are using!

What *type* of blacksmith? However for most types Frank Turley's School in Santa Fe NM will be a BIG step in the right direction. Then perhaps the ABS school in Arkansas if you want to forge knives. For ornamental work: Art classes, especially drawing and learning "forms". For all types SMALL BUSINESS CLASSES; I've known folks that their entire yearly profit came from how they depreciated their equipment and known folks who didn't even know they should! (and went bankrupt) Most types of smithing will be enriched if you have a good background in welding and machining---and also you have good skills to rely on if there is a downturn in the smithing business. And lastly if you are in the USA----marry someone with good medical insurance! Almost all independent craftspeople are *1* major medical bill away from bankruptcy.

Wrought Iron and Its Decorative Use (Dover Jewelry and Metalwork) Maxwell Ayrton, Arnold Silcock; Easy to find now---dover has re-printed it. I have one of the 1929 editions... Mentions 3 separate edicts during Elizabethan times and one from Henry III (13th century!) revoking a grant from Henry II as the furnace was injuring the forest. BentIron; what a lovely paper! Easy to read, well researched and nicely documented. (and agrees with me!) My reading time is fairly limited; but I often read during breakfast---my wife generally snores at that time and often enjoy digging though my research library over my tea and cereal.

As I recall the smaller in diameter the rolls are the more HP you need. I once saw a book on rolling mill design that had the angle of reduction/HP calculations in it. I strongly suggest you work from a proven plan rather than try to throw one together and maybe have to totally rebuild it several times to get it to work right.

Terrible just terrible,,,better send it to me and I'll hide it in an old mineshaft or something!

Not *my* scrap pile; the scrapyard about 6 miles down the road that lets you dig in the piles.

Wow I've seen propane forge built with no shell before---the kaowool being rolled up and held with baling wire. Mine uses part of an O2 welding tank and I thought it was too heavy---1" must not be a traveling forge!

Early auto mechanics had to do smithing to repair early autos! I've talked to an elderly smith who's brag was that he could forge weld model T springs and not have them break soon afterward. My 6.5" post vise came from an auto repair business that had been in the same building since 1918, they had a complete set of smithing tools *and* a set of wood working tools dating way back to repair the wooden bodies of the early cars. My post vise had stayed in use and had a "well hammered" surface. Everything was sold off when they ran out of great*X? grandkids to take over.

A lot of folks really into armormaking use the continental spellings like maille to differentiate from postal mail or armour to differentiate from armor---tanks, etc. The armourarchive predates IFI a long time though a lot of the earlier stuff was lost in a crash ten? years ago. I send folks from here over there for armour stuff and send folks from there over here for blacksmithing stuff. Note that some of the high end armourer's---like Ugo (has done Negroli quality work! http://www.ugoserrano.com/armourphotos.html ) stop by over there just like we have had JPH stop in here. We don't see some of the greats in maille research as much anymore over there as we do at academic conferences and on TV nowadays; but a lot of their early work is still in the archives. Rater than watering down 2 sites; I prefer to leave each one to their specialties

You mean that *isn't* you at the anvil?---I must go clean my glasses...