ThomasPowers

And *SKILL* from practice!

Well if you were getting clinkers you would be doing it wrong! You start with coal and as it cokes it forms a tarry mass that gradually cleans up into "fluffy" coke which is what you want to be forging with. Clinkers are the "trash" from the time spent smithing. Unburnable stuff in the coal, coal ash, scale, flux---all the crud generated by working. Strongly suggest you find local smith to spend an afternoon with---you will save *months* of time compared to trying to learn it from the net!

If it was done well it's still a great anvil. If it was done not so well it's way over priced.

So can you help me decide if I need to by a commuting car or a pickup truck? Kind of hard if I don't tell you if I need to haul gravel or if I need to drive 100 miles each day to work. Not knowing if you will be doing small work and need to haul your equipment around a lot or will be doing mainly large work in a stable location makes it quite hard to tell you to go small or go large. However the larger one looks in better condition and is still quite reasonable in price and you can do light work on a large anvil (with a few caveats); but not heavy work on a light anvil. If you have the money and don't plan to be hauling your anvil out of your basement, across the kitchen through the back door and across the back porch and into the yard every time you want to forge than I'd say the big one wins. (not a random example I used to do that back in OH when I lived in the inner city...I used a 93# anvil for *that*!)

Depending on the age the horn may be cast steel or wrought iron. Either way it can be welded up; however WI is a pain to weld.

Since there are dozens of possible handle holes for the dozens of possible axe designs I suggest you consult your possible clientele for their preferred one(s). then you are most likely going to have to build your own drift, perhaps a combo slit and drift. Using a high alloy steel like H13 or S7 will make it more expensive but a lot longer lasting---you may want to experiment with a plain high carbon steel like 5160 and make the final version after you discover what's the best pattern for you. I own a bunch of different axes and no two of them have the same handle eye.

Candles were fairly expensive in earlier times if wax or smelled bad if tallow. I think I'd let the guy stay as long as he wanted too as long as he sat on a hackle/hatchel/etc used to process flax...(looks like a pillow for a bed of nails...)

I had an old cast iron forge that I used for years without claying; however the first fire after a particularly hard winter it went kerpow and cracked. I put in a mending plate and carried on for some more years. I ended up building my own forge using sheet metal so I didn't have the weight of the big old one and didn't have to worry about possible cracking issues later.

Ok "Iron and Brass Implements of the English House" Lindsay, J. Seymour has an example shown and mentions it was a "common continental design" 18th century IIRC. *no* mention of it as a "courting" candle. "Antique Ironwork American and English 15th-19th century" also has an example listed as "american" 'late 16th to early 17th century ' again no mention of the sobriquet "courting candle stick" So the style was definitely in use but it looks like the "Courting" part is more of an urban legend.

Perhaps looking at a site dedicated to "backyard metal casting of Aluminum" would profit you more that here where it's more of an adjunct to our main focus. You can make a usable melting furnace out of vermiculite from a garden center and *cheap* clay based kitty litter if I recall the time I spent on the "backyard metal casting of Aluminum" BBS The Gingery books on building an Al melting furnace running off charcoal and using it to cast and build your own machine shop... are available from Lindsay www.lindsaybks.com

millennia*s* any ancient egyptian worker worth his millet knows you use levers to lift obelisks!

Lights might be add ons---like the big round ones used on some sports cars of the 20's and 30's; and so not mounted yet.

You can tell from that chipped edge that it has a steel plate---and how thick it still is.

Train your self to use *both arms* equally and switch off as needed.

One of the nicest sets of blacksmithing tools I have seen is on the wall of a NW Arkansas wood handle manufacturer---they are their "master gauges" to check the fit of their handles against and they wouldn't turn loose of any of them unfortunately.

You could also send it in to an anvil manufacturer and have another steel face forge welded on---there are add for that shown in "Anvils in America"

Ok lets start at the beginning: early wrought iron was made with the bloomery process where the metal never really melts but forms a sludgy mass in the bottom of the furnace filled with slag, charcoal, un reduced ore, furnace wall materials, etc. This bloom can range anywhere from pretty much zilch carbon to cast iron. (Note that the Japanese Tatara furnace is a bloomery process.) Repeated stacking, forge welding, and drawing out is used to "clean up" the bloom each cycle reducing and fining the silicates embedded in the iron mass. As we now know repeated forge welding cycles also tends to make the material more homogenous both in silicates distribution *AND* in carbon content. Every culture I have researched that used the bloomery method of making wrought iron also seems to have come up with pattern welding whether on their own or from technological diffusion. Pattern welding in early blades was a symbol of "high quality work" showing that much time and effort was expended to make it. It also helps with the diffusion of carbon in the piece to avoid overly soft and hard areas. It also helps stop the propagation of cracks at layer boundaries. "The Metallography of Early Ferrous Edge Tools and Edged Weapons", Tylecote and Gilmour; has a nice example of an early European blade that was made from 13 individual pieces of which 5 were pattern welded billets, (6th century IIRC). Also see "The Celtic Sword", Pleiner, for examples of piling morphing into pattern welding. Pattern Welding in Europe pretty much died out around the year 1000, ("The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England" H.R.E. Davidson), with better more uniform steels becoming available for as we all know each weld has also the possibility of being a cold shut or inclusions and so it can decrease the strength of a blade compared to a more homogenous material one. However the making of shear steel from blister steel is pretty much a simple pattern welding process---which again allows for a more uniform carbon content. ("Steelmaking before Bessemer", vol I Blister Steel) Having an applied harder edge material dates back even before the quench hardening of steel was know, Pleiner's shows multiple examples where higher carbon *or* phosphorous edge materials were welded to blades that were not heat treated. This technology extended until comparatively recent times---I have examples of late 19th century tools with wrought iron bodies and steeled edges or impact surfaces. (steel could cost over 5 times that of wrought iron even as late as the American Civil War!) Pattern welding was again used in making gun barrels---the resistance to propagating cracks being a good thing here. It was also played around with decoratively around the time of the French Revolution and experienced a renaissance during the folklore nationalism of the early 20'th centuries. The Hunting and Fishing Museum in Munich Germany has a number of very well done examples made during the rise of National Socialism. Now if you want to try your own bloomery "The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity", Rehder, has "foolproof" plans in one of it's appendices. I strongly suggest you read "Sources for the History of the Science of Steel", Cyril Stanley Smith, if you believe that scientific metallurgy was the result of 19th century interest in Damascus steels. It covers the search for what makes iron into steel which culminates in quite rigorous experiments in the *18th* century resulting in the discovery in 1786 that it was *carbon* that makes iron into steel---a very sound foundation for "scientific metallurgy" that had nothing to do with Damascus Steel and occurred the previous century... The first edition of "Decorative and Sculptural Ironwork" has several examples of wrought iron pattern welded with pure nickel for very pretty *non* blade uses.

I was guessing this person to be from Rothenberg ODT, Germany; lovely place I've been there several times!

Might have to keep an eye out for our meetings in Santa Fe---we move around as people volunteer to have a meeting at their shop. I'm as far south as the "northern" part of SWABA generally gets; save for our yearly conference in Las Cruces in February.

The old wood tends not to be as "gooey" with creosote as the new stuff. And like here the old treated stuff should last a LONG time especially if it was out of the sun!

I think the prospect of me driving her home has her more worried than the surgery...She's cooking up a storm today so we can coast a while before she has to eat my cooking...

Here in NM trees can be rare too. I've used old creosoted mine timbers for anvils and vise mounts as termites are Really Really Happy anytime you bury any wood out here! The 6" I mentioned is fastened to the telephone pole that holds up my shop extension. It does telegraph the pounding to the steel panel walls though.

I was at a small RenFair put on as a fund raiser for a Spanish Colonial LH site near Santa Fe NM Saturday. Also beautiful weather and we were running a Renaissance camp kitchen based on the one shown in a 1570's woodcut (Bartolomeo Scappi's "Opera"). We roasted a whole pig (head, legs and tail still on it!) and had pots of lentils, pinto beans, a chicken soup, flat breads, a salad from the farm's garden, Calabacitas, fresh green chile, melons---likewise. Most common question: "Is that a real pig?" As there were two smiths there already---one in a historic shop using bellows and charcoal in an adobe forge. The other in a Teepee with a cast iron rivet forge using coal---I didn't bring a forge and so sat all day by the fire tending the pig while the cooks worked and raided the gardens. Boy was I hungry by the time it was done! It was shared with the re-enactors after the site closed to the public.

switchjv; where in NM are you at? The next SWABA (ABANA affiliate for NM) meeting is at my smithy in Lemitar right off I 25 near Socorro. We also have a southern branch that meets in Las Cruces at a different times.

the silica in wrought iron is present as ferro-silicate spicules rather than in the iron lattice like most modern alloys. So basically you are sawing though soft iron completely filled with glass fibers! This dulls saws *fast*. Hot cutting at welding heat is generally a better way. *Old* bloomery wrought iron can have carbon contents ranging from zero to above 1%. Old smithing books discuss testing *every* piece of iron you buy to figure out what it is and what's it's good for.