ThomasPowers

"You can be frugal but don't be stingy" Words to live by! And I do mean live, I had a friend who wanted to use hot dip galvanized pipe fittings to avoid having to buy blackpipe ones. he died of complications to Metal Fume Fever. Trying to save coal by running a shallow fire will often result in ruining of your workpiece; taking even more coal to re-do it than it would have taken to do it right the first time.

Ahh they used to bleed people as a medical technique for centuries. Didn't do any good (save for very rare diseases) and killed a lot of folks. Stuff that's been done for a long time doesn't necessarily make it a *good* idea. I'd file this with the folks using newspaper as welding PPE myself... Pretty to look at, reminds me of the first time I tried CI in a billet---big globs of molten CI spattered out burning off carbon until they burst into "sparklers" when the iron started burning.

And yes; the 181 is the weight in pounds.

The low cutting step is very reminiscent of the Vulcan/Vulcan clones. As mentioned the pics are very lick what I see when I close my eyes. So what's the ring like? My *guess is that it will make a good "suburbia anvil" as it will go thwack instead of *TING!*---if it does have a steel plate.

Gray cast iron dampens vibration and so eats the ring. White cast iron will ring. Most ASO's are the cheaper gray cast iron, (we drilled a HF ASO making a propane stove from it---seemed to be more graphite than iron! As for a guide---there already is one! _Anvils in America_ by Richard Postman He's a great guy, always willing to help folks figuring out an oddball anvil. (he did a guess for my anvil that is missing everything above the waist---Peter wright due to the ledges on the feet and the font of the weight stamp) Buy his book! Encourage him to get the update printed!

Well it's like heating your house with both the front door and the back door wide open---you can do it; but you are throwing away money! The forge will heat things faster and hotter if you are not throwing all that heat out the openings. In general; as long as there is enough left open to not cause a back pressure issue, you want the opening closed up as much as possible. For short items this means the back opening is often "bricked up totally" and the front opening has a couple of bricks with a gap between them. For long items you leave a gap at both openings. A "red hat" high pressure propane regulator is the standard out here. I can buy them at the local propane company. *Don't let them sell you a low pressure regulator for a propane grill!* Just for an example---what came up tops when I googled: (I'd go for the 0-30 psi version) http://www.hightemptools.com/propaneregulators.html I got one off a trashed turkey fryer for $3 once and run my forge off it. Remembering that pressure gauges are NOT accurate and easily damaged, I adjust my forge by ear and eye and don't worry that a student thwapped my gauge and broke it.

That paint could be over galvanized too. File though it and check. If it's galvanized don't bother worrying about the inside... What is it that you need that as the starter for?

What did the spark test say about the carbon content?

Be careful with that anvil vise combo as it's almost certain to be made from cast iron and so "fragile" compared to a wrought iron post vise.

Fred from South of Mountainair, NM. First Q-S he went to he bought 30 anvils and had to go buy a trailer to get them home. He doesn't smith; just likes anvils---built a pole barn just for them where he keeps them lined up on the concrete floor. They are safe and dry there and someday will probably hit the market again---perhaps NM won't be "anvil poor" then! He generally shows up early and leaves before the conference gets started so anvils that come in later are still there.

Searching *people* will get you better deals than any online place trying to sell anvils! Deals will often have a better halflife too. You can see what you are up against on Cl; but that person who has an old anvil out in the shed may be perfectly happy to leave it there until you can come by. (And when they ask *you* to put a price on it---if it's a decent anvil I always start at US$1 a pound, you can go higher but you sometimes will get it at they price!)

Put your initials there with some Ni rod and call it "custom!"

My suggestion for starting material is to get a coil spring from a pickup and cut it down opposing sides, (torch, angle grinder, chop saw...) giving you a dozen or so "(" shaped pieces and forge them all into the same shape knife. This allows you to practice your heat treating as well---no good hammering a perfect blade if you destroy it in heat treating a bunch of times! As for the curving when doing a bevel. I have found it much easier to heat the blade up and stand it on it's spine and tap the edge with a hammer or even a mallet (or chunk of fire wood) to get the spine to lie flat on the anvil face. Do this on a regular basis while forging bevels. The precurve method works well; you just need experience to make it come out right. The Tap the edge method works all the time even for beginners---and it's surprising that with the blade hot you can tap even a quite thin edge without damaging it. If you worry about it use wood as the hammer

Alloy, heat treat, *design" all affect the "strength" of Al

Several issues here: Brewing is based on grains, grains are grown in Sunlight. Also the time between hammer blows when forging a sword varied by a factor of 4 depending on what I am doing, how rested I am, the type of sword. Tides: tides vary in strength so you couldn't use intermediate stages---a spring tide will lift the bucket/crank a whole lot more than will a neap tide from all the suggestions I feel that the dripping stalactite might be the most accurate long term source---for a certain stalactite at a certain place. I'd set up one regular at a minute or hour; from that I would suggest going to hour glass for multiples of your "reference" How about them carving a deep hole under the 'standard drip with a gong suspended at the base that would "ring every hour" when the drip hits? Note that for humans a lot of short timekeeping was done by counting heartbeats before clocks with second hands were available. You can read about renaissance experimenters commenting on trying to keep their heartbeat regular and *not* getting excited during the experiments.

Blacksmithing can be like jazz; you need to practice the basics until your mind can start with a basic theme and play a riff on it. I often doodle at meetings starting with a shape and going thought the intermediate steps till I get what I want---but I have the experience to know *how* that shape will change with hammering for each step.

The rail clips I know of are generally 1040-1060 depending on manufacturer. 9264 should make nice large blades and good axes as well as tooling, etc.

Do you have a VoTech you can "bribe" into making one for you?

Welcome Tom. Unfortunately shop fires are not unknown in the blacksmithing community. A goal I'm working towards is to split off the forging and grinding "dirty crafts" in a separate addition from my woodworking, handle making, etc shop to help deal with fire issues. Where I live is a desert, we had just over 4 inches of precipitation last year *total* and fire is a constant fear. Tonight I plan to go mow down the weeds not because we care about the looks here in the country but to lower the fire danger; a fully grown tumbleweed burns like tossing a cup of petrol on a fire! Glad you are getting into smithing!

It all depends on what you are doing: some shops may seldom need one others use it on a daily basis. You may note that a lot of the posts mention using it as a bolster plate rather than using the edges for forming. I made up some bottom swages for my big anvil to curl rasptlesnakes in as it was faster and easier to do that than to go to the swageblock. A lot of people use the depression(s) in a block for sinking, but I have a number of various sized and depth'd tools made from gas bottles and lifting eyes and tow rings---handy as they fit under the screw press as well as on a stump or as hardy tooling. My suggestion is to buy one if you can find it cheap; but wait on spending big bucks on one---*unless* you start doing a lot of something where the convenience of a block would cover the cost pretty quickly.

A forge is just a hole in the ground raised up to a convenient height. Be careful not to use stones that explode when heated for the part of the forge near the fire! I build an early medieval forge out of clay, straw, sandysoil and form it on top of a fire safe rock with a piece of 5cm pipe through the side wall for the bellows to blow in. I leave a small space between the bellows tip and the pipe through the wall so I can keep the bellows from sucking in fire. (I use two bellows and have them so one is pushing air into the forge while the other is pulling air into itself---like the Vikings used---helps to keep them from sucking in fire if they are timed right.) I am offline till Tuesday most likely.

Now if one day you are forge welding a bunch of 1: stock and the next day you are bending 1/4" stock is your coal usage still the same? Service Watch---probably something every young adult dwarf has to take a turn at before they can "graduate" to the good stuff-----mining and forging down deep. Keeping time in early medieval times was generally done by eye given the passage of the sun. Sundials were used too. But they didn't measure it too tightly, save for churches using the canonical hours. When clocks were first installed on towers they didn't have a minute hand only an hour hand as that was good enough. Bells were rung to alert people to standard times. (Alfred the Great used marked candles to tell time as he wanted to be sure to pray at the correct hours of the day and night) How about the great hourglass in the great cavern that used gold dust, gems or even plain sand that would be watched and turned and a great bell rung---much like timekeeping was done aboard warships of the Napoleonic period...perhaps there could be a shaft bored to the surface that once a year daylight would enter it and strike the hourglass at the solstice and so be a "reset" point.

Maybe out in Montana but there were a heck of a lot of factories producing stuff in the 19th century---even in the first half. And from the last half there are still a large number of catalogs around showing where you could buy pre-made items and have them shipped by train. (The first Sears catalog was published in 1888.)

I think you will find that custom ironwork wasn't cheap in the 19th century either when you compare it to the prices of things then. it may have been even higher as there was less competition with "Fab shops".

Time * your wage rate + materials + overhead per hour * time + profit