ThomasPowers

No specifics but it does look like some weights I have seen before---designed to stack between two uprights so you can add or subtract them as needed. Just a guess. What does it spark as?

Or even a country as this is a world wide group!

For hot forging ingot silver I use a one soft firebrick forge powered by a plain old plumber's propane torch. Easy to use inside.

No Wootz blades and pucks were traded through Damascus. The heyday of pattern welded blades in Europe occurred before the year 1000---and before there was much traffic between the Middle East and Europe and many were made by Frankish smiths in what is now Germany. I have often heard the urban legend that crusaders seeing wootz blades in the Middle East returned home and came up with pattern welding trying to replicate them. Unfortunately they were most popular in Europe several centuries before the first crusade...and in fact everywhere the bloomery process of making wrought iron was used, pattern welding was also "discovered" as it's a variation on how you process the bloom into usable stock. May I commend to your attention "The Sword in Anglo-Saxon Europe"

Rich how about the term "piled" for simple stacked billets---from the archeological usage of early examples made that way.

Instead of walnut you can sometimes find rippled grain hickory hammer handles from a root swell or crotch. Make a fine handle and when stained and finished like you would do a rifle stock quite pretty---but still has the toughness of hickory for *use*!

You've got the guts of a nice forge. Tables are just secondary stuff!

Well I will disagree with ciladog. The fact that air can be compressed and fluid cannot is of great matter in the case of FAILURE as compressed air tends to drive shrapnel and hydraulic fluid not so much. For a gedanken experiment think of welding tanks---knock the valvestem off a pressurized Oxy tank and you have a rocket. Fill one with water and pressurize it to the same pressure and knock the stem off and you have a spurt and that's it. I had this dinned into me in a MatSci class where we studied the failure of several pressure vessels one of which came close to cancelling the Professors tenure on life. Now if you are not considering failure mode; beans is beans.

All y'all keep forgetting *air*, the slowest and gentlest quenchant. Usually only hardens air hardening alloys and normalizes the rest. However in thin section many alloys will harden well "one step gentler". So a knife blade made of a water hardening alloy might do better in oil and an oil hardening alloy may even harden in air! As they may crack in their "proper" quenchant it is often a good idea to try the gentler one first! If it doesn't harden appropriately then you can repeat with the harsher quenchant.

PM sent

Beware of any plating too! I tend to look for nice rusty unplated wrenches at the fleamarket and scrapyard as "possibles"

Well an induction forge works well too but with no "fire".

Back scabbards for greatswords seem to not have existed historically. The period pictures show them being either carried hilt down in the hands with the blade going up over the shoulder or piled on wagons. So how does Hollywood do something that doesn't work in real life? They Cheat. (Not to mention that probably every aspect of the weaponry in brave heart is *WRONG* for the period it occurred. (remember the princess he had an affair with. She was 9 when he was killed IIRC---makes you think a bit differently about that?)

"welded cable"??

How about L-6?

OTOH I've made more than one "prototype" to hand to a customer to see if we're using the language the same...

Track is on the tough end of high carbon steel and would make a *fine* hammer head if you have a way to work it. A bit of a pain to do it all by hand due to it's shape. Harden and temper back and it should get passed on a generation or two...

Look for old jackstands made from the axle covers off a "banjo" rear end. I've found them in AR, NM and OH never paid more than $5 for a pair at the fleamarket or junkyard or *OLD* garage. They have a dished round shape with a pipe coming off it. I made a firepot to replace a broken round one in an old cast iron forge I bought out of one about 25+ years ago---and have not needed the second one yet! I ground out the internal ridges and removed the bearing race in the bottom where the grate goes. Actually this firepot is in it's 3rd or 4th forge now and I'm about ready to build the next one for it.

Wow you are so lucky to be that close to the American Bladesmith Society classes!

Is that one of the ones you have to *slide* the cover off one end? Note that "tool" steel is not "Tool Steel" most wrenches are made from a medium carbon steel not a high carbon steel. more like 4140 rather than 1095/O-1/D-2, etc...

Note that A-36; commonly sold as "mild steel" these days can harden in thin section if it's cold out. DON'T QUENCH IT AT ALL. Let it cool off preferably someplace where it won't chill too fast in contact.

Since much blacksmithing advice is location dependent putting your *general* location in your profile can save a lot of time in the long run. No specifics necessary; but even a simple question like "where to get good coal" is *VERY* different for Northern Maine vs Central NM

Note that most Japanese sword smiths don't smelt their own tamahagane. It's a specialty task just like polishing and handle making---much like sword making in medieval Europe!. Note that you have it wrong about viking blades; shoot even centuries earlier the Celts were selecting different irons for their edges and bodies (see "The Celtic Sword", Radomir Pleiner) "Damascus" has been used for several hundred years now to refer to both Wootz and Pattern Welded materials. For clarity it is nice to always use the sub-terms; but not to get snooty if someone uses the general term as it's use predates the "United States of America"! (Also: japanese swordsmiths are almost never the sword polishers! Different craft, different mastery!)

MY ideal gas forge, if I could only have one: would be very small and very large, very long and very short. Have one to 16 burners, be lined only with light fibrous refractories and only with heavy duty hard flux resistant refractory. It would have only a vertical opening and only a horizontal opening. and most of all it should cost me nothing to build! In short the ideal forge for knifemaking can be crap for sword tempering. What works great for doing small work is useless for doing 2.5" stock, etc and so on. You first need to decide what this forge's *primary* job is: Gatemaking will end up very different from Knifemaking for folders! Then see if you can add in a secondary function without compromising the Primary function. Note that many people try to compromise by building a large forge rather than several to save money only to find that their gas costs could have paid for several more forges optimized for their tasks.

Heat to a low red and use a coarse wire brush on it---hand held *not power*---let cool and evaluate. When using used springs there is always the chance that a hidden crack exists (particularly if it's a road kill piece as the failure mode is to create many cracks *one* of which propagates and drops the piece on the road...) I suggest new bladesmiths to take an automotive coil spring and cut it down opposing sides to get ten to a dozen ( shaped pieces and then you can experiment on them finding out how that alloy likes to be forged and heat treated and have enough of it to test to destruction and still have some to make a finished blade from it.