ThomasPowers

Hard to have too many vises in a shop!

Cheap, poorly heat treated steel makes bad knives no matter what the alloy! Many imported blades were made from lower carbon 440 grades because custom knifemakers had made a name for 440C properly heat treated. Saying that all 440 knives are bad is sort of like saying all european autos are junk because the Yugo's were junk. Yes cheap fleamarket "$5 for a bowie knife" ones are pretty bad; but there still are Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, Maseratis... out there too. As for making up kit knives: Do good work and don't misrepresent them and you can be proud to sell them!

I use 20 muleteam borax mixed with roach-pruf (98% boric acid) as I generally am welding up billets with some Ni content and the boric acid seems to help. Spikeknife----Iron filings: cast iron or wrought iron? (I assume cast iron was intended and have you tried brake lathe swarf for that?) Clean quartz sand or powdered glass was the flux of choice for welding real wrought iron which is pretty much self fluxing and deals well with high temps that will burn modern steels. IIRC "Practical Blacksmithing" has a discussion on having to switch fluxes as they moved from real wrought iron into using Bessemer Steel---AKA mild steel

When I started making a lot of something that I used to use the step to shape I finally made some hardy tooling that did a better faster job for what I used it for. (And I am sometimes hesitant to make hardy tools in my unpowered shop for my 1.5" hardy holes!) Now when I'm off doing demos on someone else's anvil and have to use the step it just feels "funny".

Remember that the london [pattern anvil has been in use for about 200 years and a big hunk of metal anvil has been in use for about 2000 years. I'd suggest asking forklift repair or rental places about getting a damaged tine for scrap price and use that for your anvil. See http://www.marco-borromei.com/fork.html for one such idea. And before you diss such an anvil remember that the japanese katanas are still forged on what looks like a rectangular hunk of steel. Once you have something you can use and the pressure is off it seems that london pattern anvils will start appearing at decent prices.

We really need that picture; is it a rivet forge worth a hundred bucks or a fully tricked out railroad forge worth close to a thousand?

And location

The shell of the forge is just to hold the refractory---I know one pro who needed a big forge for a job and just took tha kaowool and used a couple of pieces of binder wire to hold it into a circle and stuck a burner into that. I have two propane forges one has a thin shell---grain auger tubing, the other has a heavy shell---an old O2 bottle and boy is the first one easier to move around the shop and load/unload for demos!

Jim; I should be visiting Wales in the spring (after Easter). If there is a book from over here that would help, let me know and I might be able to bring it over.

Why did they breed horses for "daintier" feet that now have lots of problems with the weight and size of the modern horse? The ethereal anvil shape is certainly handy for a lot of ornamental work; just not so handy for heavy hammering with strikers. To quote Big Trouble in Little China "Marry them Both!" My Fisher is a squat anvil and my Trenton is more gracile.

I bought 2 vises in Albuquerque NM, USA off of craigslist this year for $30 a piece. I thought that was a fair price. I had to forge a spring for one of them a 4" Columbian in mint condition otherwise and will have an $80 price tag on it at the SWABA conference in Febuary. Covers my time and gas to get it and the time and materials to forge the spring for it. Last vise I bought for myself was a 6" columbian that I paid $50 for at the SOFA conference 2 years ago. As mentioned the screw and screwbox *are* the vise. Any excessive wear or damage to them plummets the price of the vise. Repaired ones are generally not worth much either---though some folks selling them seem to think so! Vises have gone up, several years ago the bottom band for a working vise was around $40 at Quad-State; then last year that band seemed to be around $75. (When I lived in Ohio a decade ago 20 and 25 dollar vises were fairly common) Generally I go for ones that need a mounting plate and or spring as their prices are generally better and those are trivial to make---especially if you use the Columbian U-bolt and angle iron variation...far far better to buy one missing the mounting stuff but with a clean sq screw than a "complete" vise with the screw worn out!

May I commend Frank's school to you. If you want to be a professional smith, attending it will be the fast track to help you get there! Now on apprenticeships: in the knife world there has been long discussions of this and the gist of it is that an apprentice who is not paying should expect to do 10 hours of work for every hour of 1 on 1 teaching---and few shops have that much untrained scut work. What you need are *skills* that make you a valuable worker for a smith. These can often be found locally: Is there a welding and or machining program at a local V0-Tech? Take them! Even jewelry making is a valuable set of skills if you want to get into knifemaking. Most professional smiths with a shop large enough to have extra workers will require a solid grounding in welding and welding can often lead to possible smithing jobs to ornament a fab job! And of course if bladesmithing is where you want to go the classes taught in Arkansas at the ABS (American Bladesmiths Society) school are STRONGLY SUGGESTED!

Hmm I'd sell them on having it made from home made bloomery iron---at a added price! And don't forget there are billions of pagans who are *not* wiccan! My hindu co-workers were often quite bemused about being lumped in with the neo-pagans.

My great Grandfather was the smith in a small rural Arkansas USA town. There is much that he could do that I cannot. However there is much I can do and know that he did not---especially about alloys and heat treating and the "why?" of things. I could not point a plow properly for that area without a lot of practice. On the other hand he could not smelt iron from ore using medieval methods or do pattern welding. (and actually my ornamental work tends to be much "prettier" than his as he had a living to make and could not throw away extra time on the job...) I know of at least one armour maker who is doing Negroli level work when commissioned and one silversmith who can reproduce Sutton Hoo perfectly! The knowledge and skills are still around they just don't have the *patrons* willing to pay for their use! (I'd mention the re-discovery of the details about making wootz too!)

I have had one for 20+ years and I'd rate it as not so good for smithing; but handy for knifemaking with the rotation feature.

"I noticed Y's (sometimes with chokes) built outside the burner tubes. I wondered if you could kick a regular atmospheric burner into overdrive by forcing air into the Y (and get a hotter fire with less fuel)." Let me rephrase this: "When I'm running a burner with the proper air/fuel mix to get 100% fuel burn; will adding a lot of cold atmosphere make things hotter?" No, the advantage of a blown system is that you can generally *increase* the *fuel* and *air* keeping the mix *correct* but with more of it to increase the total BTU's going into the forge making it hotter. Venturi burners are often more touchy in keeping a proper mix over wide ranges of fuel input. "What are the reasons for NOT using 100% refractory cement..or a combination wool/cement coating? Is it weight, cost, slow time to cure or insulation properties?" Yes all of the above; with insulation properties being the heavy hitter. With an all wool forge the time to get to welding temps is minimal. With a solid cast forge it may be over an hour before you get it to welding temp and will take a similar amount of time to cool off at the end of the session. Unfortunately flux for forge welding eats wool like boiling water through cotton candy su you have to figure out a dual lining if you plan to weld in your forge.

Or forge/grind down 1" tools. There is not really a standardized hardy hole dimension and as they were often hot punched even the "same" ones may be fussy about sharing tools. Finding or making or retrofitting tooling should not be much of a problem---at least far easier than for me with 3 anvils with 1.5" hardy holes! Sounds like a great anvil, good size to get started with---was it under the Christmas tree with a bow on it?

OK now we know location---perhaps... is that Washington State USA or Washington Australia? Next we need to know intended use: do you mainly make knives where a small work area is better than a big one or do you make large ornamental work where swinging a 20' stick is a daily occurrence? Propane, coal, induction? Will you have more than one set up for use at the same time? I know one professional smith with 25#, 50#, 100# LG's and then an Erie Steam hammer and a Chambersburg all around the forge and working. Powerhammers, platens, forging presses, rolling mills? It's kind of like me asking you what kind of vehicle I should buy without telling you if I need a dump truck or a Yaris.... BTAIM If the weather is clement than massive amounts of space is a good thing, If bad weather is an issue then having a subsection of a larger shop that can be more climate controlled is helpful. Height is a good thing as being able to swing a stick overhead is handy. Don't forget to factor in POWER! 3 phase if you can get it and 220 outlets for welders and grinders. Access: can you get a large truck up to the building for unloading? A "patio" you can run a forklift around can be a bit help. Ventilation. One of the old factory clerestory windows/vents down the middle of the building can be nice. Future expansion: is the building oriented so you can tack on another XYZ feet of it; or build a shed roof stock storage addition? Do you need to have a clean room for things like knife buffing and or ironwork finishing? Security: do you need to be able to lock down the entire building hard or just a few items in a tool cubby? Flooring: can you afford a nice thick concrete floor for all or part of the building and the rest will be ? I was once looking through 19th century smithy diagrams and pictures and it was interesting to note the different set ups based on different product lines.

ISTR from the adds that Columbian made some ductile iron vises for their cheap line; but would need to double check on that. Regular cast iron is right out for a post vise---might as well make it from glass!

cue Curmudgeon: I wouldn't think a steel was "high carbon" till it's closer to the eutectic; I'd consider 60 points a higher medium carbon steel.

The old motors that came with hammers tended to be about 900 rpm IIRC and so impossible to find direct replacements nowadays. As mentioned a speed reducer is pretty much a mandatory part of the design---how much tuning are you going to be able to do?

Nice scale, how many beers wide is it? Definitely has the "late 19th century/early 20th century American Style" look to it and is a great size. Does not look in too bad a shape either. You got a good deal on it! (now was there any tooling around it????) Good type of friend to have!

You might ask the seller if there is a forklift of suitable capacity in their neighborhood that you could rent---they probably know whats available near them better than you will. When I bought my large screw press I paid the rigger nearly as much as my winning bid on the screwpress to get it loaded on my truck and did not begrudge it a penny! (OK, so my bid was $50 and the rigging charge was $35; but it was *nice* not to be sweating the loading for once!) When I got it back to the shop I offloaded it onto 4x4 skids bolted to the feet and then drug it across the gravel and used rollers to get it into the shop. *SLOW* and *SAFE* are the keywords! Watch out for leg failures, chain failures, forklift failures---you get the idea...

Didn't someone post pictures of the grain reduction over several normalization cycles on this very site? Not a publication on metallurgy per se but experimental data tends to trump theoretical in my experience.

Have you tried a press?