ThomasPowers

Search for the Rob Gunter method of anvil repair and realize that while you can make that a restored beauty it will take a bunch of time, welding rod, electricity and abrasives. If the thought of that makes you think "Oh goody!" then I'd do as suggested and offer $100 cash as you will have to spend more than that in repair materials. If you don't have a good sized welder and the skills then you can A see if there is a local smithing group that may have an "anvil repair day" (I've been to ones in OH and in NM so far and seen anvils way worse than that repaired!) or B start learning!

I've always considered a forge "finished" when it's thrown on the scrap pile. Up until then it is a work in progress as I add/remove/tweak things on it. I don't think I would be presumptuous enough to claim one as being "finished" that hasn't even been burn tested yet---how about "ready" instead? My primary solid fuel forge firepot is in it's 4th "body" an it's about time for the 5th with the bells and whistles I've dreamed up using the previous ones. (Firepot is over 25 years old and going strong!) The next version will be tweaked to make hauling it around easier...

Does the firepot have slots on the side to allow deeper insertion of the bars? Is it too deep to start with and so placing a couple of firebricks in the bottom with a "fake tuyere" over it to make a higher start to the fire might help? Is it too shallow and so you can't mound up the fuel properly? If so placing a couple of firebrick on the sides of the fuel mound can let you pile the center deeper. Or when I made a small forge from a brake drum I put in a sheet metal fence that fit just inside the wall of the forge and went up higher with a slot where the ends met and a mouse hole across from it to allow me to slide billets wight through the hot spot without messing up the fuel stack. DETAILS! You know what you are doing we DON'T!

Use a simple guard: flame wood and that pattern separated by a plain guard should look great. Perhaps highly polished nickle silver for the guard so it looks like it's "reflecting" the blade and handle onto each other?

I have a HB that was stored in an unheated shack in a marshy area in central Ohio, USA. It had a lot of fine pitting on the face due to condensation over more than half a century of sitting there. I wire brushed off the loose rust and am using hot iron to polish it out---the area over the "sweet spot" is shiny and almost polished out, out toward the heel you can still see the pitting. Scale *is* an abrasive; why spend time grinding when you can accomplish the same end *forging*!

"This little skull of mine, I'm going to let it shine!..."

Corkscrews should be fine with an oil hardening as they are not supposed to hold an edge. I would try warm oil for carving tools too and see if that will work and only go to water if you have problems getting hard enough in oil. Have you read "The Complete Modern Blacksmith" Weygers? He has an entire section of forging and heat treating of wood carving chisels as he was a talented sculptor as well as smith. Makes a great Christmas gift!

Well as mentioned you just *started* with too much metal. We often do that as the excess may be just to have a good place to hold it when working the rest of it; or we wanted a piece long enough that we didn't need tongs; or the design changed as we were forging and so what was perfect for the knife we were going to make---say a full tang now is too much for the stick tang we're making *now* So you got to much, remove the excess! Cold with a hacksaw or cutting disk (or belt grinder with coarse belt!) Hot with a hot cut, hardy or farriers rasp. If you just need to trim the tang a hardy will work fine. If you want to do some shaping as you cut a hot cut and a cutting plate can work wonders---you may even want to forge some curved hot cuts for roughing out clips or the curve near the tip of the typical knife. Remember to remove the sharp edge cause by using a hardy or hot cut so you don't get a cold shut when forging it down to shape. A farrier's rasp and hot rasping can be a fast easy way to do that.

OK so it sounds like yours has been retrofitted to work without the box. Good. It still has an orifice where the gas is introduced to the air stream and currently that is the wrong size for the gas you want to use. LP uses a *smaller* orifice than NG as it's a "denser" fuel and so you need less of it per unit of air to get the proper mix. Last time I converted a system from NG to LP I just took the orifice to the local Gas place and they silver soldered the old orifice closed and re-drilled the proper size for the new. If you can source an orifice the proper size for not too much money it might be nice to have *both* sizes to hand in case you move or sell the forge. It is interesting to note that Johnson's are quite expensive new and much cheaper on the used market. I picked up mine quite cheaply at a school shop auction, ($40; but next time the dealers were buying them at $100) I think they cater to the PO market and places where liability is of great concern. Your price is not a bad one for a unit in good working order these days. They do have a reputation for being a gas hog though. You will probably need to learn to "tune it" Generally I adjust the gas air mixture till I get the noisiest burn and then tweak it for my intended use. (For heat treating I often go a bit reducing)

The "box thing" is the "engine" of this forge. It contains the mixer and blower for the gas/air and would be where you change the orifice to convert it from NG to LP. I used to have two for mine but traded the extra off several years ago; sorry.

What a darling hammer! Restoring it should be easy and seeing it running off a hit or miss engine would be great at a old time engine show. You may still need to replace the beam though as wood does age over time. Far better to change it out now than have it fail in use!

May I suggest a telephoto lens?

What are you making them from? The previous use of the steel may give some indication of what alloy it *may* be. When using unknown steel you always make up a sample *first* to test out possible heat treatment of it: what should you quench it in? What should your temper it to? (Did your normalize it?) This helps prevent making up a beautiful set of blades only to find out all the work was wasted because they won't harden right! Usually you forge something with a similar cross section and then heat to slightly above magnetic and then quench in warm oil. If it cracks it may be an air hardening steel, if it's not hard enough it may be a water/brine hardening steel---if so reheat and quench in brine and see if it hardens properly there. If not, well unknown steel may be *anything*! Discard and try again. When it hardens correctly then work on tempering: start around 350 degF and bake the hardened piece about an hour---test: if too hard raise the temp 25 deg and try it again---repeat until you get what you like and then repeat at that same temp a couple more times. Note: oven thermometers are notoriously in accurate so much so that most grocery stores sell auxiliary thermometers---get one and use it!

Since you like doing large gates your powerhammer needs to be in the center of a 20' clear zone. Oh since you only do knives your powerhammer can be set up with the base touching the wall. See the issue we have trying to address your question? One thing that can help with space issues is to make a pass through through the wall by the powerhammer---works the easiest if it's a sheetmetal wall and you do linear pieces.

20 muleteam borax is 20 muleteam borax no matter who sells it. I assume you have forge welded simple billets before with no problem? Otherwise this is rather like "I've never danced before so how am I messing up the lead in the Nutcracker?" Try a bandsaw blade and pallet strapping billet making sure each layer of BSB has one of PS between it and the next one. Are you welding in a charcoal, coal, coke or propane or NG forge? Is your anvil and tools close to the forge and preheated?

Well I stopped by the scrapyard Saturday and found some "new" stock cheap to go in my rack. I also picked up a good handful of RR bolts as the scrappers are cleaning the tracks off like a horde of locusts and so I expect to need to get them before they all get sent to China. Didn't get to do a good perusal as the were loading up cars into the crusher and topping them off with scrap from the pile and everytime the guy reved up the big manipulator I tended to focus on where it was going as I do NOT wish to go to China right now even if the trip was *free* One thing I did spend my hard earned allowance on was that they had an old windcharger. Just the generator and the rear vane and pivot. Insulation was shot on the wire---would probably need to be re-wound and if so replacing the bearings would be a good idea; but I couldn't stand to think of it getting crushed and scrapped. Told my wife I grew up hearing stories about my Mother's childhood where all the electricity they had was a wind charger that charged batteries that ran the *radio* in the farm house. If I get it going again I'd probably use it to run a string of Christmas lights on a *small* short tower. On the plus side I had forged a large set of stainless butchering hooks for a friend who was recently given the front half of a trophy bison and now have a dozen pounds of bison in the fridge and my daughter gave me some bear burger to go with it. I foresee a whopping big pot of chile in my future!

As I recall there is an Italian book just on Fire Steels.

Yup I have one like that too. Mine is a Fisher in mint condition, Large, Quiet, two hardy holes and it's my main shop anvil! One trick I use for making tooling for the 1.5" hardy holes on mine is to find old top tooling and forge the handle eyes to fit the hardy holes making bottom tooling from them. if I ever want to reverse the process I can just drift out the eyes to fit a hammer handle again---ain't smithing grand!

If you are on the flat and have good roads moving it standing up is nice. If you are in the mountains on bad roads lying down is nice too.

I picked up an air tank at the scrapyard Saturday, pulled the valve on it that afternoon. (The local small scrap yard sells me tanks *cheap* as they can't resell them as scrap without pulling the valve and that's too much work for them...) The top makes a bell. If the bottom is indented it makes a dishing form for SCA armour makers. If it's rounded it makes a ball stake for SCA armourers. If it's flat it makes a quench tank for knives or a bowl to hold stuff around the forge. The valves I sell back to the scrap yard. Only thing that goes to waste is the cutting swarf and the squeal! I avoid Acetylene tanks even as a gift! I avoid powder extinguishers too as they are much more a mess to deal with. Old CO2 ones can be discharged in the summer to cool off canned drinks and when empty treated as above. I sell a couple of bells a year from them and hang the rest around the outside of the shop for the wind to ring.

One of the old SOFA demos was welding a patternwelded barrel up. They may still be lending out the videos from their demos...

Primitive: yes, antique---I rather doubt. Usually after 200 years you can see some of the grain of the wrought iron. I couldn't in those pictures.

Totally dependent on ALLOY. For some alloys straw would be perfect for wood carving tools for others it would be terrible. For an unknown alloy you will have to *TEST* and see what works best for *you*!

Why not number the pets instead? I'm sure you can forge a running iron...

Yes it's all coke however the density of commercially made coke is several times that of what we form in our forges when we burn coal. Sawdust is just wood right? Have you noticed a difference in burning it vs logs?