ThomasPowers

Howdy! If you are going to be making swords you will need to have "The Complete Bladesmith". If you are in the USA you should be able to ILL it from your local library and read it and make the decision to buy a copy for yourself. In other countries this may not be an option. It will cover various alloys and what they are good for in the way of blades. You do realize that a high tech alloy requiring a high level of skill to work and expensive computerized heat treating but producing a superb blade can end up worse than a simple steel easily worked when a beginner tries to forge it. I generally advise my students to "make their weight in knives" before trying swords as the fast turn around on the smaller blades means that your beginner's mistakes get worked out in weeks rather than years---big blades take a lot longer to make! Also when you have your failures it's more of a "there goes a Saturday" than "there goes 3 months!" As mentioned there are a lot of components in "strongest". Having a blade that gets exceptionally hard and takes an exquisite edge doesn't do much good if it shatters like glass if it's dropped or hits anything---and yes you can do this with steel! (BTW if you are in the USA the American Bladesmiths Society has classes on bladesmithing that can really rocket you along the learning curve!)

How about a heavy chunk of Dozer? far better than a piece of rail Mass directly under the hammer is what's important. The japanese katana are forged on anvils that look like a rectangular hunk of steel. No heel, no horn and folks often consider them to be OK even if forged on such a simple anvil.

See how useful that info would have been at the start? Most of my students have minimal to no hammer skills when they show up. If you do; then you will probably already know what you like in a hammer you swing all day as per weight and type/length of handle. Really it's the skill of the smith rather than some special hammer and I've done better work with a US$1 fleamarket special than some folks do with a $100 big name hammer. One thing I will add I like a nice fat peen on the cross peen or straight peen---my favorite looks almost like it has a rod of 34 or 1" round stock welded on for the peen---old straight peen cost me a couple of bucks and I wouldn't trade it for ten times what I paid for it! Most store bought crosspeins have sharp peens on them which are not real handy for fullering metal though OK for ornamental hammer dings... I generally pick up hammers at the fleamarket or even scrap yard; though I did pick up a dozen or so of Lynch collection hammers at Quad-State over the years whenever I could get them cheap (are you noticing a pattern yet?)

I found quite a lot inside Columbus OH city limits. I agree I didn't find much when I lived in Holmdel NJ but I did find some at the Fleamarket at Englishtown for a decent price.

Well what I have noticed is that the parts hitting the hot soft metal do OK but the parts you pound on tend to mushroom more than you would like and *that* is what ends up causing you to make a new one. So a HTand then a draw up to a temp that the tool *might* get to with hard work and no cooling can make it last longer. Another method is to weld on a sacrificial hammering bar; but you have to mess with HT doing that anyway...

I prayed my "hard prayer" for her and the people around her.

What country are you in? Christopher Thomson has a steam hammer in his bone yard---don't know if he'd be willing to sell it but his shop is already fairly hammered up so you could ask. This is in the Southwest USA BTW.

Use it on the drill press! Chinese cast iron vises are known for their fragility under stress!

Have you thought of editing your profile to give your general location? I'm in central NM, USA and would be happy to *GIVE* you material to work with if you were local---or show you where to get stuff cheap!

I'd start by soaking overnight totally submerged in vinegar and then washing it off with a wirebrush in running water in the morning to remove all the scale leavina grey colour. Then wire brush or buff until you get the shade you want and seal. note that you will likely get flash rust after the vinegar soak as bare steel loves it's O2!

Well can you tell me how much weight *I* can lift? If you can maybe I can tell you how much hammer you can swing. Let me say this though. Don't try to over amp your arm with too heavy a hammer to start. It's pretty easy to mess up the tendons and be out of smithing for a long while or permanently! "Blacksmith's elbow" is a pain! As mentioned a bit over 2 pounds is generally a good weight to start with and then work your way up to a bigger one as you get in practice. Nowadays I tend to start with one like that, switch to a 3.3 pound once I'm warmed up and then cool off with the lighter one as I get tired. Getting one with a nicely dressed face is probably more important than if it's round, square, octagonal, etc. I started out with the first one I found at a fleamarket in good shape cheap---about a 2.5# doublejack. Used it for years till I started wanting a heavier one and got the 1500 gm swedish crosspein and now also use a light fast hammer for some jobs. (Insert rant on why RR spikes make lousy knives and why would one want to use them when track clips have sometimes twice the carbon content of a HC spike!)

You really want a full penetration weld and not just a go round the side. Of course if that's what you want---just a weld around the sides---, an eighty year old smith in AR, Isaac Doss, who did repairs that way suggested using a chunk of truck leafspring as the face plate as cheap and easy to find. He told me this back in the mid 1980's so most likely you can't double check with him anymore.

Nip it in the BUD?????? Why I'd give that dog a bone every time he drug one home---and make sure all of mine were chained down when he was around...

So have you taken a box of doughnuts or a 6 pack of brown pop (depending on your age and inclinations) over to the scrap yard and asked them to give you a holler with something comes in as scrap that you might could use? I have no problem buying stuff from a scrapyard at a price that makes them a profit. One thing that has helped me was I went to vistaprint and got a bunch of cheap business cards with my name and address and phone number (and e-mail) that I can scatter to folks who "might" run across some smithing stuff sometime. Worked so well my last place that when I moved here I sprung for a fancier card---has colour flames on the front that helps remind folks of me when it's stuck on the fridge or in a wallet.

I had a large old anvil from a copper mine in AZ that the %^&* maintenance crew has used as a prop when gouging. The face was *pristine* between the gouges. I drug it around a number of years until the local ABANA Affiliate held an anvil repair clinic hosted by a Welding instructor and highly talented smith. He used the Gunter Method and did proper preheat---had an optical pyrometer to measure the temp! Now the anvil is back in duty. (Only two anvils showed up for the clinic which was well as one had had the face milled down too thin to be usable and took 5 hours of work by a pro to get back into using shape and then mine had the gouges but took less time to repair particularly as I requested that it be a using repair and not a Concours d'Elegance repair. I figure my anvil is up to around 410 pounds after it's face lift...)

As for automating the count for twisting. I have an old timer that's electromechanical, you wind the indicator to the amount of time you want and then it has two sets of contacts one for things that are on till the timer clicks off and one for things that are off until the timer clickers off. Hook the motor up to the "on" but with a switch inline as well. Set the time, flip the switch and it will run the set time equaling a set number of turns and turn off. (If you really want to get fancy you could hook up a signal to the other set so it will let you know when it's time to load another as well) You really don't want to do fence pickets manually unless you hire grunt labour to do it! Most folks twist long lengths and then chop to size---more efficient.

Most of the post drills I have seen are made from the lower grades of cast iron---which is why they do break. I'd just use steel and forge a new part and tweak to fit myself. The used cast iron cause it was cheap and easy to use not because it was best for the purpose!

Using alloy steel you can get away with smaller sections than with A36 and so your tongs can be quite a bit lighter which for most of us is a virtue! My "heavy" tongs spend a lot more time on the rack than my light ones tending to get used by students who are not as careful as I am with the light ones.

Well I sure notice the difference once I started working in the dirt floored section of my shop vs the concrete floor. Same shoes, same me, same tasks as the forge just got moved out to the "dirty shop". My feet are much happier at the end of the day! Of course with anything dealing with humans different strokes for different folks!

Tis indeed a fine looking anvil and a lucky guy you are!

Hayden; I'm planning to go to Quad-State from NM and would like to carpool from Fort Smith AR. Non-smoker and happy to pay my share of the gas. Been to Q-S a lot of times and generally camp on-site with the old keenjunk internet crowd---you'd be welcome there too! I know that Vernon is practically on the way from NM; but I have a passle of kinfolk in AR that I need to visit so I need my old pickup there to get around and see my Grandfather and Grandkids, aunt and uncle, cousins, you know the drill...

Well the "2 parts" might be an issue and would renting a crane be cheaper than a helicopter? While the test would be equivalent if you had it free hanging an inch or two off the floor it would be much more interesting having Ric in a harness with the hot steel and the hammer hanging say 80' off the ground. I will watch from a considerable distance with a scope! Ric, we must discuss media rights and check to see if New England Life is still in business... Since many of the big hammer's foundation instructions speak of having crisscross layers of timber below them as part of their foundations that might be a fast way to build it up between the floors.

Strapping varies, I like to take a piece and do the heat-quench-break test on the end to see how it reacts for that piece. Different bandsaws have different alloys and some bandsaws have two alloys with the body and the teeth being different. Some of the good ones seem to be L6. I don't know if they cheapen the body too much for bimetallic blades. So far the ones I have used have a good bright nickle line in my pattern welding. If I'm worrying about the carbon content I'll slip in a sliver or two of old Black Diamond file as it was 1.2% C back in olden times. They're my favorite for San Mai blades too. I used to buy all the Black Diamond files I could get *cheap* back in OH and must have moved 50+ pounds of them out here---which is good as I haven't seen but one or two in 7 years out here. Had several Dealers back in OH that saw that I was scarfing them up and raised the price on them only to find I had a hard cutoff and wouldn't even look at them at over that price. It's not like I was hurting for them...I had told them my cut-off price too; not dancing around in the dark. They just had problems that I would buy 100% of them at price < cutoff and 0% of them ay price > cutoff. Of course some dealers were that way. I remember fishing some tools out of a dumpster that I had offered what I thought was a fair price for earlier at that fleamarket. Dumpster price was OK with me!

The SOFA forges have their blowers set up with a foot switch so you have to be standing on it to get them to run---saves a lot of coal and steel! The also have an override switch to just keep it on if you are doing something that needs a lot of air like forge welding.

Most of my vacation type things involve an anvil and hot metal at least part of the time---even when traveling internationally! I have one HB anvil that was stored for about 50 years in an unheated shed in a marshy area. The face was extremely good but 50+ years of condensation on the anvil when the weather changed let it with a fine even pitting. I has a substantially thick face on it and I could surface it to *perfect*. However I decided to leave it alone and just the working of hot metal on it is polishing out the face. (Scale is an abrasive you know). Most anvils don't need to be dead flat as in straightening it's helpful to have a bit of sway as yu need to push the metal just a tad too far and have it bounce back to straight. I still tend to use my anvil longest in my possession to straighten blades as I'm so used to it's sway it seems easy and with other "newer" ones I still have to fiddle a bit.