ThomasPowers

Actually trying to forge weld H13 and S7 together will probably result in a very expensive learning experience... or to quote Admiral Ackbar---"It's a trap!"

Be wary of leaving your equipment at an art department! Students often have little concept of meum et tuum and are proverbially rough on tools. (I teach an into to smithing and a smithing projects class a couple of times a semester at the local college and I figure that 1 class is equivalent to 1 years wear on my equipment if I was the only one using it.) Finding a forging friend with a local place to set up is your best bet---or see if there is a local group or historical site that would let you use their equipment. I once spent the summer in Germany on business and was having forge withdrawal until I found an open air museum where the smith was happy to let me do some forging.

Good looking bench; but may I suggest you think about making the stuff for yourself *special* as it will always be on hand when folks come to see you about getting something made...sort of a physical portfolio (I'm one to talk, I own all of my mistakes and all of the really good work belongs to someone else!)

Looks more like a hawk than an axe to my eye. Arc welding shouldn't be much of a problem if you used a good preheat/postheat to avoid cracking in the HAZ and for what the weld is doing I don't think there would be a lot of fuss in the alloys as in traditionally made versions that area is all wrought iron anyway. I've found the leaf spring can be harder to get a good forge weld in than a plain high carbon steel; but it can be done. I don't advise it as one's first forge weld or after a long while without doing them. Looks very "functional"!

"Trouble??? What? A neatly trimmed yard? A husband in better shape? Saving money on yard maintenance? What woman wouldn't want that kind of trouble?" Well as I mentioned my scythe work ended up with surgery to my shoulder and a wife having to wait on me hand and foot over the Thanksgiving Day holiday. Only Thanksgiving where I have not blown my diet as I was on heavy pain medication as the surgery was done the day before.

Buy quenching in Rob Gunter's "Super Quench" you can toughen up a HC RR Spike; but it's not really in the league of proper knife hardness's in my opinion. The HC spikes are spec'd to never exceed the boundary between mild steel and medium steel. The rail clips, funny ampersand looking things, spec out quite a bit higher and would make a decent blade as well as most automobile coil and leaf springs. RR Spike knives seem to be wildly popular but they are like the dancing bear---the wonder is not how well it dances but that it dances at all!

May I suggest you take this query over to the armourarchive.org which is a series of forums *dedicated* to the modern making of medieval and renaissance armour. This is not a job for a blacksmith but for an armourer (and yes they use the english spelling of armour and not the american one in the url.) As previously mentioned do list your intended use and approximate location; shoot you may want to check the classifieds section to see if someone has a pair for sale right now!

Perhaps what you need is not another anvil but just a "truing plate" A heavy thick piece of steel that has a good flat surface. I was using one last night when I was truing up a spider (used to support a pot over a fire) after forge welding the legs onto the ring. Very helpful in that as a wide flat surface you can true up assemblies on it either hot or cold. For blademaking I've sometimes used a section of old RR rail with a flat top and several feet of length. (new RR rail tends to have an arched top)

Sort of like some people getting really fussy about calling pattern welding "damascus" even though it's been done for far longer than their country's been called the United States of America. (I prefer to use the separate terms pattern welded and wootz just to avoid confusion now that we have folks making both kinds and sometimes using both kinds in the same blade!)

Ductile iron works in the same way that drilling a hole at the end of a crack works. The graphite forms spheres as it solidifies. To propagate the crack now has to spread it's force along a wide face and exceed the strength of the material to essentially start a new crack. Grey cast iron is absolutely full of lens shaped graphite inclusions which terminate in atomically fine "wedges" making it easy for a crack to zip through it---sort of the difference between pounding a steel ball through a log of wood to pounding a splitting wedge through one. White cast iron AKA "chilled cast iron" is cooled so it solidifies before the graphite can start collecting in lenses but the carbides it's trapped in are both hard and brittle. Ductile is useful for a lot of things and is often nice and cheap compared to casting steel. HOWEVER when someone says "cast iron" it is assumed they mean grey cast iron until proven otherwise!

My rule is: good screw = = good vise as everything else can be fairly easily fixed with common tools.

Generally I don't start new smiths on real wrought iron or high carbon steels until they know the basics with mild steel

A36 is generally a tad harder under the hammer and so not as good for very "florid" ornamental work where "pure iron" might be just the thing. However it's what mostly gets used these days. As mentioned don't quench---normalization is far better. With A36 I like to not have a quench tank handy just to make sure. And by the way 30 points is not some magic number, it's just one chosen for convenience to mark the change from mild to medium so as you go up from 00 towards 30 points of carbon stuff gets increasingly "medium-like". Now the eutectic concentration does represent a change!

Now Mark there are those shop drawings that show the anvil oriented with the horn towards the smith too....hard to keep a pointless argument down and later we'll have dead horse pate...

I like the term "gravity hammer". MacBruce, how do you then differentiate between hammers that have a "powered" down stroke vs those that are simply gravity accelerated? (and then the hybrids---some of the old tilt hammers had a "spring" on top to help to get them started on the down stroke. Sometimes just a board that would flex much like the simple leg vise springs) As I recall the first steam hammer was a gravity hammer with a steam return---but didn't take them long to figure out that it could work better as a double action system!

Well let's see: youngest I've taught was in single digits and the oldest was 82. So depending on how you define "older in life" you maybe ain't there yet! My day job is in IT and it's often very soothing to come home at night and hit some hot metal with a hammer---REPEATEDLY! OTOH when it's 108 degF in the shade and your working in an uninsulated metal building it's real nice to go into work and think "wow they pay me to sit in a comfy chair in airconditioning and stare at a screen and type!

Ciladog is right on the hot and cold short. Jake an odd thought came to me; could you design a grill for the Cathedral where folks could buy in for just one "section" of the ornamentation and so would grow gradually as folks did so. Perhaps having the mounting holes for the rest of the pieces pre-made when the frame is erected. As just a block the price could be reasonable and get a lot of people to buy into it!

Now if you do cut off the delam face section you will then have a piece of *old* high carbon steel that should be saved to make a knife from in a style appropriate to the date of the anvil. I have an 1820's William Foster missing almost all the face save for one small section that I picked up for US$5 to have both some dated steel for an 1820's style blade and a base to try to forge weld the top on sometime in the traditional manner. (I'm the guy who suggested that to SOFA as a demo for Q-S and then wasn't able to attend that year!)

To start a line you first find a need to fill that has possibilities that forging will make something faster/better/cheaper. One example I know of was a part that was being machined out of a very large piece of very expensive metal alloy where 80% of that expensive alloy ended up as milling machine waste. The blacksmith was able to forge a pre-form close in shape to the final piece so that the milling needed was minimal saving a lot in the cost of materials, time, wear and tear on equipment, etc. Sounds like making parts for a monorail is a good place to start and if you can provide them *good* and *fast* locally it would sure help lock your company in as a supplier over some company that is in a different country! Good Luck!

Hmm; have you looked into wearing a concealed maille shirt when turning such items over to the customer?

I'd say that "drop" hammers are strictly gravity powered ones for the down stoke (no matter how the up stroke is handled) and powerhammers are one that have a power assist to the down stroke whether it be energy stored in springs, steam, compressed air, etc. Tilt hammers are a type of drop hammer as are board hammers cable hammers etc.

Note that pretty much every hardware store sold these things at one time often under their own name and pretty much every general foundry probably made some too. Unless there is a name on the blower you're down to the basics: the "type" is a coal forge and the model is a rivet/farrier's forge with a ratchet crank for the blower.

Sorry I was referring to the cog driven one and not the large drop hammer subsequently posted. I figured that "not a duck" was referring to the "schwanz" in schwanz hammer that I posted. Anyway, MORE POWER! is often handy in the smithy!

Haywood Community College 185 Freedlander Dr. Clyde, NC 28721 Sam punch some hole in your Al foil hat we're having difficulties reading needed information from your mind!

How's the screw on it? Looks like it was left out to rust but I don't see a lot of repairs and the jaws seem to line up and their isn't a lot of hammer marks on the front moving jaw---how had it lived a rough life? I have a 6" one that was inside it's entire life; but that was in a car repair shop that started in 1918 and the moving jaw top looks rather like the surface of the moon from all the hammering done on it. (Of course car repair shops had forges back then!)