ThomasPowers

A heavy shell can be an advantage for a stay in one place forge as you can weld all sorts of bells and whistles to it. My second gasser was made from welding cylinder material and the first thing I did was to weld a section of sq tubing along each side. then slid in some nesting sq stock with one end bent into an L; so I have a third arm to rest longer pieces on and one for the front and one for the back as well! If the insulation is good the outside material has a nominal effect of the efficiency.

Mine didn't but I don't know how *your* set up will be. i picked up a couple of *short* sections of stainless from the Re-Store to do the last bit on my system down near the firepot just in case; but have not used them yet. If you are going through the roof of anything attached to your house you may need a formal woodstove pass through---though in my experience my forge flue has *NEVER* been nearly as hot as my wood stove flue; follow all requirements to keep the insurance people happy! My shop has steel walls and roof and as we get very little rain, (we're at 0.1" precip for the year so far!) I have a rather informal set up for the chimney.

Auto Parts store????? Think shade tree mechanic or small non-chain auto repair set up. Here in Socorro NM I could give you a dozen names and we're a town of under 10k people! The bigger the business the more likely it is to have strict control on all inputs and outputs and the least likely to have someone interested in what you are doing just say, "pile's out back; go crazy!" Note that for a small business a dozen doughnuts or a hand forged trinket can go a long way to gaining access to the goodies! Also be prepared to listen to everyone's stores about their relations who were smiths---but *listen*! I've run down more than a few anvils or other tools that way!

All I can say is how grateful I am that my wife doesn't read this forum!

Steve that is a *great* suggestion!

Well I'd rather *gift* work rather than sell it at a loss!

Is "well over 100 pounds" 110 pounds or 190 pounds? If someone was selling you gold or diamonds wouldn't the exact weight make a difference in price? Hard to tell the state of the face from those blurry pictures, just like a car how bunged up the body makes a difference in re-sale price. OTOH *repairs* or even worse grinding or milling to make the face *perfect* sends the price plummeting! BigFoot's pricing is rather along the same lines as my self for that region.

For a specific brand knowing WHAT COUNTRY YOU ARE IN may help. In general I use 20 Mule Borax here in the USA and when I work with higher alloy steels I cut it with Roach-Pruf which is 98% boric acid (and much much cheaper than buying USP Boric acid at the pharmacy!) Forge welding is something that a good afternoon with someone who knows what they are doing can save you *months* of flailing about on your own. Finding a local smith or smithing group is strongly suggested!

You would quench for the edge material. Good place to get corian is from someone who installs sinks or counter tops. The cut outs for the sink(s) will provide a lot of material!.

Just don't let the theory end up getting you hurt! My Father used to tell me that "many a good man has gotten killed by theories that *should* have worked!"

My guess is that it's a translation error; how many translators know the details of ferrous metals and their processes? I ran into this once when using a native Japanese speaker to help me vet some earthquake bracing plans. Even with a technical Japanese dictionary they still came up with "this bar is like where a ship travels". To me that meant "channel" steel. To them it was a mystery. (I will say that the Japanese designed earthquake bracing was very well done, especially as it was to be insulated from the system---for years after that job I knew the kanji for "insulating bushing"...)

How I would quantify it is to turn it on and adjust the air flow until I didn't feel much blowing past me in either direction. I feel that empiricism is much superior to theory in many cases as we can't quantify all the variables!

I picked up 2 sections of spiral seamed 10" ductwork at the Re-store for $4 a 10' section. They also had some SS to make the ingress section from. Did you check with a local HVAC contractor to see what they had on their pull off pile from remodeling commercial spaces? Did you check with the local demolition company to see if they have any to sell you for 1/2 or less the price of new?

we're both sticklers for the jargon of our respective crafts---at least she doesn't smoke hams! (that insult in Monty Python's Holy Grail is actually an insult because it's claiming that his mother had a non-noble job, not that she was a rodent!)

Thanks for checking up on them---of course museums don't always get it right either... Looks like we can use a check on ferrous metals process history. Casting of steel in Europe was about 2000 years after those were made and even early crucible steel work done in central asia only produced "pucks". Cast to shape in steel is quite a modern thing as you need good metallurgy to deal with casting issues like large grains. Casting of cast iron was known in China and they even came up with a surface decarburization process to make steel faced cast iron objects. So suggesting that these were cast from steel is like suggesting that the illuminations of the Lindisfarne Gospels were made using apple computers. In the West Huntsman is generally created with the invention of "crucible steel" in the 1740's though places like Merv were doing it in Central Asia around the first century AD---still 700 years later than the Luristani blades and again both places casting ingots that were then heavily forged to refine the grain. I heartily concur that cast iron would be a ludicrous material to make swords from.

1 Don't make plans based on what someone who may have just been lucky does. 2 Another issue is that the amount of CO a forge produces goes WAY UP if it can recycle the exhaust back through the burner. Fresh make up air is mandatory! 3 If cold weather is an issue look into running your forge in a "box" that has an exhaust flue and a blown make up air supply balanced with the exhaust. I've been to demo's put on by major ABANA affiliates where they ran propane with the doors only open a bit due to weather--and came out with CO headaches several times. I love my gas forge; but I generally try to use it with 2 10'x10' roll up doors aligned along the general wind direction open and only start closing one of them "slightly" when things start blowing over in the shop---we get a lot of high winds.

I got my first set of tongs right over there----WHERE ARE YOU AT. Actually you don't need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs---you just start with pieces of steel long enough to hold on to while forging the working ends. For small stuff a pair of gatepost pliers can work. I've seen lots of folks using visegrips, but the heat tends to mess up the springs---just like in arc welding with them... I generally buy my tongs at the fleamarket and pay US$6 and under---my favorite knifemaking tongs cost me $1.50! Many of the cheap tongs are not in great shape however it's a lot easier and faster to repair of modify a pair than to forge them from ground zero, (which I have done like when I made Ti tongs) Just be wary that the "old" tongs you are getting are not wrought iron ones; they are a bit harder for a new smith to work with. Leaf blowers make obnoxious noise; far better to salvage a car heater blower and run it off a 12 volt car battery!

Looks like a good one! I have several like that---what I call a *using* vice. I consider using them more important than worrying about when/who made it. The neatest mod I've see to that style was to braze a cap on the back of the screwbox and fit a zerk to it to be able to push grease in and have it push out the cruddy stuff. (of course after an initial through clean up!)

16 penny nails make good rivets and the heads can be easily re-struck to resemble hand forged nails. However in most colonial work would that not have been forge welded instead? I do several different trivets and forge weld the rings and the legs as my basic take on it is "If you are doing something to avoid a forge weld in a historical piece you probably are doing it in an unhistorical manner".

"some sort of pusher or guide would help" What about a couple of springs like on a post vise but in the horizontal plain? The bending up is due to deformation in the working and not as easy to deal with.

Ahh the title of the picture was "Near East (Luristan) Iron Collection cast iron swords with handles" this indicated to me that they might be cast---the handles definitely are made to look like the cast bronze ones that proceeded iron ones. Without inspecting them I can't say that this is not a simple translation error and were forged to resemble the earlier ones. To us "iron" usually means "wrought iron" but to machinists it usually means "cast iron".

Very good anvil brand!

Well once I sort of qualified as the one and now I might qualify as the other---if I eat a lot of salad! (Actually my wife is a spinster and wanted to do a traditional indigo vat dye project. Indigo is a weird dye as instead of chemically bonding with the fiber it mechanically bonds with the fiber. It does this by being reduced in a vat of stale urine, fermenting bran or nowadays a chemical-thiosulphate. When reduced the dye molecule is quite small and slips in between the fibers. You then oxidize it by hanging the material in air and it turns beautiful blue and swells up so it can't escape the way it got in. So after being the vat filler designee and having to nurse it along as it was a cold summer and I had to move it into the sun, build a greenhouse for it and run a light bulb to it to help keep the temp up at night; I laid clam to it after the dying was done to test Theophilus's methods---some folks want very accurately made medieval eating knives! Well just like last week when I was having people forge eating knives from old sewer snake---I don't tell them what it was till *after* they have used it...)

Sometimes you can find a a place where a tragic industrial accident can occur with a load of coal being dumped in your truck after a loss of brown pop---usually at lunch or late in the day---hot days seem to work better than cold ones. Leastways that was what I was told by an old timer who continued to source his coal from a mine even after all of it was pre-sold to a company in Belgium...

The day I cam to work after spending all night at the Hospital assisting with the birth of my first child I was not allowed to work with any of the tools. They just set me in the corner and told me that this one was on them!