ThomasPowers

Iron City in a 6 pointed star made in Pittsburgh. More commonly found on Postvises in my experience

One of my students gifted me with a penannular he made with a twist pattern damascus for the brooch and a mokume sword for the pin and the ends of the brooch had silver caps with dangling on fine chains an anvil and hammer in silver. Perhaps something like that for your customer? It was on display at Quad-State.

HB's are weight stamped in pounds so does it weigh appx 77 pounds or are you missing a digit (probably the first one)

How about a slight dip on the bottom jaw as well so the head of the nail doesn't lift it off the rest of the jaw?

PS: be sure to temper over 500 degF to have a tough rather than hard and brittle item!

Note---traditional ones may be sized for smaller hands. Historical ones would almost certainly not be made of a medium to high carbon steel. (if used against blades there is a virtue in having the blade nick the guard as it gives you more control of the blade in a twist movement.---but yes they would have to be replaced more often.) I have 1/2" and 5/8" coil springs from autos/pickups in my scrap pile and also 1.25" coil from earth moving equipment and one slightly smaller from a train car. Do preheat and full penetration welds if using modern welding methods. The heat treating afterwards should cover any postheat

Don't go wild over hardy tools until you know what you are likely to use, think of the pain of going broke for a complete set of XYZ only to find out you really need a Q and now don't have the money for it. At Quad-State there was a fellow with a large number of old battered hardy tools and top tools that started selling them at a decent price, whereupon I bought a couple I really could use. By the end of the event they were quite cheaper and I picked up several that I could modify into tooling I could use. (Helps to have anvils with a hardy holes that will take top tools turned upside down!) You definitely want the Hardy for cutting hot stock and may want a fuller. Most of the rest you may not want or need until you figure out how to use one to make a job you do regularly simpler---I've now bought a couple of bottom swages as I use them when rolling rasps into rasptlesnakes faster and easier than using the cutting step on an anvil which I did for years...

Unless you are planning to offer free shipping it might be a good idea to mention the location. In your previous thread:"location is columbus ga".

You won't get topography with vinegar. And as mentioned you want a weak acid rather than a strong one as you want a differential etch and strong acids eat *everything*. You may want to try diluting your acid or your ferric chloride. Note that different alloy mixes work better with different acids, you may need to experiment to see what gives you the topography and colouration you want. Also buffing can "smear" the lines, you usually go to etch after grinding with sharp fresh belts. And finally this is one of my quirks: please don't use the word BEST! Or to put it another way you tell *me* what is the best temperature for *my* tea---kind of hard not knowing what I like isn't it. Best for one person may be one of the worst for another. Also "Best" might cost several million dollars; not very helpful to most of us!

Don't "pack it in"! You are using it as an insulator and insulation works best if it's light and fluffy and not dense and compressed! Keep it dry too.

Once you start your anvil harem it's hard to stop with just 1!

Capt'n Atli uses an old steam iron to warm his anvil, just turn it on high and place it on the face while first thing when you get in the shop. Anvils do see to break more often in cold weather---I have a friend who broke an old family anvil. Steel does have a brittle zone when it's quite cold---we studied the liberty ship that broke in two in a calm harbour---at -55 degF in one of the MatSci classes I took. However there is always the possibility that the failure mode at warmer cold temps is actually the smith not having as much control due to be cold or bulky clothing and so doing the damage by mis-striking. Any way, a warm anvil is nice to work on in cold weather! When I worked for the swordmaker we used to fight for who got to sit on the nice warm anvil between heats rather than standing on the cold concrete floor! (we warmed it up by hanging old large cans on the horn and heel and building small scrap wood fires in them.) A piece of plywood on the ground can help your feet stay warmer too!

Wow---look at all those cell phone towers around Nuge! (only mesquite and cottonwood near my place and they don't get very tall and definitely *NOT* straight!)

Funnel to the wind: Were you eating a lot of beans then? One of my *O* *S* moments was being in a hurry to get home from a demo and dumping the "dead" coals into a metal bucket and loading it in the bed of the pickup only to look in the rear view mirror a few minutes on the road and noticing that the side of the bucket was glowing red...

Generally I anneal overnight and love to find the piece warm to the bare hand in the morning. Normalize, heat to critical and let cool in still air is what I do when I don't have time for an anneal.

I prefer junk shops and fleamarkets and garage sales to antique stores. Generally I don't spend more than $5 per hammer head and *try* to buy them minus the handles as you generally have to reset them anyway and you can do it *right*. (I also buy handles at fleamarkets, garage sales or when the local hardware store has a sale) One time a fellow was trying to up the price on a set hammer I wanted telling me that the *new* handle was worth more than what I thought was fair to pay---well it was handled so badly that I pulled the new handle out of the head and handed it to him and said now how much? I would have had to toss the "new" handle he had botched into the head; so I saw no reason to pay for it. Have you asked your neighbors, folks at church, co-workers, etc what's lurking around their basements, garages, sheds, barns, etc?

If a blowdryer isn't enough somethings wrong! One was too much even for a forge made from a semi brakedrum. What size are your tuyere holes and is the rest of the plumbing buttoned up tight? As to plans for cheap bellows; well you build them to use what you can find for free or cheap! So the plans for my "free" set might cost a whole lot for someone else to build who didn't have that stuff free! You can use treated canvas for the "leathers" (or old sails, even did one once with old awning material that was thrown out) and plywood for the boards (did 2 bellows from an old line printer cabinet from a law office---oak veneered!) The snout can be one of the old (60's) tapered table legs---you just cut off the end at the right size to fit your plumbing! The end of the bellows I glued and screwed up from scrap 2xX's and bored the hole to fit the table leg.

"When?" Looks like a more recent variant of casting. I'll check AinA when I get a chance.

Make the brooch out of Ti?

Traditionally about 1 hour per inch of thickness. It's more the bring up that does the work than the sit so you are generally better off to temper cycle it 3 times than to do it once and let it sit for a long time.

Perhaps it goes to mine where I have the base but the top is missing---weight stamped; so it was a full anvil at one time and was most likely a PW according to Postman.

How much does it weigh? Did you do any distal taper on the blade? Alloy and heat treat? ("Stainless" ranges from completely useless to OK for a blade depending on ally and heat treat.) Just want to know if it's a sword or an SLO.

Well if it's a mild steel cable neither quench will do anything; if it's double improved plow steel cable, warm oil will work great and supper quench will cause it to shatter. So what is it? If you don't know, try warm oil first and if it's not hard enough try brine and if it's not hard enough try superquench and if it's not hard enough it's a letter opener. Remember the edge should be as least as thick as a dime before quenching and don't do a full finish on it as heating and quenching will scale it up again; but make sure that no coarse scratches are left to promote cracking during quenching and remember TEMPER AS SOON AS IT'S QUENCHED!

And unless you are always going to be holding the same end with the same shape you may need more than one pair of tongs! As the piece changes shape so do the tongs. For starting with flat stock a good pair of tongs that have a flat U on the bottom jaw that just fits the flat stock with the top jaw that fits down between the U will make a pair that controls stock well. For me I like a small pair of snub nosed horseshoer's tongs, (not the round ones), as they are light and short and I want to work up close to my blades! I have it sized for 1/4" thick stock and generally that's OK for 80% of the work I do. Working with scrap the first task is to forge a section to fit those tongs and then take it from there!

Of course "old school" is not using modern alloys!