ThomasPowers

"The Complete Modern Blacksmith" Weygers has how to scrounge and tinker and build everything you need on the cheap. I once assembled a complete beginner's set up for under US$25 with a 1/4" drill as the most expensive tool used. Basically you need something that you can build a fire in and something you can beat metal against and something to hit it with! Doesn't have to look like 19th century American stuff at all! I picked up several smithing tools and books at the fleamarket around Frankfurt. Hopefully you speak enough German to ask? Can you join a local group? Several of the open air museums have smiths that are "volunteers" and the forge at Lauf auf den Pegnitz is run every month by a club. Your assumptions about smithing are not necessarily accurate: According to "Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel" Gies & Gies. smiths did not start using coal till around the high to late middle ages. Charcoal is in many ways a much nicer fuel than coal---no sulfur or smoke! Real wrought iron was used from the beginning of the iron age until roughly the 1930's tapering down from the invention of the Bessemer/Kelly process in the 1850's (One of England's last wrought iron manufacturers was donated to the Blist Hill Museum in Coalbrookdale and they are recycling old WI; but it's pricey!) I can give you lots of info as this is my are of interest (History of Ferreous metals technologies) Lets go to e-mail. Thomas SKA Master Wilelm the smith

I have never based an anvil buy on "when it was made"; only on size, style, condition and make. When it was made doesn't generally affect usability. If it is in your price rang and is in good condition then go for it. HB is one of the top american makers Now for historical work I use my most recently made anvil---2008 but it was made in a style that was in use from ancient Rome to the 19th century!

I'd bet on Vulcan too: configuration, school use and the porosity in the cast iron peaking out under the horn's steel "face". Be gentle on the horn, I have one where a student broke off the horn. due to porosity and abuse!

I forged 2 hardies on Saturday from 2 small high carbon steel wedges; all I had to do was to use my screwpress to bump the end to square and the size for the hardy holes---I then took it to an anvil and hammered a blunt point on the end so it can be popped out of the hardy hole if it jams, (students don't seem to check if a hardy is designed to fit the anvil they are using. My current plan is to colour code anvils and tools so it's harder to make up an excuse of why they are using the wrong tool for their anvil... Seemed hard enough just normalized (see students....) I also ground off the mushrooming on a number of top swages I picked up at Q-S and then heated a couple of them and bumped them to serve as bottom swages on my large anvils. I then forged a replacement for the arm on my swing arm fuller that broke at the State Fair, Used heavy coil spring and punched the mounting hole for a 3/8" bolt, normalized that one too. It will take another heat to tweak the alignment though. Sunday I spent the afternoon in a church business meeting; but a student/friend brought over a work crew and cleaned out the first bay of the shop extension so we can work on getting a floor in . Amazing how much stuff accumulates in a "not ready for use" area.

Where in Germany? I get over to Garching bei Meunchen every once in a while on business. I got to demo pattern welding to a smith in his 80's at the open air museum at Bad Windsheim back in the 90's. (been in the SCA since 1978 too)

Ah folks that old an industry of that type there should be a bonanza of smithing stuff hidden away; pretty much any factory dating from pre WWII had a complete smithing set up---I know of plate glass factory and a sugar refinery that had power hammers! I once went to the close down auction of a car repair business that had been open since 1919---they of course had a smithy as part of the original equipment...Also a HVAC company that had moved to the "new" building in the 1930's---got a nice hay budden at that one. Shame to let them go to a scrapyard! Someone nearby look up that fellow and talk to him or his father about possible finds!

As a gedanken experiment thank of taking that same set-up and putting it on a piece of 1/4" stock to balance and mark that point. Now draw out the peen side to 1' long. Put it back on the balancer and mark the balance point---are they the same point? Lever arm calculations play a part too in having a well balanced hammer.

I was wondering if anyone had ever told them how dangerous gasoline was and how they should never put any in their car as there are *loads* of terrible things that can happen if you do!

What? I can't use your tangent to go off on my tangent and sneak in a little of the history into the discussion? One of my meds is an injectable I take it every 3 minutes 24 hours a day...insulin pump...

"Thomas, You da biggest elf I ever did see" Yah; well I used to go out drinking with the Ents all the time... Of course in the red hat I've been compared with a gnome on steroids a lot...

Tempered over much how? Brown is a harder temper than blue. If anything I would say under tempered but as a medium carbon steel Brown may work as a forging hammer---use will tell. For "special" hammers I like to use Ipe wedges (rasped out of some flooring boards) and pattern welded wedges, (you generally can't see the pattern but when you tell folks they get a funny look on their faces...)

If you can get your work up to temp without oxidizing too much it will work. Doesn't matter too much *how*. Coal, coke, propane natural gas, induction, friction...all work. I generally start at one end and work my way to the other---especially If I will have to weld a larger billet in stages because of the size of the forge's hot spot. To start off with I would have advised a small billet that you can easily weld in one go; make and weld several of them, then clean and stack them and weld up the billet of billets to get the mass you need for the blade.

Phil K: I wear my hearing protectors on long trips in my old truck---especially in the summer when I have the window down as the air conditioner went out and the cost of fixing it is more than the worth of a 21 year old 4 banger pickup...(I also wear them in the house when my hard of hearing wife turns the TV *up*...) One aspect of leveling a stump---you really only need the area that will be covered by the anvil's base parallel with the base of the stump. You should be able to trace the anvil base on some plywood and cut that out and then using a level level the plywood template on top of the stump and then just rout it out making a level inlet that the anvil will drop into.

Nice choice of handle and fittings *and* the sheath work---makes it look like "old money"!

I'm one of the folks who will mention that car/truck coil springs have usually double the carbon content of an HC RR spike and are also cheap---usually free and easy to find. As most of the time and effort in knifemaking is in the finishing and you have to do pretty much the same amount for a spike knife as a coilspring knife why not use the *better* alloy to start with Then if everything goes right you have a good blade to brag about. I teach a number of people a year smithing and beginning bladesmithing and I don't start them on spikes; to get into the bladesmithing I expect them to already have done the basics class and so don;'t need to learn the basics of smithing on their first blade.

Well then if you are up on alloys and how they work and what heats they should use and can work a deep reducing fire to keep it going half a day in the shop and can get strong forge welds as the usual rather than the rare case them you should do very well with the Pattern Welded Blade. I would suggest ILL'ing his first two books and reading through them first as they are a progression. As for starting books I like "The Modern Blacksmith", Weygers, which is now sold combined with his other books as "The Complete Modern Blacksmith". I am very down with Weygers scrounge and re-cycle memes and like the way that he details a process down the sides of the writing with multiple pictures rather than just a couple of photos.

Dodge is right on the money! Pay attention to the safety aspects he mentions too! Bone can be carved like a hard and brittle wood with chisels or rotary tools---watch the dust for power tools! I made some small chisels to carve simple knotwork on a handle using the square cut masonry nails.

Actually as an introduction to bladesmithing I would suggest a good all around blacksmithing book *before* The Complete Bladesmith. Once you know the basics of the craft the advanced topics will make much more sense!

Jean Tijou

I do not believe that PW used serial numbers however it could be an asset number from a previous owner. My big Fisher anvil was from a blacker powerhammer and has a number punched into the side of the face that Fisher never put there. Another Blacker I've seen has a similar number just a couple if digits off so I suspect it's a blacker number---nothing stops anyone from adding their own number to an anvil.

Well some folks here will get a bit tired and cranky if we get a person who posts time and again without getting out to the forge and *trying* stuff; but are happy when someone comes back in and says "I tried XYZ and got this and I wanted that---how do I get from here to there...?" (If you read the entire archives you will find a couple of examples of this.) The proof of the smithing is in the doing! I get a lot of MatSci students in beginning smithing classes and a lot of book larning still does not equate to any smithing skills. OTOH learning to blacksmith helped one MatSci friend of mine get a MatSci job in a tight job market. As for hardening and tempering: if you start hard you can temper to a higher temp multiple times---but failure mode may be catastrophic destruction of the piece. If you start soft you have to do a full heat quench temper cycle to get it harder but failure mode is usually bending/mushrooming. Which way you chose depends on how difficult the piece is to replicate and how you like to handle things. If you want some starters: blades usually start temper at around straw to dark straw and then go up depending on alloy construction/design, size, personal preference, etc. *except* for high alloy blades that may require high tech heat treat to get the best form the expensive alloy Tooling usually starts darker as it is often expected to withstand more abuse than a blade. Many tools are made from medium carbon steels and my be tempered all the way to blue. However high alloy tooling---beloved of blacksmiths because it keeps it's strength almost to glowing has a whole nother heat treat paradigm. Go not to the Elves for advice for they shall say both Yes and No!

As long as you get pure borax and not Borateem which has soap mixed in with it. Flux before your pieces get too scaled up, wirebrush and re-flux if it starts getting "crunchy" looking.

"The temper color depends upon the carbon content" and alloy content! Purple may be fine for some alloys and TERRIBLE for others. If the chart does not reference the alloy(s) it's good for then it is a bad chart! (Though with skill you can often figure out how you would modify a chart for a different alloy...) Also personal preference is a big part of smithing. I mean we can make our own tools; so we can make them to suit ourselves and not some lowest common denominator that some large corporation thinks is the cheapest they can get away with. Think about it. Companies are not dedicated to making the *best*; just what has the best profit ratio. If you feel that a 34 Oz hammer is *perfect*; you will find that no company makes one---but I can name a half dozen smiths off the top of my head who can make you one exactly like you want it! I personally like my knife blades softer than some makers I know and so will temper them to suit myself. (I like to be able to touch them up on a natural stone instead of having to have a diamond hone with me...) Does this mean everyone else's tempering instructions are wrong? *NO*! Does this mean my tempering procedure is wrong? *NO*! Just as you may not like the foods I like and vice versa. De gustibus non est disputandum Note too that there is a LOT of hold over from the old days in blacksmithing that can be not only wrong but *very* wrong, (cf "packing the edge of a blade"). Would you trust instructions from a 200 year old medical book, even if it's re-printed in a modern book? Things that worked for blister steel and shear steel may not be a good thing for modern alloys---the temperature that real wrought iron likes to be worked at is above the burning temperature of many modern alloys and if you work it at temps that modern alloys generally do well at; it may fray like a broom! (However most folks don't work much with centuries old types of material---modern steels really start around the 1850's with Bessemer/Kelly process) If you cannot work in such an environment then perhaps smithing is *not* for you. No slur on your character, it just may not be something that goes well with how you *are*. May I suggest machining as a metalworking craft where utmost precision is considered a good and laudable thing! (as well as starting with known alloys and using calibrated instruments for heat treat, etc.) I have a friend who is a hobby machinist---he considers me to be a witch doctor and I consider him to be A-R---so we help each other out when the other's skills are needed for a project.

Which is why so many of my replies tend to ask that details are supplied! We've answered that it's a top of the line anvil and that they tend to be quite expensive and that some of use would prefer to have a larger anvil at the same or lower price. Seems like that's enough info for them to make their own decision---and then the thread started slaloming about---as usual! Barny, they didn't start using coal to smelt iron until the 1700's, (Abraham Darby, Coalbrookdale England). Prior to that they used charcoal; but to confuse things in medieval times Coal meant charcoal and not earth coal, mineral coal, sea coal, etc. Had problems with sulfur getting into the iron making it weak and hot short. Coking coal prior to use helped some and was AD's method.