ThomasPowers

Diderot's Encyclopedia is the "go to" book for the late 1700's for technological info. It is one of the gems of the enlightenment where they tried to show how *everything* was done currently in France. Hard to find the complete version but easy to find excerpts. There will be a number of pages of engravings on jobs that are smith related showing the tools, clothes, equipment of the era in the "best and most up to date methods in France" So cutting edge of the last of the 18th century might very well cover remote/rural areas of the early 19th century.

Check local small businesses; I buy most of my new steel from a place that makes and repairs windmills---the old farm type in western America. They charge about 1/3 to 1/2 less for the same stock as does the local lumber yard and a heck of a lot less than a big box store only 50 miles down the road (and even further to find a real steel dealer!). The get a break on price the more they order and so are generally happy to have me upping their order levels. Also I used to get scrap new stock (drops) for free from a middle sized ornamental iron co---they had to pay for their scrap dumpster to be hauled and dumped and so having me go through and remove some and clean it up so more would fit was a good deal for them---and I made hand forged trinkets for the office staff.---always asked first, wore PPE, went in when I wouldn't be in the way of paying work, etc.

That would work, though be an expensive bottom swage in my thoughts----How about: anneal it first and cut off excess length and make them into hammers heads so 2 hammers and 2 bottom swages, or make one into a bottom swage and wire wrap a handle on the other for a top swage to match the bottom swage?

"given a choice between driving a bicycle or a rolls royce, I would pick the rolls royce" And if you could ride the bicycle *today* and the rolls royce sometime in the misty future and you have to stay home in the meantime? Or if you could buy the bicycle and a 4 wheeler and a small pickup vs just the rolls royce? Everything is trade-offs and we all have different priorities.

Do you want to use that billet for knifemaking? If so: if all the pieces are the same thickness the result will have 50 points carbon---without any decarb taken into account! So it's a bit low on C---for knifemaking. I generally use wire to hold a billet together and generally it scales off the outsides of the billet. If you worry about it on the indise of a fold you can grind it off before folding. How many folds? I'd suggest folding till your handle is about to fall off---won't be too many for your first go around! A good welded billet can be worked on any edge---I've compressed one down the Long way down into a disk for one project. HOWEVER for your first one I would not advise trying to work it down edgewise. If your hammering were perfect you would have perfectly parallel layers and so have the problems you mentioned. However most of us will end up with "random pattern" pattern welded steel as each hammer blow will not be quite even. If you want a more active pattern I suggest you read "The Pattern Welded Blade" by Hrisoulas---if you are in America you can probably ILL it at your local public library. (And I assure you it has a whole lot more info in it on the subject than a few posts on a web forum!) For your starting piece having a very slight bow across the billet pieces can help extrude the flux and crap when welding. Once you get good you can weld up random scrap from off the side of the road with no problem; however when you do have a problem it's back to first principles and do clean metal and slight camber. You want a deep clean un-oxidizing fire; but it has to get hot enough to weld Not knowing anything about your set up it's hard to give details---can you tell me how much I need to press the accelerator down to get to 60 mph in my vehicle? One trick I use is to get the fire really hot and then turn off the air and stick the billet in to heat for fluxing and then go get a drink of water or use the facilities to give it enough time to heat thoroughly with no excess air before wirebrushing and fluxing for the first weld. Also for un-experienced weldors I would suggest double welding before folding. As for hammer blows: firm not sharp, you want to push the stuff together not blast it apart. Billy Merritt demos welding by using a hammer handle to weld---no hammer head on it! So raw power is not needed *or* wanted!

"Ugly stuff": I too have some early stuff I forged that is "ugly". I have always promised myself that when it broke/wore out I would re-make the items with benefit of my increased experience. Unfortunately(?); some of them have not broken after about 30 years of use. Guess I got them right even if ugly back in my beginning days! I'm slowly replacing them; usually as a demo for a student who needs to make something similar.

Note: if you re-stack your forge so it's about 1/2 as wide and has the same charcoal piled deeper it will work better. All that charcoal to the sides of your working area is just wasting fuel and throwing heat on you. Charcoal forges are often "trench" shaped to make best use of the fuel. When I need to make my own charcoal as I go along I like to have a separate fire to keep the heat and smoke away from *me* and then just rake coals onto a shovel and dump them in the forge as I need them. You have already noticed that a vacuum puts out way more air than you need and have probably figured a way to cut it down a *lot*. Even blowing a 3' long trench forge my shop vac was set up to waste most of the air by having the end about 6" away from the tue pipe and then adjusting it so they were *NOT* aligned for fine control. In general I do not advise folks to admit to crimes on the net or suggest that others do likewise; however those "J" shaped steel rail clips are *MUCH* better steel than RR spikes and are actually a fair grade to make knives from where RR spikes are a poor grade for that purpose. Sure are hard under the hammer too!

It *must* be seasoned for a decade or two in a central NM shop---I humbly volunteer to undertake that for you! (Only think I know of is to mount it securely at a good height and so the ring is reduced!)

Looking for cowboy hat blanks a friend of mine found that the local pipe place had round blanks with a slight dimple (easily reduced with a good whomp) considerable cheaper than having them cut. Various sizes used to weld ends of pipe closed IIRC.

Ulric; Sorry that's not a hammer head it is a set tool and so meant to be struck with a hammer, hence the mushrooming as you don't hit two hardened pieces of steel together! 2dogs; of course they can be forged! Or how about a hardy tool from them where a short heavy piece is forged to fit the hardy and the other end forged to fit the eye of one of the hammers with say 4 inches of shaft between them. This is easiest if you have a substantial anvil so not so much forging to do with a large hardy hole.

Look for "Junkyard Steel" charts; most every smithing site has a copy somewhere. Just remember that they are more a *suggestion* than a law! Many of them have bad info buried in them---like JackHammer bits being S-5 to 7 where 99% of them are more like 1045... I know that anvilfire has one in the FAQs with suggested testing methods and good info as well as the big chart.

Longest one I have seen was at a Quad-State where a fellow had taken a double stake, (they are made in pairs than then cut into separate stakes) and removed the second head and so had more stock to start with. Dave; I'm just not much into competition; shoot I spend a ton of time helping other folks out with what they are doing and have enough claims on my free time that I would rather be doing stuff I want than trying to beat other people at stuff they have done. Feel free to consider me in last place!

Scrounged large vise repair parts have included: leveling legs from scaffolding, bottle screw jacks, trash compactors, etc. Cleaning out and brazing in an appropriate nut from such items and then welding on the handle stub to the screw is then the repair.

"Tales of the Great White Birch"? "War and Birch"? "The Birch also Rises" "Catcher in the Birch"?

Along with IFI's blueprints anvilfire.com has an I-Forge section with instructions on making a lot of things. Finding the appropriate shapes for a certain time/place is harder. If you can find examples of advertising they may have period blacksmith "clip art", also paintings of smiths from the time period. For remote areas you often have to go back a generation or so earlier as new modes took some time to propagate. Hmmm, Diderot's Encyclopedia comes in at the tail end of the 18th century; but in France. Did the fur trade still have a French influence where you are at? Any museums of that period with even one or two extant smithing pieces?

Blacksmiths suffer mightily from Anvil Envy; but in truth it's the *work* you do that should be the basis of your bragging not what a great set of tools you have. You may have noticed that in almost every hobby there is a subset of people that have "all the cool toys" for it; but don't really do much with them and when they do it's often at a level that does not due their tooling proud. I've met some folks that had to have a *perfect* smithy set up and then when they found that they needed to actually practice to do good work they abandoned the craft selling off their almost new tools for a fraction of the original cost. I've also welded up a billet in an improvised forge using charcoal from desert bonfires for fuel and a chunk of RR rail and a clawhammer. Or to bring it home---Folks get out in the shop and practice using whatever you have and not worry so much about having a vacuum cast H-13 anvil with the story of Weyland the smith laser etched on the side...

Take a look at the anvils japanese swords are forged on---may change your definition of a "nice anvil". The London Pattern anvil is more of a "swiss army knife" anvil---lots of features allowing you to do a lot of different things; but probably not as well as with dedicated separate pieces of equipment.

I'd suggest getting Patrick to chime in as he works as a Metallurgist for a large open die forging company and so if it's being used; it's probably being used where he works! I forge to get away from the pesky ones and zeros and the devil spawned coders and end users (to mangle a Dilbert quote). Noting nicer than to HIT something repeatedly after a frustrating day at the keyboard!

K.P.; I assume that you don't have a 100 mile drive each way to get to a steel dealer? Drives the cost up a bit! For projects where it counts I use new material, for a lot of projects re-cycling is an easy and cheap way to go and has a nice resonance as smiths have been recycling iron/steel for about 3000 years now.

Actually you can have scale "rust". Often seen when folks forge on a concrete driveway in a damp climate, you will start getting rust spots from the scale that wasn't cleaned up all the way off the concrete. I'd correct that typo If I could; but IFI won't let me edit the post anymore...

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together! Welcome to the confraternity!

I'd go with the 4 separate ones---each one could be set up with different edge shapes so if you travel you could only take the set(s) you needed. Or were you thinking of making them 4" thick instead of 2"? I'd still go with the 4 separate ones unless you do a lot of work with stuff that is wider than 2"!

I draw them out just till they make good tentstakes. Don't see any point to make something useless.

With practice you can smith on a tilted surface. To start it helps to have the forge on the tilt and the anvil inside on the flat. Sounds like you have too much going against you there and should look for the local smithing group and hook up with someone who will let you use their equipment. I had one student who was a freshman in college; he got the forging bug and he managed to set up a forge living out of a DORM ROOM! Built a gas forge into a gas grill cart and parked it out back of the dorm with the other grills, changed out his desk for a workbench with postvise, had scrap steel stored under his bed and ran through roommates at a pretty good clip... Gas forges without massive ventilation in garages can be deadly! With massive ventilation you are almost outside anyway....

"Book Learning" (and now internet learning too) can only take you so far. At sometime you have to step up and start making mistakes. Folks that are afraid to make mistakes will have trouble progressing in blacksmithing. One top smith, (made the Sutton Hoo sword on display with the original in the British Museum), showed us one of his "trial" pieces he did while trying to get a good reproduction of the original---he *knew* he wouldn't get it right the first time and so planned for several attempts. For real fun I ask people who tell me that they "*KNOW* all about smithing" because they had done it in a video game to demonstrate. *Very* amusing when they find they have no hammer skills, can't judge temperature and totally underestimate the time and energy it take to forge something. (I was once consulted by a game maker who wanted to inject a little relism into their game---they wanted me to tell them how to start with ore and mud and trees and end up with a forged steel blade---no problem; been there, done that; then they told me it has to take less than 6 hours....