ThomasPowers

Some regulators and some acetylene hoses are designed to work for propane as well as acetylene---the regulator will usually be marked "for all fuel gasses" and the hose will be "T" grade IIRC. Yes air should go up the 2" pipe. Yes it will exhaust if there is no air going up it. It would be easy to slit that pipe and stick in a round piece of sheet metal with two tabs: one to fasten to a pivot point mounted on the pipe and the other to grab to rotate it in and out of the pipe to control air flow. When you get a good blower, (I use a 150 cfm with my Peot forge) you will need to adjust both air and gas to get the best burn at each level----I have my gas set to the general pressure I like and then adjust the air till the burn is loudest for the hottest burn and back off the air for a more reducing atmosphere for knife making. You know that in the time it took you to take and post the pictures you could have had it up and working if you had just asked a local smith that's familiar with propane!

My shop is sitting over the Socorro Magma Bubble; don't know if I can afford an insurance rider for volcanic activity including earthquakes. Good luck with housing; but your shop looks in better shape than mine does normally!

I've already answered this elsewhere; no need to repeat. However how thick is the face on it? I just noticed that ther cutting step has been ground down so it's on an angle now---sometimes this means that they ground the face down too.

I pour lead in old frying pans for repousee work. Tin is a bit more "friendly" and a lot more expensive than free lead and I tend to wash my hands whenever I go to the house anyway...

mice and so bullsnakes, black widows---quite a few, probably a tarantula or two wandering through, I've chased a couple of humming birds out when they come in the shop and get confused by the fiberglass panels in the roof---sorry no exit that way! I check my gloves and hearing protectors before putting them on---I want to make a screened in container for them so they can dry out after use but not get buggy...I am also careful *NOT* to reach where I cannot see---black widows and the possibility of rattlesnakes. I took a 12 button rattle off a road kill rattlesnake within sight of my house a week ago. Living in the desert!

Was that the remains of a farriers clip up near the horn? The double pritchel I usually associate with a farriers model and I thought that they was a trace of a stub on the left when looking at the horn. Lovely anvil and in nice shape as well! The numbers under the horn on the foot should be a serial number that can be dated to a year and a weight IIRC...but that size should fit on a bathroom scale...

Or "Alloying Elements in Steel" Bain (as in Bainite!)

Wire EDM anyone?

Well you could start by putting your general location into your profile---might be a great smith local to you! Assuming you are in America look at www.abana-chapter.com/ and see if there is a smithing group near to you. One Saturday with a good smith will save you 6 months or more trying to learn on your own. There are a lot of good starting books: The Backyard Blacksmith, The Complete Modern Blacksmith, etc that can get started. ILL them from a local library and decide which one(s) work best for you and then see about buying your own copy---Mine of The Modern Blacksmith has dirty thumb prints all over it from standing at the forge with the book in one hand and the tongs in the other...

Ulric; melt some babbitt in that and it's blacksmithing related!

Looks like a Peter Wright in form. Looks like it's stamped Peter Wright and has the Solid Wrought stamp too---taste it and see if it taste's like a Peter Wright!

Yes that looks like a blown burner set up and not an aspirated one.

Well I've seen something like that in several centuries old depictions of saw yards to move large timbers around. Didn't call it "Texas" though as Spain still owned that chunk of territory back then...

Looks like a Vulcan to me too, especially the shallow step between face and horn and the angular run up to the heel rather than curved. Vulcans tend to have thin faces so check it to make sure nobody has ground or milled it too thin! They are quiet anvils and so should "thwap" rather than "Ring" when tapped with a hammer. Good for suburban or city use. They are not a top tier anvil so please do not pay top tier prices for one! Will you be at Quad-State? Probably 50-100 anvils for sale there!

Welcome Xen, (short for Xenolith no doubt). Most of the world doesn't forge on London pattern anvils---why should you pay extra for one right now? The famed japanese swords were forged on anvils that look like a rectangular solid of steel, (one of the things I teach beginners is that you don't need a horn to make curves with an anvil) So instead of an expensive anvil look for a large hunk of scrap steel. I used the broken off knuckle of a RR car coupler before---it had a flat area and a curved area and weighed enough for a starter anvil and was *free*. A chunk of forklift tine, (damaged tines cannot be re-used for liability reasons---make sure they *know* that it will be chopped for an anvil". A friend of mine used a heavy duty fork lift thine that had a large head section with a 1.5" rod through it; cost him $25 to have it welded to a plate to stand vertically and makes an excellent anvil! As for working out of a dorm---think about an aspirated propane forge. It frees you from having to have an extension cord and power plug. One student student of mine had his gas forge built into a gas grill setup and kept it out back of the dorm chained up with the real gas grill that other students had. VA has a very active smithing scene with great folks and events going on all the time. Looking up a local smithing group can really speed up the learning curve and I will suggest it strongly even where you are at now! If you are looking to switch schools New Mexico Tech is a top rated Science and Engineering School and has a Fine Arts Metals adjunct community college class that has me over to teach some smithing several times a semester and my shop is available for student use by arrangement...

If you ever bring tools into a group smithing setting you need to be able to sort them at the end of the day *FAST* and under poor conditions---say a thunder storm. As many of us have a lot of the same new stuff it makes it a lot nicer to be able to say "all the light blue marked stuff is mine throw it in the back of that truck" than to argue over who's H13 slitting Chisel is whose. If you sell on something it's pretty easy to re-paint. Hmm I'm taking a bucket of tools to the State Fair Saturday; I'd better check that the paint is still on the stuff I use the most frequently! I know one smith (Howdy!) that paints his tools hot pink as nobody else uses that colour---and he says NOBODY borrows them either! Red is a rather common colour for smiths and I know of one friend who used darker blue on his tools and we used to josh each other that the other's tools were the wrong shade of blue...

Yes I have taken a couple of pieces of nesting square tubing and sawn it about 1/2" down on the diagonals and bent the flaps over to fit in the hardy; but it sure is nice to have tools that fit the plain hardy if you are going to do some heavy hitting---and 400-500# anvils are made for heavy hitting! RR Bolts: I have made sheetmetal dishing hammers from them too; slit and dish near the threaded end and you get a nice long neck dishing hammer. Getting a bolt that's bent to your swing curve is ver nice indeed for deep dishing

Hard firebrick laid in fireclay is what all of those I've seen were filled with.

my flaps were sheetmetal---Al sign material; of course I used light hinges and contact cemented felt on the contact side of the flap.

They make a metal folding sawhorse that folds up into a straight piece. I would get a couple of those and make a piece of sheet steel into a top that drops over the legs and then place the forge on it---Stable and folds down into a small size for transport.

In general when forging a long blade you *don't* want to heat up anymore than you can work before it gets cold. This helps prevent scaling loss, decarburization and grain growth. So a sword forge can be fairly small. When you need the length is for heat treat as you mentioned and while there are ways of using a small forge for a long blade one that is closer to size is a lot nicer. When I need a particularly long forge I dig a shallow trench in the yard and put a piece of blackpipe with holes drilled in it along the bottom and blow it with mu shop vac---wasting a lot of air before it gets to the tuyere as it puts out way more than I need and I don't want an oxidizing fire!

I would extremely doubt they used O1 in that use case!

You will probably need more depth to your firepot, perhaps running some scrounged firebricks around the current one would help. Also chunk charcoal is a whole lot nicer to forge with than briquettes and can often be found in the same locations. (Cowboy brand is one common one). Now get to pounding!

Looks like a great one to me! Please don't burn the barn down though it tends to make barn owners peevish and down on smithing!

DANGER if you have messed up your elbow continuing to work it can cause much worse issues! (last time I had a bout of blacksmith's elbow I couldn't smith for 6 months!) Are you using too heavy a hammer? Are you using correct body mechanics swinging it? Far better to not mess it up than to mess it up and pay the price!