ThomasPowers

Me I'd just scrounge firebrick from fireplace demolitions and set it in with fire clay from the local masonry supply yard for the forge table and use whatever I found for the rest of the masonry that won't be in close contact with the forge fire.

A lot of city/county trash collection sites don't allow "scrounging" but if something like what Bob found appears I have no moral compunctions about attempting to suborn the staff. I'm quite willing to even replace the stuff with equal weights of scrap metal to boot so the gov has the same payment from the scrapper!

Cubic inches of steel = cubic inches of steel, fudge a bit for scale losses.

I finished my shirt of 1/4" ID 4in1 back around 1981---doesn't fit me anymore...

The joy of smithing is that you can then *make* your own X and get back to work! What's the anti seize for? Better punch lubes out there! Will you be forge welding? I'd add something like an old Lincoln tombstone welder so you can make swages and other tools a lot faster than forging them down from 2" stock. If you go to armourmaking---well most folks nowadays work cold sheetmetal and so most of that doesn't apply but you will want a B2 beverly shear and a whitney punch and a bunch of ball stakes and dishing forms and a planishing hammer and rawhide mallets, etc. If you go to swordmaking you will need a powerhammer.

Turners were more upscale than bodgers! Of course bodgers were probably higher class than colliers...

Have you got a copy of "The Celtic Sword", Radomir Pleiner? Great read on the early ferrous blades (and of course the landmark "The Knight and the Blastfurnace", Alan Williams) I've got way more money tied up in books than I do in anvils and triphammers and love to debate this kind of stuff. I try to get to the conferences too; IronMasters, ICMS, etc and am on the archeological metallurgy mailing list. Re Wrought Iron: I explain it to people this way: "When you go into the linens department at a big store what is everything made of? Cotton or poly-cotton, probably not a piece of linen in the entire "linens" department; *BUT* they all used to be made from linen! And so the material used for them became the general term for the items even after they changed what they were made from. The same thing for Wrought Iron; it was the material used by blacksmiths from the dawn of the iron age through the end of the 19th century and even a bit into the 20th. However with the invention of the Bessemer/Kelly Converter in the 1850's that produced mild steel cheaper and faster, gradually the items that once were made from the material Wrought Iron were made from the new mild steel; however just like for linens the name of the material carried over into the name of the items.

Can you get to the center board easily to increase the inlets (and flapper valves) on it? Some smiths have made the inlet/flapper valve pieces a removable piece that is screwed into place and so you can remove them to work on the inner set or take the inner set out for tweaking and then replace it. Most double lunged bellows work with the center board stationary and the top acts as an air store to provide for a constant output even with a punctuated input.

I generally suggest to folks that they mill as much of the face off as their anvil as they are willing to mill off their own face! If you MUST mill remember that an anvil face may *NOT* be parallel to the base and so step one is to clamp the anvil updide down and mill the base parallel to the face. and only then flip it over and kiss the face lightly. I have *personally* seen anvil where they milled through the face on one end because it wasn't parallel to the base and they were determined to make it flat, (ruined, damaged, useless are just side effects of having a machinist go hog wild on an anvil!)

I've seen a number of small lincoln migs on craigslist *cheap*. I'd much rather have a used *repairable* good name one than a "HF" one that may let the magic smoke out at anytime. Also I would trust that duty cycle about as much as I would trust a Sears HP rating!

So go ask that guy if he has another! Seems to me that it did work and having *more* local smiths is generally considered a good thing. (and perhaps he will tire of it and pass it on to you sometime in the future...)

As I recall there is a nice shot of a sword blade with a wrought iron tang in Manfred Sachse's Damascus Steel. AIR it may have been one of the ones forged welded from alternating pieces of real wootz and pattern welded billets creating a chevron pattern. I'll check when I can. It's not uncommon in early blades and as to being a flaw---every single bade was made of material that had been forge welded---from the roman piling to migration era twist construction to blades made from high carbon blooms where folding and welding was the *NORM* just to get your starter material, to shear steel. Battleship drive shafts were welded up from separate pieces of real wrought iron during the early days! "The Metallography of Early Ferrous Edge Tools and Edged Weapons", Tylecote and Gilmour, shows an early medieval sword made from 13 pieces of iron/steel forge welded together and 5 of them are pattern welded billets. "Knives and Scabbards, Museum of London", with several hundred examples of medieval knives will show a large number of them where the steel was a thin strip forge welded to the edge of a wrought iron blade. Forge welding is not a flaw! Note that many folks at medieval and renaissance fairs have not researched early ferrous metalworking processes thoroughly and may repeat "urban legends" and "common knowledge" that have been superseded by more modern research---shoot even the ground breaking work of Anstee (see appendix 1 in "The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England" H.R.E. Davidson) has been built upon to show that the round rod theory of construction is not consistent with extent examples and as a smith much more difficult then welding rectilinear billets and then twisting that does produce items that match the extent pieces from the excavations. I've researched this in museums all over Europe and places like Indonesia and I'll try to track down more examples however I will be out of town this weekend. Perhaps Ric and JPH could weigh into this as well, I'd bet they would confirm that it did occur!

Once I get my forge extension finished off and work in it a wile to get the set up tuned I plan to bury the baulk I have for my large fisher---it's about 2'x1'x4' and creosoted. probably part of an OLD bridge. I'm trying to work out a set up where I can still back the truck into the shop for loading. so the power hammers and anvil will need to be on the sides and I'm going to sink and concrete a large piece of square tubing into the floor to use as a receiver for the large post vise so it's removable when I want to load or unload with the truck inside.

I've hot forged quite a bit of silver, usually fine so to avoid the copper fire scale. I generally use a one firebrick forge or chunk charcoal for a solid fuel one. Easy to forge hot but you really got to watch the melting temps! I'm usually going from ingot to penannular brooch.

Except when you are replicating the originals that did have a low carbon tang forge welded to the blade; then doing it *exactly* the same should *raise* the price!

Since I travel with most of my smaller anvils they are set up for easy taking off and putting on their stumps. The "shop" anvils are just kept in position of course at 500+ and 400+ pounds they don't move a whole lot. If you will have a stable set up fastening them securely will produce more work and less sound in use and be more secure against them going walkabout when you are not there.

Ironstein; New Mexico is odd in that while most of it is rural and cheap we have a quite dense high tech areas Some counties have some of the top PhD's per capita numbers in the United States. I myself work in the town of Socorro that is a small town apx 10K when the university is in session but with the university and the Very Large Array there is quite a high tech presence. If you ever come out this way let me know and I can give you the nickle tour. We have a 4 bedroom passive solar house on an acre of land and it ran us about 150K *and* it's on a paved road and has "city" water!

Bigger valves! My great bellows were slightly wider than that but I could blow coal out of the firepot if I pumped them hard. I used rectangular inlets with a light sheetmetal flapper on hinges and with felt glued to the wood around the inlet.

Quad-State can range from HOT! to COLD! (one year I had ice on my water bucket in the morning and wore a pair of army surplus wool overpants over my jeans) to WET! I would spring for a cheap camping cot over sleeping on the ground just in case we have a wet year... Primitive camping has trees but not ones spaced for hammock duty, (and they go fast!) If you don't like dogs barking at night ear plugs are suggested.

Copper is a joy to work compared with brass! With proper annealing it should work great. BTW you might look up some articles on swaging of blackpowder balls as what you will be doing could be quite similar...

I teach an "Intro to smithing" course here for the NM Tech college students and so get a lot of folks whose brains are more exercised than their brawn. Often they hammer like lightening---never striking the same place twice! I think I would go with 150 pound anvils for the majority and then get a bigger one for the last one. Most of my students are working on smaller anvils but we have an old bridge anvil for them to use when the sledges come out to play! One of the reasons I bring a variety of anvils and tools is so they don't get hung up on having to use a particular anvil and hammer; but learn that anything that works is *good*. (I've been bringing my 25# Roman- F&I war travel anvil too and they are amazed when I tell them that for nail making, one of our projects, it's the best one there!)

I plan to drive in from NM for it. Hope to arrive Thursday and camp with the junkyard/forgemagic/farwestforge crowd.

Well one thing you are doing wrong is asking on the net instead of finding the local smiths and have one of them come over and SEE what you are doing!

When people ask me to give a price for an anvil I start at US$1 a pound and go up. To go further than $1.50 a pound it better be in great shape! Of course I don't *need* anymore anvils but all the ones I've got average out to under a dollar a pound---the 515# Fisher in mint condition for $350 helps a lot in dragging the price down as did the 400# one for under $200. I think the used anvil market is artificially high right now from people seeing special anvils going for top dollar on e-bay and then pricing run of the mill anvils to match!

Depends on the brass, depends on the bronze. Sort of like saying a Ford can carry more than a chevy without specifying exactly *what* models you are talking about. Actually nowadays they are generally called "copper based alloys" as you can have bronze alloys with lead and zinc in them and brass alloys with tin in them. Silicon bronze is often used by smiths as it works well and can be tig welded with no visible seams. I'd *guess* that on the originals they were soft soldered on.