ThomasPowers

Why settle for Senior?

HB's have a factory serial number on them located on the foot of the anvil under the horn. Using Anvils in America you can then reference that number and find out when it was made---which then can factor in it's construction type as well. OTOH I have a large Fisher used as the anvil for a Blacker powerhammer that does have a re-seller's number stamped into the side of the face plate near the indent as I recall. I have seen one other Blacker Powerhammer anvil like mine that has a similiar SN; in face it was ony a couple of digits off from mine! I have also seen several anvils with brass inventory numbers on them from companies and the military. Having had an anvil stolen before may I suggest that people put their own stamp on their anvils---inside any indent in the base is a good place, not likely to be noticed or worn away.

"I just finished building my first forge" "So I was wondering what would be better to use for a solid fuel to heat my metal" You would of course use the fuel your forge is designed for! Can't build a good efficient forge without taking in account what fuel you will be using. If you have not selected your fuel type yet then you are NOT just finished building your first forge.

Stop by my forge and you are welcome to use my equipment to make these and I will help (and try to talk you into using real wrought iron---a buggy tyre would be appropriate for the straps!)

Forging with wood is really forging with charcoal you are just making it in your forge as you go along. Iprefer to separate the two processes and transfer the charcoal over to the forge. I had a student forge welding a knife billet using only charcoal Saturday. We started with charcoal I sift out of the wood stove ashes from my house and store in a trashcan. Meanwhile I started a wood fire in a raised firepit and would then transfer the embers from it to the forge as needed. Used scrap wood and so it was free and the fire was nice as it is cold outside! I also cooked lunch over it. So: Heat, Forge Fuel, Cooking and Clean Up scrap wood around the place. Charcoal takes a lot less air than coal even for welding To use my regular coal forge I took some double sized firebricks and built a 3 sided box around the firepot making it about 8" deeper and used a singel sized firebrick to provide a front lip.

Annealing is to make it as soft as it can get. I believe he wanted to use the term "Temper" it in an oven. And I would suggest that after you temper to the face colour, you then go back and re-temper it from the eye by dropping in a hot chunk of steel so the eye area is softer than the faces. Since you don't give us any clue about what skills or tools you do have---save for not having a torch---it's hard to help you If you don't have a forge a hole in the ground with a piece of blackpipe and a blow dryer and some real lump charcoal will work for heating a hammer head to critical temp. You will need some way to handle the *HOT* piece and keep your hands/self AWAY from the flaming oil as you quench in it.

I use parafin wax, (food safe buy it at the grocery with the canning supplies), Beeswax, (2 hives on my property); or I season the metal like you would season a cast iron skillet. Or I forge the items out of stainless and not treat it at all.

You can use wood to make charcoal but not coke. Have you gone to your local public library and ILL'd a good starter book like "The Complete Modern Blacksmith"? Find the local smithing group spenting some time with someone who knows what they are doing will really speed things up! (Charcoal is a good fuel; we were forge welding a knife billet with it Saturday---note "real"charcoal and not briquettes!)

"I have two of these presses in my shop and I would like to place them in a good home with a fair price. One is a 100ton and one is an 80ton I think. Do you know any one that might be looking for one?" Depends on the price and the LOCATION, neither which was posted...Some people are always looking for this sort of thing---armourers, coiners, some ornamental iron folk, etc.

Let it rust, remove any loose rust, oil or wax very much in the same way you would russet a firearm in the traditional way. I sure hope he didn't mill the face any! Had a friend who picked up a very nice anvil that had the face milled too thin to use. Took a professional welder (and smith) 6 hours to build it back up to a usable thickness. I've also seen an anvil where the machinist milled the face flat, only the face was not parallel to the base and so he milled right through the hardened face and into the wrought iron at one end, (instead of milling the base parallel to the face and then flipping it over and just kissing the face to clean it up)

Even with a large area and a forced fan draft I was not able to get an overhead hood to work as well as a much smaller un-fanned side draft hood. The ones I have seen that seem to work seem to rely on the forge being enclosed to keep the smoke heading toward the draft Why would you want an overhead version? Side version also has the advantage of leaving the overhead open in cause you need to put an odd shaped piece in the fire.

Unicorn; I've known what thet phrase has meant since the early '70's. Having a kid grow up like yourself is a blessing and a curse!

another issue with briquettes is their size makes for lots of direct O2 access to the steel not so good if you want to weld or bladesmith. Rehder mentions in "The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity" that in a bloomery furnace the reducing part is about 13 times the average fuel size above the tuyere; so if you want to be sure of having a reducing atmosphere for forging think of the pile of briquettes you would need.

"I've been forging myself for about 12 years." Sounds *Painful*! I thought we taught you to forge the metal and not yourself! (don't forget to update your profile to show your location again)

It's a good brand anvil; can't tell if it's a good buy without knowing how much you paid for it and how the face is holding up---even a good anvil can have been through a fire or been ground thin on the face.

Fold forming the wings works well too, gives them a lot more "body".

do you have a good bladesmithing book (like one of Hrisoulas' "The Complete Bladesmith, The Master Bladesmith, The Pattern Welded Blade"). Pretty much any decent bladesmithing book will have a section on alloys that work well and how they should be treated---which as has been noted differs a bit from how the handbooks that are based on 1" sq cross section material samples list the treatments.

Will one of the pins used for RR car couplers fit? It should be rated for tough duty in a similar use case.

Lots of us out there; I currently have "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl ftaghn" written in the dust on the side of my pickup by my eldest daughter---she translates it as "wash me" but I was so tickled I told her I wasn't going to wash my truck till it wore off. Is your top mask lined with velvet for wearing to parties?

I have always found it funny that my most authentic historical setups have always been the cheapest to build. Of course that is mainly to do with the fact that since I do Y1K stuff I have to make my own as there are not anything I can buy to cheat with... BTW I found that a properly set up double lunged bellows (came into blacksmithing in the early renaissance from the goldsmiths) was much more enjoyable to use than even a good hand crank blower, even for welding up billets! (of course a poorly set up one is a royal PITA) It's about time for me to make a run to the basalt flows and get some firesafe rocks and start on a Y1K forge for this area. Biggest problem out here is often sites have a requirement that no flame devices save for propane are allowed due to very bad fire conditions.

My friends got together and gave my daughter a small anvil machined from steel as her birthday gift.

Looks like a fairly standard chainmaker's anvil to me.

check the pivot pin. It may need replacing. Sometimes the pin may be worn and just putting in a new bolt will fix it enough. OTOH I had a large vise that had been abused so the jaws didn't meet that I filled in the old pivot hole in the moving leg---heat shrunk and flush riveting and then redrilled it so it would line up again.

ILL stands for Inter Library Loan; it's where a local public library can access books they don't have for you. It's generally free or for a trivial fee; here in NM I had to pay US$1 for a 3 week loan of a book costing over $300 on the used market! (In our *small* town I have access to books from over 90 other libraries including several university ones!) It's a great way to check out books on a subject before deciding to buy them so you only buy the ones that you like. Go to you local public library and ILL a few like "The Backyard Blacksmith", "The Complete Modern Blacksmith", "The Complete Bladesmith", etc. Cold weather is a great time to catch up on your reading! I've been doing petrobond casting for knife fittings for about 26 years now using my coal forge to melt Copper, Silver, Sterling, Brass, Bronze. So there can be some overlap between areas!

"Metalworking": blacksmithing, casting, smelting, machining, welding, non-ferrous, ferrous, bladesmithing, ornamental, historical, primitive?????????????? Got to know the details before we can make suggestions; however every forum on metalworking I know of has a getting started section giving such information for the type of metalworking they specialize in. Most have a book review section too! As for costs US$25 - US$2500 depending on what it is you want to do, how good a scrounger you are, where you are at, etc. Projects can be found in all blacksmithing books, (you know about ILL right?) as well as on this site as "blueprints" or i-forge at anvilfire.com (please be sure to read the safety ones over there!). However spending a Saturday Afternoon working with a smith can save you months of trying to learn this from a book or website. So check for your local ABANA chapter and see about going to a couple of meetings to find the resources available in your area http://www.abana-chapter.com/ So sit back, limber up your typing fingers and let us know what you want to start with!