ThomasPowers

leaf springs are usually *medium* carbon steel, like 5160. They do harden deeper due to alloying though. I generally weld knife grade steels below sparking and only real wrought iron at a snowball heat!

They also have an interesting method of hardfacing mild steel by crayon-ing on cast iron at high heat.

I've gotten safety glasses for my regular glasses and so wear then all the time I am awake---even swimming! Just looking at the scrapes, chips, burns, overspray, etc on them makes me quite happy to be wearing them; especially as a lot of times the damage didn't occur in the shop but in the yard, kitchen, etc. Folks keep trying to talk me into laisik or contacts and I just hand them my glasses and ask them to explain how it would prevent the damage there. I do have a diskdrive "scary powerful" magnet to do at home emergency fishing as it's a bit of a drive to an ER where I am at and I would prefer to do it with the metal *out* rather than scratching around during the trip.

Changing the temperature you temper at will change the piece: lower temps will make the edge harder but more brittle. Higher temps will make the edge softer but tougher. Now I can't answer what works best for YOU! But if you do a bunch of this sort of thing you may want to do a set of them and draw temper to different temps/colours for each one and see what YOU like best. Pretty much basic junkyard steel rules; gotta test to see what works for that item or that alloy. Multiple temper cycles are suggested. Multiple hardening cycles are not save for some particular alloys and plain 10xx steels are not ones that profit. For myself I will sometimes oven temper at the temp I want the edge and then go back and draw back the body with a torch to get it softer/tougher. Remember the whole idea of making *custom* tools is that they *can* be different just to suit the customer!

Yup some of the modern stuff is pretty amazing. I dropped out of the mountain climbing program at my college back in the late '70's when they went to the ice climbing section. I could get away wearing layers of wool in the mountain climbing part but you had to spend a lot of dough to keep warm climbing up waterfalls with water still not politely frozen on them. Sounds like life is a bit uncertain if just going out to the barn can get you in trouble much less having Mutual of Omaha moments wrestling those sons of birches

"To the Moon" Frosty!

Get a face shield that covers your entire face then; always seemed much less hassle than the goggles over glasses set up, (however for the last 15 years or so I have just gotten safety glasses for my regular wear; but I still with wear a face shield as well for wire wheeling, buffing, etc)

In general---for stock with parallel sides---Tongs grip where their jaws are parallel. What you don't want is to have them meet only at one point on the stock as then you have just a fulcrum and hot stock can flip around it!

Flea Market: Ball peen hammer heads for hawks, handled tooling Cold chisels, rock chisels, star drills: knives, punches, drifts Wood Chisels: (socket chisels---small spear points), knives Just remember not to pay too much---you generally *want* the trashed rusty ones and so should not be paying "good using prices"

One of the problems can be that your PPE *may* be better than what they supply; but if they allow you to use it then they *HAVE* to officially check it out and certify it (and if it turns out to be better tell why everyone is not being provided it)---the blasted paper train again!

Put an end on one end of your pipe and stuff some crunched up real charcoal in your pipe to scavenge O2 and have even less scale! Also you generally hold the blade in the pipe so the edge is not touching the sides to prevent un-even heating. I usually rest the back edge of single edged blades on the bottom of the pipe to soak heat in faster into the thicker parts for through hardening.

Seems like a set of bike gears and hub would work too. However I see no real virtue in the pump blowers over the crank ones so why go to extra work to reproduce one?

Tools: store them clean and dry; oil or wax them as part of maintenance.. In very damp areas some people will linseed oil the parts of their hammers that don't come into contact with hot metal---usually as a side effect of soaking the eye in linseed oil to keep the handle tight. If very dry areas like where I am I don't deed to do anything to my tools unless they get caught in a rare rainstorm and then wipe them off and oil them. For ornamental work: Paint or even use non-corroding alloys like stainless

Ironstein; great to know about more steel-wool couples around. Will she be coming to Convergence in Albuquerque this year? If so tag along and we can meet up and go to my smithy about 1 hour south while the wives work on their high fiber diet!

I used one of the axle covers off a appx 1937 Banjo rear end for a fire pot; got two of them that had been made into jackstands at a fleamarket for $3 20+ years ago---still using the first one. Don't worry about it too much as you may want to change out the form your firepot has a couple of times before you are happy and then make *that* one out of heavy stock!

Hundreds of people have used such forges with no problem. If you are worried remove the Al as the clay will act as a good insulator. "scrap material to use in a forge" Do you mean what metal is best to forge? What are you making---what's good for a knife is lousy for ornamental stuff. I used to go visit an ornamental iron co and get permission to raid their recycling bin for plain iron for ornamental stuff. (But it's pretty cheap to buy new *IF* you don't get it at big box stores and buy it from a steel dealer. (I can buy 3-5 times as much from a dealer than a big box store for the same price). For blades car coil or leaf springs---the uncoated ones are a good source of material.

More likely to be decarburization than carburization. Had a fell yesterday tell me about how the japanese swordsmiths did the folding and welding to put carbon into the blade. I then explained that they started with nealry 2% C and ended at around 0.5% C and so I don't think that was the reason...A lot of folks don't understand that in general forging you can scale off steel faster than you can soak carbon into it. Takes skill and care to up the carbon content during forging.

For who? Most smiths I know would ignore it if they could get a larger anvil of even a common brand for the same money. Not a big "collector's market" in anvils compared to the "users market"

File steel is generally easy to overheat and crack and easy to crack in quenching. That looks like an over heat crack to me. Did you weld it like it was a low carbon steel? (May be too hot for a real high carbon steel like a file)

Double duty! Throw a bunch of mucked up drywall screws in your tumbler *as* the medium and then sort them out after they get cleaned up too. Scrapmascus can be made with most anything after you get good at welding!

I heat blued my eating set; of course I forged it from Ti so it's dishwasher safe!.

With my gasser I tend to have a 10'x10' roll up door open right by the forge area and really like to have the other one open too. I can dress warmly but just haven't mastered being anaerobic yet.

5x30x50 = 58.95 kg apiece, so 117.9 kg for the base + top. *NICE ANVIL*!

That's a problem as anvils vary so much in the heel thickness. I wouldn't worry about getting them too long though who bothers to cut off the excess when it doesn't cause any problems? Now if you want you could ask for max heel thickness at the hardy hole for everybody's anvils and do a statistical break down and figure out an "optimum" I can measure mine this weekend.

Well not quite 1095 I am citing the Arema (The American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association) 2007 document, Part 2 "manufacture of Rail" Standard rail steel: .74 to.86% Carbon, .75 to 1.25% Manganese, .10 to .60% Silicon Minimum Brinell (of unhardened surface) 310 or 370 dependant of grade ordered. Low Alloy Rail Steel .72 to .82% Carbon, .80 to 1.10% Manganese, .25 to .40& Chromium, .10 to .50% Silicon British rail details can be found at: Institute of Rail Welding - Job Knowledge 4. Metallurgy of Rail Steels