ThomasPowers

Ahh another post from the man who used to be called Frosty. a prince amongst smiths!

My "loaner anvil" is missing the entire heel from the edge of the hardy on back. Still a great anvil. We need a picture of the face is it cracked or pitted? And how much of the original hardened steel face thickness is left? Generally *anything* can be repaired; but cost may expand beyond the cost of getting a new one! Also many new people think the face of their anvil needs to be pristine when actually a slight sway is preferred by knifemakers and pitting is often not a problem.

May I commend to your attention the forums at armourarchive.org (yes the british spelling of armour). Also get "Techniques of Medieval Armor Reproduction" aka TOMAR *FIRST*!

I read a rant from the early 1800's when a steam engine fellow was complaining about the tolerances the smiths were holding for pistons and cylinders---he said they would only work to the thickness of a worn shilling. I always wanted to get a worn shilling as a "pocket piece" so when folks asked me about tolerances I could show them what was considered standard work back in the day...

HB's are one of the great US brands, made in Brooklyn NY. Yours looks to have a lot of life left in it as shown by the thickness of the tool steel face that was welded to the wrought iron body. Try not to do anything that decreases the thickness of that face! Also don't get caught up in the idea that the corners need to be clean and sharp---old blacksmithing books will often tell you that the first thing you should do with a new anvil is to round off the corners to prevent them from causing cold shuts in your work. With that anvil I would go over the face with a wire wheel (or gently with a flapwheel) and get to forging! If you want a clean corner for a specific reason make a hardy tool that has one. Great Gift!

My suggestion for getting started is to: Find your local ABANA Affiliate and start attending meetings! Blowers were not sealed and work more with "flow through" oiling, much better when we all had dirt floors. Usually you just give them a squirt or two of oil when you use them (and have a pan of cat litter under them) Don't use too heavy an oil as that will make cranking difficult. (especially in cold weather)

Usually I leave the bevel the thickness 1-2 mm before hardening and temper immediately after hardening. Of course I have a belt grinder to make cleaning up the edge easy after heat treat. I think you are using the term tempering for several stages of heat treat where we will often break it out into: Normalizing, Hardening, Tempering; to prevent confusion when we are discussing specifics.

If you do want to draw back the holding bits, try putting the striking side in a pan of water and then draw back the holding bits that project with a propane torch.

(bet she didn't buy it in the Linens department! as to why it wrinkles so bad it's a function of the material just like iron/steel rusts, linen wrinkles!) As you can probably tell I am married to a Spinster (for 25 years as of Aug 5th!) We are a Steel-Wool couple.

Lets see I went to college to become an EE, changed my mind after 2 years and got a degree as a geologist/geophysist. Worked in the oil patch for several years till the crash of 1983, was un-employed for a year and then went to work for a swordmaker for a year. Got married and had to have a real job so I worked in a custom wood shop for a couple of years. Then worked on an assembly line while going for an electronics tech degree but got hired by Bell Labs before I finished that degree and they had me do a CIS degree while working long hours with an old house and a young family. Almost 15 years with BL and then when they laid most everyone off I ended up moving from OH to NM and working as a bit herder for an astrophysics research org. I'm wondering what I shall do next! I have learned that having that piece of paper (degree(s)) has made a difference in getting hired several times and at better rates than a friend who was a much better coder but had no degree was able to.

I rather consider e-bay a terrible place to find smithing tools; is there some reason you thought it might be a good place to find such items at a reasonable price? What did you turn up looking in the blacksmithing tool catalogs?

Wrought iron is not steel. Wrought iron is a composite material consisting of usually a clean low carbon iron with ferrous silicates dispersed throughout it as stringers of spicules. Wrought iron *was* the material however the name became equivalent with the products just like if you go to a linen department nothing in it is made from linen, its all cotton or poly cotton these days; but it used to be all made from linen! Thomas who has smelted wrought iron from ore using the direct process. Ahh using that reasoning you can't be called Frosty because that was used for something else's name first...

Well there have been changes in mindsets over time; handmade was not always considered *better* save for specifics, (eg hand spun warp was preferable in the early industrial revolution as opposed to machine spun; later the preference reversed). Also the guild system of europe wasn't always trying to improve methods. There is a great bit in "A History of Western Technology", Klemm, MIT Press, about a "red metal turner" in renaissance Nuremberg who kept inventing better metal lathes and getting squashed by the local guild---they bought a couple of them and had them destroyed, forbid him from making more and finally forbid him leaving the city! (IIRC) The goal of the guild was stability not innovation. A lot of our viewpoints on craft come from the Arts and Crafts movement around 1900 when there was a "revolt" against the "soulless" products and jobs created by the large factories extolling the virtues of the hand wrought item (v A past tense and a past participle of work. adj: 1. Put together; created: a carefully wrought plan. 2. Shaped by hammering with tools. Used chiefly of metals or metalwork. 3. Made delicately or elaborately.) One of the side effects of the A&C movements was the belief that hand made items should show that they are handmade by leaving in some of the tooling marks people used to work so hard to erase. Taken to the ludicrous we now have items artificially dinged up by machines to try to imitate the hammer marks of hand work. (or slubby yarns people like to think are indicative of medieval work when in reality in medieval times an 8 year old girl would have been beaten for doing such poor quality spinning...) Another interesting aspect of the A&C movement was the encouragement for *everyone* to try their hands at making stuff by hand rather than leaving it to the specialists. In these parts craigslist often had listings for rot iron and even rotten iron and many times they are correct!

S7 is overkill, 4140 or even A36 will do fine and should be MUCH cheaper. However folks sell stake holders and buying a couple or even 4 of them might be a better return on your time. At Chris Thompson's shop I saw a nice set up they had a thick slab of steel set flat as a table with a welded up stake holder at each corner so they could use the flat or have a number of stakes in place to use round robin. The stake holders were just pieces of heavy strap stock welded up at the proper angle to hold the stakes and then welded to the table frame. (If I was trying to do them I would probably use a stake to do the alignment on and leave a little "more" so the final result the stake could go a bit deeper.)

If that is a view from the side I would move the burner entrance up so if something ever melts and "runs" it won't be able to go down the burner tube...Also scale and crud don't build up in the tube.

I'd see if a local vo-tech has a machining class that might take on that project.

Frankly I know of nobody using a gas forge that they can control the temperature of electrically. Though there are some heat treat ovens you can do that with. What is it that you need to accomplish?

Why cut it out? you want to retain as much mass as possible I would think more of adding on a chunk of structural tubing for a hardy and may be a "horn" piece of round stock but leave the body as it is---take a look at the NIMBA anvils as a suggestion!

A feed "sack" of coal is around 50#

Yoga; but it's physical therapy for me.

But the heel isn't extra thick like a Fisher or Vulcan would be. (and waist is definitely not a mousehole!)

Well you can also get cast iron up to melting temp in a forge and then it sorta "splashes" when you hit it with a hammer...

This is an *old* discussion in the craft world. You may want to look up the terms "Workmanship of certainty" and "Workmanship of risk" to get caught up with the discussion. If it's the skill of the crafter that makes the item and not the machine then it qualifies as hand made---so open die forging is very much hand made but closed die forging is *not* And the earliest I have seen documentation for a water powered hammer is before the year 1000 for a northern european tidal powered one---saw it at the Medieval Technology conference at Penn State about 20 years ago now... I call a powerhammer a "smart apprentice" as it does what you tell it to do! Thomas

Neat idea!

Full time college students pay $40 according to the flyer I have in my hand. My wife may be having foot surgery soon; if so I may miss Q-S, Alas! (Asking her to put it off till after Q-S would probably ensure I miss it through fatality...)