ThomasPowers

I used to cut shurikens out of old circular saw blades, decent steel and free or a quarter when used beyond sharpening possibility. Saturday one of my students tried to make a shuriken from a large nut by pounding it flat, found it did not work that well. Also "smelting" is refining metal from ore. Melting or foundry work is melting metal.

Drako you bring up something I have not seen mentioned yet: Health Care! Almost every crafter I know has had at least 1 catastrophic health incident. Many of them have gone bankrupt and lost all they own over it. Exp a knifemaker who accidentally got his fingers stuck in the gears of an old hand crank drillpress he had motorized to save money, not only did he have the very expensive micro surgery he was also not allowed to work for months! So remember to factor in health insurance payments when you work on your plan. Me I have really enjoyed keeping my hobby and my income separate and regularly exult on how nice it is to be sitting in a comfy chair in climate controlled room instead of *having* to crank out produce in 100+ deg heat. If you want to make a business of it---get welding training! Oft times welding will keep food on the table while you are between commissions. Next suggestion: is there a blacksmith shop at any "local" attractions that may hire you and *pay* you to practice the craft?

Some folks who have forges lined with hard firebrick (it comes in several varieties you know) have to let their forge run for an hour or more to get the bricks up to temp before they can weld.

There is so much that is possible if you are willing to spend several million dollars on equipment! Unfortunately most of them are no improvement and some of them will have even worse results. However someday someone with access to such equipment may surprise us all! (But we still won't be able to afford one of their blades...)

You need the mass to provide inertial mass under impact so it has to stay rigidly attached. Concrete in a steel box tends to lose it's attachment under repeated pounding. Can you weld up large chunks of steel oriented vertically?

of course the spikes used on the early wooden or wooden with an iron cap rails are not like the spikes designed for the "modern" fish plate. If you ever get to Manasses VA the town museum has several examples of ACW wrought iron rails that are quite differnt from modern rails on display.

Any steel they feel like can be stamped "FORGED", some may even be forged! There are a large number of tool steels not all of them real great for some uses; others may be at the lower limits of their quality designations and then there is the problem with "forged" information on them. Without testing YOU DON'T KNOW!

File burned handle "looks original to the piece" but the pattern of indentations does not match the files of that period---too regular teeth pattern. Bad fake.

There are quite a few intro to smithing books out there. I like "The Complete Modern Blacksmith" by Weygers as he has very much a scrounge and build it your self and working with scrounged scrap metal type of meme. However, 1 afternoon with a good smith will save you about 6 months of trying to learn it on your own. ABANA (Artist Blacksmith Association of North America) has chapters all over. Meetings are free and open to attend for new folk. You might look up your local group and take in a meeting! Blacksmithing Organization Web Sites : Blacksmith Group Locations has a listing for at least two groups in PA and lots for the surrounding states---depending on where you are in PA...

Sounds like a great variation if all your tools are the same size. Did you make it longer than the anvil heel is thick so you have a place to tap on the bottom of it for removal?

I can probably find something similar in "Pounding out the Profits"; but it will be sometime over the weekend.

Well as I tell my students when something goes odd but is still quite usable: "Charge extra for it!"

Part of the issue may be that those are really *NOT* simple questions to answer. The ASM handbook on heat treating is several thousand pages long and is only *1* of the books on the subject sitting on our shelves. One of the problems is that we don't really have any control on what the manufacturer used---and it could have changed several times anyway. While many leaf springs have been 5160 other steels have been used with different heat treat requirements. Shoot I have run into *1* microalloyed strain hardened leaf spring---(low carbon it can't be quenched hardend for blades). So you need to know how to test your steel to see if you are getting the best from it. A maker trying out a new steel type might do 20 or 30 test blades so as to be able to try out different temperatures to quench at, different quenchants and different tempering temps and test them to destruction to see what worked best. Remember when you ask folks to re-type stuff already available you should be willing to pay for their time as you are asking them to spend their time so that you don't have to spend your time hunting stuff out. Standard shop rate should be around $100 an hour and most smiths don't type very fast....makes "Search" seem like a better deal doesn't it. And if you haven't read "The Complete Bladesmith" or "The Master Bladesmith" by Hrisoulas you are trying to start out with one foot in a hole already. If your local library doesn't have them ask the desk about ILL ( Inter Library Loan) It's generally free or almost free and even remote places can get books from University libraries worth hundreds of dollars for you to check out! (New Mexico has a lot of remote to it too!) You may find out that having a couple of hundred pages written on the subject will do more for you than a page or two of web postings. Finally most folks who have been smithing long enough to get good at it have run into throngs of people who want to do stuff but are not willing to put the effort into doing it. Wasting time helping folks who won't do their own work is a real drag on productivity and morale. So; many of us have a "crusty exterior" and will throw out some info to see if someone will go out and dig. If they show that they will go the distance then a veritable flood of information may descend on them. I never teach blademaking as my first class; however if you do well at my first class---a simple S hook, *then* I'm willing to help a student towards blademaking---and "doing well" does not mean that your S hook is perfect. I've had folks burn theirs in two but "pass" the class as I base it on: Do they listen and follow directions? Are they a safety hazard to others? Are they a safety hazard to themselves?

I am not a current SOFA member; but I was one for nearly 15 years when I lived in OH and unless there has been a lot of changes there would not be any problem with that scenario. Just make sure you have a copy of the form to hand as they may not have one printed out either! SOFA has always been one of the nicest groups to be a part of; very helpful indeed!

Yup Miami County Fairgrounds, meetings monthly and *forges* and even powerhammers available for use when I was last a member. We used to drive 2 hours each way for meetings from Columbus---carpools make it cheaper and fun! Meetings can deal with an 18 month old, though you may want to go in the back room when/if they use a powerhammer at the demo. They have their own building so meetings are indoors year round! Note that you can probably find someone at the meeting that will let you use their forge that is even closer than the meeting site! And if you don't show up for Quad-State then you are seriously out of it!

Yes many owner built gas forges differ only from crucible furnaces in their orientation and door set up.

search on patination and you can learn a LOT! Yes for a blade you need to use a process that keeps it under the tempering temp.

Just like there are a few difference between medieval medicine and modern medicine there are a heck of a lot of process differences in medieval and modern steels. ( eg: vacuum processed and electric arc furnace steels just were not very common in medieval times.) The big difference is the non-homogeneity of medieval steels as in early medieval times the bloomery furnaces never melted the iron/steel reduced from the ore and so the starting product---the bloom was full of crap that the folding and welding was done to reduce the amount and make what's left in much finer sized inclusions. The melting of these inferior steels into cast or crucible steels dates to the mid 1700's when Huntsman worked out a method of doing so. (In europe, central asia had been making crucible steels for centuries by then) Not as early as medieval but perhaps you might profit from "Steel making before Bessemer, vol 1 Blister Steel, vol 2 crucible steel" Also look up Blister steel, shear steel, cast steel. Note that the japanese tatara furnace used to make the starting material for traditionally made japanese swords is a form of bloomery furnace and so they have retained the labourious process of refining the bloom into a usable material. (one thing many people do not realize is that all the folding and welding on the japanese blade *DROPS* the carbon content, the starting content being close to 2% and ending up close to 0.5%) Other differences is alloying, control of not wanted elements like Sulfur and Phosphorous, understanding heat treat processes, knowing what is in the steel we are using... I have smelted iron/steel from ore using Y1K european methods and while it is a lot of fun and work the end product is much inferior to modern steels indeed!

Etching especially electro etching is used by a lot of blademakers.

If you look at page 5 of SWABA's Aug newsletter: Swaba News Letters You can see several other of those swageblocks and anvils piled up on a pallet at a fellows anvil collection.

It's *YOUR* anvil dressing the hardy hole to be uniform would not be considered abuse. At least to me!

I used to have students make tentstakes from RR spikes to teach them powerhammer control---they end up looking a lot like that only not so "pretty".

You sir are the proud culmination of over 1 million years of tool using primates! Modify the tools for your considerations rather than vice versa! One of the problems I have with new students is teaching them that the store bought tools are not the *best* design; rather the *cheapest* design the manufacturer thought they could get away with and it's quite right and prioper to modify them to suit yourself.

if you are hard on firepots you can get one designed for coke as they are in general much thicker and heavier duty.

I made my first billet in 1983 too at a 1 on two with Jim Crowell!