ThomasPowers

Depends; plow points were made a lot of different ways: Do a spark test on them or heat and quench a section and check for hardness. Most of the thin disks will usually be a steel with enough carbon to make a decent knife.

The ball bearing balls are not case hardened only some of the larger races.

It's a Tau Beta Pi key; an engineering honourary society you can see an example on their web page Tau Beta Pi - The Engineering Honor Society as to the language; well it's all greek to me! Not a tool. (My father has one).

When I lived in central OH I found mine on the side of the road. Go to a mom and pop garage and you can probably get one from free. Chain shops have all sorts of liability issues in letting stuff go out the back door.

Unfortunatly the two I know the best were in NW AR and Kansas city about 20 years ago and I don't remember the little details, (save that the AR one was made from 6" sq structural tubing and the one in KC used the main beam in the basement of an enourmous victorian house to back the top wheel support. Both used hydraulic jacks to apply pressure for the rolling.)

A friend of mine had great help from Johnson when he called them about his old forge. They are an old firm and may not be e-mail focused.

NeoTribal bladesmiths try to have less than 10% stock removal to do after forging. They often have a "hammer finished" blade and just leave enough to remove decarb. Note that new bladesmiths often have much heavier decarb layers than skilled ones. You may want to check out the NeoTribal metalsmithing forums over at Primal Fires. I do all my handle work after heat treat myself.

Smithing coal and charcoal have nearly the same BTU content per *pound*. The density of charcoal is MUCH less though so you have to shovel a lot more of it through the forge during a session. As I tell my students "They will both get hot enough to burn up your steel---how much hotter do you need to get?"

My shop anvil is a 515# fisher; my travel anvil is a 93# Arm and Hammer (not vulcan!). When you hit one side of your work on the anvil with your hammer the anvil is hitting the other side---old Newton's for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However the more the anvil and stand can move away from the blow the less energy that goes into changing the shape of the hot metal. This is why you need a good stand for an anvil and why a larger anvil "works" better. I sure can tell when I move back to the big anvil after a weekend of using the little one! Also as mentions anvils can be broken if you do too heavy a work on too small of an anvil---breaking off the heel is usually the damaged point. When I have students trying to work with larger stock I usually take a piece of soapstone and draw lines on the anvil and tell them they MUST work only over the center of the anvil and not over the unsupported horn or heel areas---and then I yell at them if they don't follow my instructions. Note such anvils with broken off heels often make great cheap starter anvils; I have one as a loaner for my students, over 100 pounds and cost me US$40 and has a great flat face and ok horn.

I made one from a fairly shallow brake drum and then made a sheet metal "fence" to sit right inside the walls, left the ends a bit apart so I could stick stock in and then cut a "mousehole in it opposite the gap and just over the wall of the drum to be able to slide long stock through. I used to use this for billet welding and it worked GREAT. If I wanted to work with stuff that wouldn't fit through the gap I could just pull the fence out and have a standard drum forge.

single piece spurs made from farrier's rasps do well out this way.

As a blacksmith my Dr gives me the Tetanus shot on an "every 5 years basis"; for "normal" folk it's every 10 years. I figure he must think I work with horses as that's a danger factor; but since I do work with a lot of farm scrap I'm not amiss to being a tad more careful. Tetanus is a *bad* way to die! Most folk don't have that much in the way of exposure these days---but everyone who blacksmiths and has cut/scratched themselves on rusty metal in the past year raise your hands! I thought so....

If a file will cut it a file would work great. Start coarse and move to a fine file and you should be able to get it to a surface that is fine for forging. if a file won't cut it and if you have that much relief to get through you would best be using power tools; perhaps time to pick up a cheap angle grinder.

Actually a lot of cashiers checks and money orders are scams today---it goes both ways. I sure wouldn't accept that large a chunk of change in paper drawn on a third party without getting it vetted through the bank *first*.

The "dies" are steel wheels of various radii and curvatures down to using a large ball bearing for the bottom one. As wheels they are fairly easy to turn on a metal lathe according to my friends who built them. (better than trying to re-use commercial wheels due to the high pressures put on them). Thomas

That anvil in York is a fisher a good brand and *QUIET* they don't ring and so a great anvil to use in cities and suburbia. Decent price too. A good weight for a starter anvil, light enough to move a lot, heavy enough to do some real work. (I moved 6 times the first 6 years we were married...) SOMEONE jump on it

Tire hammer is more compact and "elegant" than a rusty. As you have the skills I would go with that. There are clear and complete instructions available for them as well.

Melting temp of a cast iron ladle: 2150 - 2360 Melting temp of pure copper: 1983 as you usually heat something Hotter then melting temp if you want to pour it you are in the DANGER ZONE! Also copper absorbs O2 from the atmosphere when it's hot turning into a ceramic, nice and shiny and copper looking but you won get it to melt or pour. When melting copper in a crucible you either melt it under a layer of powdered charcoal or flux it with borax.

Tirehammer!

Apprenticeship: so basically you are asking some one to bet their house, shop, car, tools, retirement savings---all they own on *you*. How long/closely would you have to know someone before being willing to do that? How much are you willing to pay to be an apprentice? For a professional "babysitting" a new person is a monetary loss that most self employed people can't afford. Unless you can bring skills or money to the job to make up for lost productivity; apprenticeships are not a nice thing to do to someone. In previous discussions the consensus was that it would take about 10 hours of unsupervised work for every one on one hour with the "master blademaker" . Most shops don't have that much scut work and many times doing the scut work is the time the master uses to figure out problems they are having. Many don't have the room or tools for 2 people to safely work independently. (I know this as I spent a year apprenticed to a top swordmaker, 6 days a week in the shop, no pay, 2 meals a day with the family---and I still feel guilty over it!) Also in today's single authorship mindset you *can't* help a blademaker do their stuff without dropping their price substantially. DON"T BE DISCOURAGED---change your mindset! Basically if you want someone to teach you; pay for a class, go to conferences, start getting friendly with the local smiths, many of whom will be happy to give you pointers and help *outside* of a formal apprenticeship. Learn skills: jewelry making is directly applicable to making fittings for blades and scabbards; welding is always helpful around the shop---both these skills can usually be found being taught at local community colleges!! Even machining can be used to make jigs that "traditionally" might be give to an apprentice to spend a month with a file to make. Start getting your basic set of tools together---fleamarkets are your friends! If you do it slowly it can be done quite cheaply BTW you might want to look into the NeoTribal forum "Primal Fires" for a group of people trying to take blacksmithing/bladesmithing back to the early basics building adobe filled washtub forges, fueld by chunk charcoal and using hunks of scrap as anvils. (and doing some *great* work too!)

I know several talented armourers who have built their own english wheels as the commercial ones are generally too light for the thicknesses of "using armour" for the SCA. It's amazing to see them do a multi axii curved breastplate in a few short minutes on it.

Of course a simple cheap propane forge has the same ease and speed of use.

Bolt holes with a couple of bolts could be used for a bending jig. Be a lot of work to make it into a firepot though if you did want to and use the side hole for air---chunk charcoal would be the fuel I would think would work best.

Ferociously expensive ??????????????? I once made a complete beginners set up for under US$25 that included Forge, blower, anvil, basic tools. And it wasn't a toy I used it as my main billet welding forge for several years in preference to the commercially built forges I owned. Also the fanciest tool I used to build it was a 1/4" electric drill I have also done a pattern welding demo on a chunk of railroad rail using a carpenter's claw hammer and a roughly fabbed up sheet metal firepot burning charcoal sieved out of old bonfires in the desert. Don't get hung up on tooling! Experience will go way further!

Don't move until you get a chance to go to Quad-State! Put on by SOFA the last full weekend in September just above Dayton OH. Largest annual blacksmith conference in the world! And it's CHEAP! And you can camp out there to cut costs! I'll be driving in form New Mexico, Rich usually shows up from the US Virgin Islands, Darrell from Canada...; it's *that* good. All the new and used smithing equipment, supplies, books *everything*! A group of us off the web camp together for potlucks and shooting the bull and you and your fiancee would be welcome. This year's focus is on traditions aspects of blacksmithing. (Usually 4 or 5 demos going on at the same time one is always knifemaking/patternwelding.) Southern Ohio Forge and Anvil (SOFA) Blacksmith Association but the Quad-State link is not filled out yet on the demonstrators. Now as far as "traditional blade making" goes you are a bit off base. The traditional bladesmith's shop will have at least a half dozen workers in it. The smith will NOT be the one to grind the blade and the grinder is not one to hilt it. In medieval times these were separate guilds even and doing the work of a different guild was punishable by having your shop pulled down. The earliest powerhammer I can document is pre year 1000. This doing it all yourself is a MODERN mindset not traditional! The Japanese have maintained the traditional roles fairly well with the smelter, smith, grinder/polisher, hilter and scabbard makers all being different. Now if you want to do it all you can and even using earlier methods; but it won't be they way *they* did it! Folks didn't have the capital resources to have the tools to do all the different things and let all the rest of them sit idle while they were using just one set. Frontier America was a bit of a special case where there were not a lot of extra people around; however most blades actually came from England and France from places that specialized in making knives! Don't worry about size, get yourself a good leather apron sized for you and perhaps a sturdy portable platform to stand on when visiting other smiths and getting a chance to use their equipment (building it so it's also a tool chest for your favorite hammers, tongs, etc would be a neat way to do it.) When I teach I provide a range of anvil heights and we have one that would probably suit you fine! OTOH, there was one anvil set up at SOFA for a member that was about 6'4" and *nobody* else could use it comfortably. Check out "The Backyard Blacksmith: Traditional Techniques for the Modern Smith" (ISBN: 1592532519 / 1-59253-251-9), Sims, Lorelei----written by a lady smith And be sure to come up and say Howdy to "the man in the disreputable red hat" at Quad-State! And think about attending classes at the ABS school in Texarkana!