ThomasPowers

Yes it sort of gives them a retread, they are not equal to a new file though. They will aslo rust fast unless you treat them after the acid etch---just like patternwelded steel.

No in general the forge can be just slightly longer than 1/2 the blade length. The only time you need/want the entire blade heated up is for heat treat and it's pretty easy to create a special use forge just for that---like charcoal in a ground forge! If you get a long forge make sure you can decrease the interior so you are not always paying to heat all that space you are not using! (I have a small PU; about 4 times a year I wish I had a large one; but it sure is nice running a small one the other 362 days a year!)

Gun barrrels are generally NOT high carbon something about increased brittleness and explosions inside not being a good idea.

Well last time we roasted a whole pig in AR we used a rotating spit and the pig wasn't flattened any. I got to do the honours as the pig cook had over indulged the night before at the bachelor party...used hickory wood, also did 160# of steak---wedding party AR style! Down south there is more than one way to roast a hog! Last one I went to above the mason-dixon line they cooked it in a pit luau style... making myself hungry now...

You could make a stop plate for your anvil. Take a piece of steel the correct thickness + a bit for cleanup and cut an outlined rectangle from it that you can bend the short ends down to sit on the sides of your anvil leaving the two long sides going across your anvil with just enough room for your stock to fit between then and then use a hammer with a face larger than that to hammer on the hot stock (striker or holder strongly suggested). The hammer face should be stopped by the side pieces leaving the stock within it the correct thickness. Most people I know just take a section of saw blade and cut their own teeth into it Note a neat trick you can do is to taper the saw blade blank so the cutting edge is thicker than the back edge helps for fine woodworking where the kerf may not be very large.

Quality is strictly associated to what you want to make from it. Gun barrels usually do not make very good knives; but are Excellent for making gun barrels. So can you tell us what you want to try to make from them? Or is your question "I can get undrilled barrel "trimmins". What would be good things to make from them?

John I have a friend that has a bunch of fly presses; he finds his in the used equipment dealer papers from the NE part of the USA as that was where they were big at back when they were used.

What manufacturer? I do not believe that the different manufacturers used the same system; my #2 hopkins (??) is a Large H frame screwpress that was pretty much over the load limit for my small pickup.

Hardy; bending fork(s), swage, dishing forms are the hardy tools I use the most. The swage is used for turning farrier's rasps into rasptle snakes a common sales item out here. I had one that had an improvised holder for it that went into the hardy hole but just did a trade to get some top swages that I could forge down to fit my 1.5" square hardy hole, (their bottom pieces had 1" shanks)

Well in 28+ years of forging I have never had a problem with hardies bouncing even when they fit quite loose in a hole. What are you doing that this is a problem for you?

1: they have not got that price yet and probably will not so talking about it as if they have/will is a bit afore the fact. 2: it does look to me like a steel faced wrought iron stake that would put it at a pretty age and not recent at all. 3: Frelance Fabber where are you at---as I want to avoid there! I was still getting a brand name anvil every year in great shape for under US$1 a pound when I left Ohio 5 years ago. I haven't bought any in NM but I did find two free ones for a friend.

Sounds like one of Dan Boone's dragons.

I started armour making about 3 years before I started forging, all done cold which was pretty much state of the art 32 years ago. My focus quickly changed to smithing once I was kured over to the dark side; but I have kept my hand in and made a lot of tools for armourmakers that require knowing how it's done. Especially for japanese armour which tends to be laced lames; a shear and a punch are much more important than hot work capability or skills. You do know that most armour was low carbon wrought iron with no heat treat right? "The Knight and the Blast Furnace", Alan Williams, is the best book out there on the metallurgy of medieval and renaissance armour. You could be a blacksmith for 50 years and still not have armour making skills---it's a different skill set; much more akin to autobody work combined with costume design for making the patterns. I'm slowly working on two projects: a wrought iron spangen helm and a pattern welded spangen helm just on general cussedness to show all the cold work armourers what they are missing! (it was a 3 helm project; I finished the first one of a spangen helm made from all forged mild steel with the bands forge welded---no sheet metal was used, it all was forged out of larger stock.)

I just took a piece of 1/8" thick x 2-3" wide strap and forged one end down to fit the hardy hole *slightly* and bent it 90. About time to heat it up and bend it back the other way so to use the "clean" side... For pattern welding billets I have a cutting plate set up with a center line and then 1/4" tic marks out from the center line on the side and inches number stamped to make it easy to figure out where to cut a billet evenly. Phillip; yes you can forge a cutting plate from a micrometer if you start with a large enough one---use a starret or other good brand...

Very few air harding alloys in the old farm scrap stream though. I have run across a couple of old cold chisels that air hardened. If you are using unknown steel then you HAVE TO do a test piece to figure out what works best for it. Learn to judge the grain size when you break it and how to modify it by changing your HT process. If you are not willing to do a test sample don't use unknown steel AND DO THE SAMPLE FIRST; don't spend the time foging something only to find out it's not hardenable (lots of farm scrap is mild or even wrought iron!). Also beware of decarbed surface when testing.

If you can find a blacksmith they can make the part for you...

NO!!! Since anvil heels were originally jumpwelded onto the main mass of the anvil you DON'T WANT TO WEDGE ANYTHING THERE! as in "I wonder what would happen if I took the weakest part of the entire anvil and deliberately tried to break it off??? Sheet metal stakes are wedged in sheet metal stake plates and stake holders and have tapered shanks. They are not advised for use in anvil hardy holes. They also take a lot less force than anvil tooling as few sheet metal workers are using sledges on their stakes. Anvil tools have straight shanks and if anything is wedging tight you should dress them so they don't!

A lot of the work a flypress does is during the insanely huge spike in pressure that happens as the system bottoms out and the ram "bounces" back up. That press will not generate anything like the pressure curve of a fly press. It may be ok for bending. Keep looking---my large flypress (42" wheel on top with drop down bars to grab it by) cost me just under US$100 what with the auction price buyer's reaming and $35 to have it loaded on my truck for me by a rigger.

Looks like a steeled wrought iron piece.

Pattern welding is primarily done these days "for pretty". Armour making really has no connection with blacksmithing these days. To suggest a person learn general smithing before armour making would be a lot like suggesting a potter learn general smithing before throwing pots! Now the high end armour makers have the skills and equipment to work hot; but as I mentioned very few armour makers do. (we keep pushing it as it's more traditional and easier on the arm than working cold is) In particular for japanese armour a good shear and punch would be much more useful to get than a forge or anvil! Making the katana can be done hot or cold with forging of course being the traditional way of doing it. Tamahagane *is* a bloomery product and so working it like wrought iron was worked makes perfect sense. *But* that's sort of post-doc work skills and you will need to work your way up to that over *years*---especially if you plan to smelt your own iron sand! If you just want to make a couple of swords; then doing them cold, (stock removal), from mono-steels is something you can start *today* and except for the heat treat expect to get a tolerable product. Heat treat you would probably have to farm out to an expert.

I'll ring an anvil for him tonight

Probably available at a ceramics supply company *locally*.

Frankly the cutting shelf would have to be really really bad with very deep cuts indeed to play any part of an anvil buying decision to me as I don't use it anyway. I cut on a cutting plate that sticks in the hardy and bend on swages that fit in the hardy hole.

"It all started here" ignoring the 2000 years or so of ferrous metalworking and tack on another thousand or two of non ferrous metalworking *before* Abraham Darby started smelting iron with coke rather than charcoal... (I've been to Ironbridge Gorge; it was the one place I said I wanted to visit when I was in England!) I also have a book on Medieval Metal working techniques of India and one on the Agara (sp) a tribe/caste of indian iron workers. Special mention of course of King Tut's iron dagger---much more interesting than his solid gold one IMNSHO! Note to be cautious of books written for "political" or "social" reasons. Quite a few books on ancient china have that slant and are verbose on their claims to have invented *everything* much of it not admitting recent hard dated discoveries that predate the chinese examples...

As he said: punch a sq hole in a couple of pieces of stock, draw out the ends and bend back to engage the meat. As for the "heavy side down" issue: I do a combo fix of the support and the shaft. make the support a fairly tight fix on the sq shaft and then *round* a section of the shaft for turning in the support and then at one end of the round section have the sq shaft twisted 45 deg out of phase with the other end. So: you turn with the rounded section in the support fork then you can lock it in by shifting it slightly to one or the other sq sections and so have 8 different positions the meat can have over the fire without rotating on it's own. Moxon's Mechanics Exercises has plans for a spit jack if you get tired of turning it on your own.