ThomasPowers

I keep buying because you *can* drain a local area of the good stuff and then need to work off your stash until it re-fills. Also I teach and so can go through a lot of old ballpeins for hawks in a short ammount of time. I used to live in the "blacksmiths' happy hunting grounds" and piled up a lot of stuff that now that I live in the "blacksmith's desert" I'm happy to have. I have a "buy point" for items I use on a regular basis that if I see them at that price or cheaper I will buy them; but I won't pay a penny more (pre-nicholson black diamond files, ball peen hammer heads, socket chisels, Post Vises, etc). If it's a particularly nice example and the price is close I might ask the seller if they will sell at my buy point; but I'm not upset if they say no. I get an "allowance" for my hobby and by sticking to it have had a lot of fun getting stuff over the decades and never have had a negative impact on the family finances.

I hope you didn't quench the rebar ends after looping but left them to normalize. Otherwise there is a possibility that some may become brittle and Boy Scouts can generally be expected to be able to break an anvil with a rubber mallet---I know cause I was one!

I don't use water in my shop save for when I need to control exactly where a heat goes. A 5 gal plastic pail with a dipper does fine. Carry it out to the shop when I go and dump it on the mesquite tree when I'm done. When I need to let a part cool down we toss it out into the desert. With A36 you can get unfortunate unintended consequences when quenched so I avoid it and with knifemaking you don't want a water quench anyway! For demos when I need to cool down a piece to hand around I use an old coopered wooden icecream maker bucket---buy them at the fleamarket for a couple of bucks; remove the metal work and run a 3 strand rope through the holes near the top and you have a great old-timey wooden bucket dead cheap. Of course out here I have to start soaking a bucket a couple of days before a demo to get it water tight. Half a barrel takes up a lot of floor space and is a tempting target for the smithy gremlins to drop a hot piec of HighC in. We're no longer forging straight mild steel or real wrought iron where a quench was a standard end to the hot phase of a project so why do you need a large slack tub?

Except for those warhammer that predated the use of plate armour. The heaviest ones were used for foot jousting in the renaissance---two handed ones and for a laugh look up the lucerne hammer. BTW The norse didn't use a lot of hammers beside metalworking ones. Mauls would work better for many things than an *expensive* metal hammer head. I have weights on the Mastermyre find; I can dig out my book but they are a LOT LIGHTER than your planned!

As cheap as their hammers I I would save the pieces and mount them on your wall of shame! I have a collection of anvils on my wall of shame including one where the base broke off from the top half---the weight stamps are on the base so I know it once was a complete anvil.

I had a hot piece of steel jump up and hit me on the cheek once, didn't burn it left a cut! I had a great story about Heidleberg dueling scars all worked out but it didn't leave a scar. sigh... The best story I know happened to one of my students who was teaching his wife to forge. She hit a piece and didn't have it flat on the anvil or sufficiently captured by the tongs and it flew up past her, past her husband's head and hit the tree and then bounced back past her husband's head and landed in the slack tub. She quit right then.

So ask over at armour archive how you rivet and strap legs. Steve; as far as armour making; do we really need to try to duplicate a forum that has been around 3 times longer than IFI? Why not allow them to deal with the armour questions?

DM; The problem is that *you* didn't have time; so you expected the people trying to help you to spend more of theirs. Do you really think your time is more valuable that theirs? Would you be willing to pay $100 an hour for all time spent answering a question a second or more time? In general it's considered a good thing to make it as easy and painless as possible for people to help you; so research to see if a question has been answered before, think out the question so that all the details needed are available the first go. And think over and try the answers you get. Raising my kids we had a rule that the "third time you ask the answer is NO!" helped to deal with nagging kids and you can see the applications to outher situations... Pope; on the other hand if you asked the question it might be slightly different and so get a different answer that would cover a wider area and so enrich the answer pool available in the archives.

Eric was working hot though IIRC. I direct people there from armourarchive that want to do hot work...

Yes there are certain projects I put off until I can borrow a friend's powerhammer. (Or when I was in OH I had one large billet I was working on that I got about 1 weld in a moth at the SOFA meetings wsing their hammer).

Yellow pine tends to be resinous and sticky when warmed and handled too. I think DM is interested in NZ species rather than NA ones.

Think of it being like sports---who would expect to walk to the pitcher's mound and the first time they have ever touched a baseball throw a no-hitter! Yet we get loads of folks who expect to start blacksmithing at the "professional" level. (worried about knifemaking and pattern welding before they can even hammer straight) Like sports: Practice! Practice! Practice! I had one student who literally had not used a hammer before---he's selling knives now because he did not quit when he wasn't happy with his work---he did more until he got good!

I have a 24 volt battery charger wonder how that would effect the de-rusting process...

Can't say I know him; I work at the Array Operations Center that shares the NM Tech Campus but is not part of NM tech. Instead it's "owned" by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as part of the Very Large Array 50 miles west of here. (Actually the project I'm working on is being built in Chile at 16000' but our computing team is based here.) We could probably put you up for a night or two if you get down this way, as long as you can deal with a cat and dog...(and my daughter hasn't moved back in...)

As mentions banding can be of different grades: heat, quench, break to test it; of throw in a bit of old blackdiamond file (pre Nicholson stamping); at 1.2% C it will raise the carbon content of the billet or you can use it in san mai with patternwelded sides. Note too that nowhere in the original post does it say the pattern welding is for a knife---could be for a ring or a candy dish and so not need high C content...; Shoot I've been slowly working on a pattern welded spangen helm and my pattern welded pizza cutters have been well received....

Frankly in that condition I'd think that US$2 a pound would be tops in an anvil rich region. Kind of sad though to be selling an "heirloom" and finding out that it's not a pile of money in anvil shape... Like folks trying to jack up the price at the fleamarket by telling me something is "old". I generally pick up a rock and tell them it's a million times older and I'll sell it to them....

Well yes you do want your anvil between wrist and ankle height---but trending toward the *top* of that range...

Generally, no. Knife woods are often selected to be hard and oily to provide for long wearing use. Traditionally fruit woods, tropical hardwoods and whatever was the hardest wood handy was used. Now days many people use woods that were not traditionally used; however they are often stablized with resins to make them harder and longer wearing. It also allows you to use pretty looking woods that perhaps would not take hard usage.

Note that in general "smithy" is the building, Smith is the person. Learning the jargon will make you look like a pro in no time! What date is the village set at? I can probably suggest some books that have some smithing info from that time period.

The flap lets you control the ammount of air so you can control the burn and atmosphere in the forge.

azIronSmith; we had a fellow reshape a light sledge into a diagonal pein hammer at one of our meetings fairly recently. He did it hot using another member's press; took about 2 minutes once it was hot. I prefer forging to grinding almost all the time!

Well if you get a chance to visit/interview at EMRTC (Energetic Materials Research and Training Center) here at NM tech; look me up and we can tour the explosively done art on Campus and have a beer together. They have had a firing freeze I know of but a friend of mine says that have been hurting to back fill some positions when it thaws...

Free YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you can always use it for forge brazing or as trading stock at the next smithing conference you get too.

So how does it get the "snap" using the chain? Or is a gravity device?

The "correct" height is the one where you can work for the longest period of time without hunching over because it's too low or not being able to hit flat because it's too high. Note this will differ depending on what you are doing and what tools or tooling you are using! I have anvils at 4 different heights within 3 feet of my main anvil (and an upsetting block on the floor as well)