Bentiron1946

Welcome to forum! I hope you get a your questions answered here.

Those are really very nice looking skillets, you sure got them near perfect and the trivet too. You done good!

His book sure inspired me when I was working on the anvil. He an inspiration to many of us. He book was a driving force for the revitalization of the art of blacksmithing. Prayers offered up for his family.

We'll be praying for you guys, peace, strength and love through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Nice looking table. You could make coffee tables, hall tables, a  whole line of furniture items using that motif it sure looks good.

You need a good sword to process chickens don't you? Oh well, I guess a cleaver will do in a pinch. That is a fine looking cleaver to process a pig or beef with for sure. Nice work, you done good!

Here awhile back I was looking at an online auction of Roman artifacts from Bulgaria, iron spear and arrow heads, most all of them were tanged also. They were not the wonderful shapes we now associate with arrow heads but more angular diamonds, like they were all made in big hurry. They could have been fake but were supposedly found by "metal detectorist". Seems to be a popular hobby in Europe these days.

Those look handy for socket work and rebar is OK. It's not as bad as the purist would have you believe.

How does one know when one has become anything? Steve is a journeyman electrician, he has spent the time, taken the test and received the certification to prove that he is what he says he is, no problem with that. In England there was and perhaps still is membership in the guild hall to establish you as an apprentice, journeyman, etc. but here in the United States things have always been a bit different especially after the War of Independence when we pretty much got shuck of whatever had to do with the old. I was a draftsman for years but I had nothing to prove to the rest of the industry that I had the capability of drawing my way out a paper sack other than a high schools drafting class, I did bronze casting for years and had no training other than books and watching others doing it and myself doing it so how could I call myself a founder, I certainly never had an apprenticeship in it. Was I a blacksmith, well I never really called myself one, others did, but I called it art as most of my stuff was useless as well those items on wild boars as art is never really very useful in and of its self you know. It's not like you can plow a rocky field with it or secure a window with it against break ins but it does look nice and stir the senses. So no I was not and am not a blacksmith but a metalsmith since I work metal in many different ways, I cast it, hammer it, twist it, repousse it, I work in bronze, silver, copper, lead, steel, cast iron, and I use all of the modern and ancient methods of working metal. I have very little in the way of formal metal working education but most has come from the writings of others and in conversation with master of the fire and anvil BUT am I a blacksmith, no I just dabble in it to reach my goal of making art. I just love fire and metal together, such fun it is. :P

When I was really into the black powder gig I would buy a lot of old original items from Dixie Gun Works, it was a great place to do business with and they always had a fun catalog too. I bought a used Navy Arms Buffalo Hunter and it had this flimsy wood ramrod so I ordered a metal ram rod from Dixie that came off a Snyder rifle and  took a die and cut some thread on the end for a worm from Dixie, then I made a ball puller from a drywall screw I brazed to the end of Dixie ball puller where their screw just wasn't sharp enough to bite into the lead and I had a real going out fit for that .58 caliber gun. For target practice I used 50 grains of FFG with a round ball and for hunting I used 100 grains of FFg with 500 grain Minnie ball. At 100 yards that ball would open up to over two times it diameter in a gel block and come out the other side of it. I had a Williams peep site on the rifle, great shooting gun.

However I still like the pleasure of building up my own pistols and rifles best of all, somehow just more satisfying. Now they seem to think that adapting a break open single shot shotgun with a percussion nipple is just great or fitting up a gun with electronic ignition is roughing it somehow destroys the notion of black powder hunting. It's kind of like archery, I started shooting bow when I was in fourth grade and by the time I was in high school I could put all of my arrows in 4" square of paper at 35 yards and yet archery was considered a girls sport back then. By the time I got out of the Navy and college it had become a man's sport for  hunting but they all had sights and such. Now they have these really fancy bows with pulleys, optical sights, string pullers, silencers, and such. Four years ago I went up to where some friends had camped and were showing me all their fancy stuff and I had my old Ben Pearson wood bow and they  had some bales of straw set up at  35 yards. They shot their  fancy stuff, 5 arrows each, each of them had 2 or 3 arrow in the paper plate. Then it was my turn, well they were all laughing at my "antique", I put 5 of my arrow in the paper plate, no big deal. If you want to be good with any rifle, shotgun, pistol or bow you just need to shoot it more than once a year. I guess it's the same with any skill, take for instance forge welding a rifle barrel, ain't going to do it right off the first time now are you?   

If only I was in this good of shape as this fellow I'd be a lot happier about things http://www.wimp.com/blacksmithstill/

That sure is some kind of fancy! Nice work for sure. :P

Looks to be a Fisher and is a good anvil to have but the price seems a tad high, try to dicker with the fellow. Just because it was made in 1901 doesn't mean it is worth the asking price. It looks to be maybe a 150# anvil so $2/# would be a good starting price.

"I don't even have a coat of many colors."..................Yes,! Red, white and blue,plus OD green. Those will get you into a pit of trouble over there for sure. Welcome to the forum!

Something like that happened here in Phoenix, a family was moving and packed their BBQ with propane tank in a U-Haul truck, parked the truck over night and drove off the next day and while going down the road, BOOM!!! the truck blew apart. The bottle had not been shut off and there was a leak, the gas had filled the space and somehow there was an ignition point as the truck was going down the road. Here again, fortunately, no one was injured but the contents and the truck were total losses.

Every year I need to get my cars emission tested, and every year I remind the manager of the testing station to remover the propane bottles from the testing bays. He always tells me it is safe, he is an idiot. The gas, if there is ever a leak, will settle in the dynamiter pits and could result in an explosion. When I was a wee little lad and just starting out doing plumbing design we had to do a remodel of a lube/oil rack building for a utility company in a remote part of the state. Their problem was that the old gas piping had leaked one night and filled up the lube pit with propane fumes and the early morning guy had walked in with a lit cigar in his mouth. He got a faint whiff of the gas and was very lucky he didn't set off the whole mess. It was cold and the gas was heavier than air and very dense that morning, if it had been summer everything would have gone sky high. We were hired to bring the whole building up to the current building codes.

Flammable gasses are not to be fooled around with and that's no lie!

Looking good!

I saw a fellow out here that had them stacked two high, the very long ones, in a "U" with a cat walk to access the top three. Over the open area of the "U" he had a crane that he could access all of the open area and even put items onto the catwalk so he put them in the top storage. He wasn't an artist but he worked on truck engines and did welding jobs but I sure envied him his set up. I sure would have loved something like that when I was making sculpture. Oh, and he had it covered with an arched corrugated steel roof, nice set up and he did all the work on his own.

I'm somewhat familiar with ceramic shell casting and once the shell is fire is rather  fragile in nature. After repeated heating and cooling cycles it tends to come apart in small pieces. You can give it a try since it's free. At the iron pour one year we tried using  the  wool and ceramic shell in our pouring buckets but the shell just didn't hold up all that well in my estimation but then again molten iron is pretty hot compared to the inside of a forge.

No use buying hard drawn, as the name implies it is hard and stiff, not easy to work by hand. If you are going to do wire wrapping buy the mild drawn so you can manipulate it by hand without the need to anneal the wire. You only get one or at the most two attempts with mild draw to do the wrap then the wire magically turns into hard draw, who would of thought about that? Careful with the heat on copper as it turns it dark in color and that's good or bad depending on how you want he color to look. If you don't mind a dark brown go ahead and heat it, that's annealing it and making it soft and allows for a really tight wrap but your bright copper look is gone.

Frank, Be sure to warm and dry the tufa in the oven before you pour the silver into the mould or you will end up sparing molten silver all over the shop and yourself, not a fun thing to do. You would be surprised how much territory that silver will cover if the mould is not warm and dry, WOW!

I think that Indian Jewelry Supply in Gallup, NM still sells tufa stone and maybe Thunderbird Jewelry Supply in Albuquerque, NM, I have purchased from both in the past(20 years or so ago for TJS and 8 years ago for IJS).

Nice looking work on the ladle, especially like the touch of wood on the handle. You done good.

Good of you to share your pictures of your vise collection. They sure clean up nice.

That sounds like good news but we'll keep her in our prayers awhile longer if that's OK?

Looks like you did a fair job of imitating the pressure flaking of a lithic artifact.

Fisher anvil, cast iron body, steel face, good anvils for use in areas where the ring of a wrought iron anvil would be objectionable as these are very quiet by comparison.