Bentiron1946

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.

Not a bad looking adz, you done good.

I have had both and of the two I would say that my electric blow was the one I liked best. My crank blower set for years and I finally sold it to Harold a couple of years ago. The electric blower will save your strength for more important work.

That's a wonderful looking anvil and I'm sure that whatever brand it is you will enjoy it all you years of forging on it. Now light off the forge, get the iron hot and start hammering. :D

Nice looking work, really like the chain. You done good!

Now that's a fine looking anvil! You done good :P

Scrap copper is harder than one would think to melt down. You need to keep the oxygen from it or it just kinda lays they and stays tacky and never quite flows into a cohesive liquid so you can pour a nice ingot. Some suggestion have been to use a lidded crucible, use glass as a flux on top of copper to cut off the oxygen, some who use charcoal as a heat source place charcoal on top of to do this. Sometimes it's just best to save your scrap up and then turn it in for credit for pieces you can actually use rather than expend all the necessary energy to turn it back into useable material yourself. The only metal I recycle is Sterling silver, I have draw plates now to make my own wire, tube and a rolling mill to make my own sheet. With silver having a spot price of somewhere close to $33/oz it is worthwhile to do this but copper is somewhat cheaper so it hardly makes sense to spend a lot of money to do the recycling yourself when the spot price for copper is $3.60/# today. It's fun to experiment but if you aim is to make money remelting your own copper is not the way to go, instead buy scrap that looks like you can reuse it. I bought some really nice sections of ductwork, some 2" dia. copper pipe, some 3" wide 20 gauge strip 8' long, plus some large bundles of #12 copper wire to make rivets form, all for $4/#. I spent a little over a $100 and had good usable material to make my small scale sculpture out of and no need to worry about if it was cost effective to remelt it myself. The scrap yard made some money on the deal and I walked away happy as a lark. Next time I go all my scrap goes back and he will buy it or give me credit towards my next purchase. It's a good deal for both of us.

Three Hundred Hours condensed down to fifty-eight minuets is a pretty good video. I have put together a couple of rifles and it sure took me more than length of time to it and mine weren't nearly that nice looking when I finished either. The National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association(I think that's the name) out of Friendship, IN used to put out a really fine magazine and there was a three part series on how to make a lock by a blacksmith that was a great lesson on the practice of lock smithing. I now wish I had kept all those magazines. Great fun that building locks and rifles.

Bellotta, isn't that sold mostly in Europe and South America? I had a square faced cross peen hammer that was made in Spain that I bought from a Mexican for $2 and sold to another smith for $20 just because he thought it would be so cool to have a square faced cross peen. I thought that by asking $20 for it he'd choke on the price and not buy it but I was wrong. ;)

You could also do like I have seen in some of the African arms, that is use a hot cut to make some splits in a wider blank than is necessary and then draw out the wider part of the blank until you have the length you want. It is use in pole arms and bore spears too, so it could be use for your spurs off to side of this sword also. Seems like there is more than one way to skin a sword. Get you iron and beat it till you succeed!

Nobody else going to try? Sam, do you know what this is?

Nice illustration! I always appreciate good draftsmanship, thanks.

Well now, lets not be all jump all over the dude. If I look at this as a piece of sculpture it is doable with some work. First off I'd do some rough forging of the basic blade shape and then perhaps forge weld all those fancy little spikes and horns on, next would come the real work on the danged thing, making all those little spiky bits look nice. Man, would that ever be a lot of hand work for me. I'm sure a lot of you would just get out the 4" hand grinder but me I'm kind of old school and still like to use files for this kind of thing. I know that there may other ways of doing this but that's how as a sculptor I start with it. The hilt and all that other fancy stuff up there could be cast out of silicon bronze. Yeah, I think as a straight piece of art it is no big problem to forge this thing, just time and effort and as blacksmiths that what we are good at, right?

You definitely don't want to move the shop, last time I did that life in the shop never seemed as good. Hope you get the more or less local job.

Nice looking hundred pound Fisher and I would say from looking at the horn that it hasn't seen any service at all. I have seen a vise similar to that and envied the owner, no cranking the screw to close the jaws. I have also seen them on eBay a time or two and they always seem to garner a fair amount of interest money wise too.

I thought "goodenough" was a rushing fellow, always rushing around to get something finished not quite on time but just about finished. The setting of standards is somewhat arbitrary. An old client who was moving into retirement living was cleaning out his back yard called and asked if wanted it back. When I forged it in 1976 I thought it was more than "good enough" but if I were forging it now the level of "good enough" would have been vastly different. The last four years I have been making jewelry and when my wife put on one of the first pendants I made I was somewhat aghast at the workmanship but she and others think it a thing of beauty and would like one "jut like it". "Good enough" can be very variable over the life of any give smith, it your standards aren't advancing and your skills improving then you will never ever be good enough. One must strive to be better than "good enough" otherwise you are like the painters who turn out the pictures for the "starving artist" sales, they have all the strokes down to make adequate paintings but not truly great art, they are just "good enough" to make inexpensive paintings that sell for the bottom tier of the market. That may be fine for most of what we do in making a thousand fence pickets but not for the individual sculptures, focal point hat/coat racks, gates, grilles and other items that are in close daily use by the client. I think as we mature as smiths we are constantly pushing the boundary of "good enough".

Interesting piece of gear, got a ratchet to extend the little spiked doohickey and a cam to lock it in place, looks to be late 19th C. or early 20th C. So what is it? :huh: