Bentiron1946

What a deal! Heck yeah buy that baby. Like Thomas says you'd have a dedicated hardy holder with a horn, no bad for $50. I also wouldn't be overly worried about all that weld stuff up front, just grind it smooth and use it till you can find something much better. Like the song says, "don't worry, be happy", if had a spare fifty I'd buy it.

He has been smoking whacky tabacky and is stoned out of his gourd. You should avoid buying swords from deranged old hippies you know.

Thanks for taking a look, I sure wasted a lot of time looking at that guys visit to the museum but I sure enjoyed looking at some place I'd never get a chance to go.

I got an email from an old friend in NJ and he said things were not too good where he was and wishing he was back in AZ so I'm praying that all of you that are in the area are at least dry. God be with you.

Tom, That is some first class copper work. Nice job on setting the stones, I like that a lot!!

Thanks for the offer but my other hand would be jealous of the other and it just wouldn't do to have my hands angry with each other, no telling what damage they could do whilst I was asleep. :blink:

I have a small radius on all of these tools, otherwise you end up with these sharp nicks in the copper wire/ribbon you are forging. Remember to anneal often.Yes, you need to flatten progressively since my flatter is only 2" sq. and my copper is 12" long. I do have a rolling mill but it is over a hundred years old and needs to be set each time with feeler gauges since things are a little worn, it would save time to use it but I like to use the hammer, I really like moving metal under my hand, it brings great satisfaction. With care in forging and use of the flatter there is little need for use of the file and sanding except to clean the metal.

My wire starts at around 12" long and grows a bit longer and gets to be nearly 3/8" wide. My flater has a 2" square face that has been made flat, no curved face on this one any more like you see on some of them. The saddle just fits the width of the anvil and goes over both edges so you'll need to make one to fit your anvil. It, too, it is ground flat. As I forge the copper down it is important to keep the edge squared up and to try and keep the whole thing looking even. I was trying to help a fellow out who was trying to figure out how goldsmiths made wire and sheet before the invention of rolling mills and draw plates, he said that what some of them did was near impossible and I said that all it took was superior smithing skills. There are abundant examples dating to the beginning of metal working that show high examples of such drawing out skills so why wouldn't it be possible with our superior tooling today even without draw plates and rolling mill? It is just a learned skill like any other.

I forge my 10 gauge wire out flat by hand and can get a very uniform thickness and then only need to do a minimal amount of filing or sanding, I make use of a well polished flater and steel saddle on my anvil.

I don't know but those are kinda narrow strips to be stacking easily. May hap wider and shorter would work better and then draw then out if you need longer. A jeweler I know uses 1" w. X 2" l. with silver and copper and he gets good results on his ceramic soldering pad and steel bench block. For a heat source he uses and O/A with a rosebud tip. His usual layering is copper/silver/copper/silver/copper.

Paint just gives the rust a place to hide and work in a nice dark quiet place, just leave it exposed and maybe a light coating of oil. Work the other surfaces clean or use a wire brush either by hand or with power as others have suggested, avoid abrasives.

I get bored just sitting around with a hurting body so I travel the world by reading and looking at other folks adventures and whoever took these pictures sure had a nice visit to this place. I thought all you swordsmiths would enjoy this picture might give you some new ideas for some new metal. I found some for bronze swords but don't think I could handle a crucible full of that much hot metal, scary when you back is killing you but lots of cold worked ideas in this cache of pictures for other things too. Enjoy!

Better than a rock any day of the week, you got a wonderful anvil there!!!

I was looking at that flex shot also and was quite impressed with it too. I also notice the chickens in the background and how they went peacefully about their business knowing that they were safe from attack from marauding brigands, safely protected by that wonderfully wrought sword. :P

Having lived in the drier parts of the Southwest most all of my life I was somewhat amazed when in 2000 I flew back to Lexington, KY for a five day visit to see if I could adapt to a wetter colder climate that there was really such a little amount of forested area. It was pretty much a barren landscape that I flew over. Most all of my trips except one in 1978 have been by ground transportation and from the ground things can look pretty well covered with trees when they are taller than you but from the air you can see that the forested areas are those only are what can not be plowed or are needed to drain the water away. We have pretty much bladed, graded and plowed every thing east of the Mississippi River and a goodly portion west of said river. Yet we encourage other nation not to follow our example as we continue to buy their forests products in great quantities. All we need do is look at the devastation that has befallen the forests of the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and North America due to unrelenting pressure for wood products no matter if it be to make charcoal, just to burn as raw wood, or as building material to figure out that this kind of continued voracious appetites for raw materials can only take mankind so far before we have fouled our nest so bad it will have become unlivable for any our future generations.

The area that is now Saguaro National Monument was once covered with Foothill Palo Verdes but the charcoal burners cut them all down for fuel for the local copper miners. This deprived the saguaro's of nursery trees for future generations of new saguaros. One of the unintended consequences of clear cutting but not to be to harsh on the charcoal burners it was just not understood by them nor was it even part of the early nineteenth century mindset. I have been doing some reading on the Calcolithic Age in India and it seems that it and the true Bronze Age that followed also lead to the demise of the dense forests of the subcontinent. Once the forests started to go cereal cultivation started and then a population boom ensued which increased the demand for metal products, which lead to a demand for more charcoal. It was interesting to note that India seemed to get their metal technology from Southeast Asia rather than from the Middle East. During India's recent electrical system failure it was somewhat surprising, to me at least, to note that India had such large internal supplies of coal and yet was importing such quantities. I wasn't surprised that it was because of graft and corruption that the internal sourcing was so messed up. They are still working on a late Nineteenth Century mining system.

That's unusual, something that agrees with Thomas :P It didn't take long for kings to realize that the use of wood as a fuel was dangerous to the overall health of the forests. The phrase by "hook or crook" came about because it allowed the peasant to collect any deadwood they could reach with a hook or a shepherd's crook. If it was alive or higher than that it was against the law to harvest it. There were those however that were licensed to produce charcoal, after all the wealthy had to have their needs met. <_<

Nice job on the orchid! She'll love it.

http://www.claytoncr...ished/Iron2.pdf Here is a link to the pdf on on "What Caused the Iron Age" by C. E. Cramer, an interesting read also. The copper/bronze industry sure changed the ecology of the Eastern Mediterranean, the use of coal during the early industrial revolution and later has sure change the climate and the use of oil is changing our age. I have sure had a good day doing all this reading. I hope that you all are having a good time too. I met an old man who worked for the New York City Sanitation Department and he talked about the shipping of rail cars full of horse manure out of town for disposal along with dead horse that dropped in their traces being sent to be rendered. Ah, the good old days before gas driven automobiles. I'm looking for an article that I read about west central Africa and their Iron Age, no Bronze Age there, and how they destroyed their forests and left huge slag heaps smelting iron, in ever expanding rings away from the center of their culture until it collapsed. Also a good read.

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2005-10-25/peak-wood I wa s doing some reading on deforestation and how the Bronze Age accelerated it and how one fellow thought that this shortage of wood helped bring about the Iron Age and then another fellow added in how the Iron Age was on it's last legs until the discovery of the Americas and that now we are in another "peak", Peak Oil, it's all kind of interesting. Makes you wonder what's next for civilization, Peak Recycling?

Codes can be strange critters at times, here in Phoenix, AZ we have the 4" rule for fencing and for the most part it is OK. However some of my friends found out that their four year old grandson could scale the pool fence just fine by wedging his feet in between that 4" gap and grasping the uprights and just going up and sitting on the top rail and then dropping down to the pools cool deck and jumping into the pool. The kid thought it great fun to out wit his grandparents that way. To break him of doing that they wired stag horn cholla cuttings along the top rail of the pool fence.

Nice looking anvil you got there and a wonderful price too! Now build a forge and get some iron hot and start to clean that face and horn up with some hot forging. If you want to do some more cleaning than that use a wire brush, NOT a power grinder, you want to wear out your anvil out with work not abrasives. Have fun with that anvil, you'll be surprised how good it is for your dominate arm.

Me, I scrounged scrap to reuse in my projects, in the art world it's called "found objects", great fun that! No matter what you call it, it is good for the world to make use of material that is scrounged, salvaged, repurposed, reused, found or dare I say it acquired by less than authorized means.

Nicely done program, even my wife was interested in it, we must be going to have a wetter than usual winter for sure. I may need to name the next rescue dog after that sword if it is a male. Once again a well done program.

I like my hammers cheap and like Thomas I get them at yard, garage, tag and swap meets, that way I'm saving the environment by not having trucks using fuel and all that's associated with buying a new hammer. On the other hand I'm not spending a lot of money and helping the economy grow either. Any way if I get a used hammer it is in most cases better than many of the new ones and if I mess it up grinding on it well no big loss but most of the ones I have purchased have turned out to be pretty good tools. You just can't beat a couple of bucks or less for a head and then another few dollars for a handle and since you're a wood worker you could make your own. I have rounding hammers that have cost me anywhere from a $150, a Jim Keith, to$1 plus a remade use handle, and which did I prefer, the $1 hammer of course. Oh, the Jim Keith is a really nice hammer but it's handle is made for a man with a really tiny hand and the handle I put on the $1 Diamond Brand hammer came off a sledge hammer and fills the hand. I have reworked the faces on all my hammers to get rid of sharp corners, bad transitions and the like, those are just part of getting a hammer ready for work.