Bentiron1946

Or just ''forget about it'' as the wise guys like to say...... B).........................I concur with MacBruce

I was thinking, all right, he gets a blade and an eye patch all from one stint at the forge, a real pie rat at heart. Looks like a good weed whacker. :P

He sure dose have a working museum there and his work is a credit to the craft. I bow before him.

Nice big hammer. "got shirt??" That reminds me of my friend Jose in fourth grade, kept getting his hands smacked with a ruler for misspelling shirt, did it five times finally I leaned over and told him to put an "r" in it and he'd stop get his hands beat. I hated that teacher, she was mean as all get out.

I think they are still sitting there in the yard, want me to check? I haven't been down there forever.

Nice tombstone, mine is still working great. bought it in '72 and it'd take more than $50 to get me to part with it but probably not when I'm dead and gone for my family though.

Very nice looking! I really like the look of the wrought iron fittings, that's my kind of thing that texture and pattern. The blade is very nice too but that wrought iron is a knock out for sure.

"I did have a small problem forging yesterday, at one point forging on some 3" square I found myself wishing I had a bit more power! " See, you should have bought one of my 1,500# Niles-Bemment-Pond hammers for sure. They went for little more than scrap prices here in town with a cylinder rebuild kit for one of them. Reading all this sure depresses me, I hate my state of health as my "big hammer" is a one pounder! :P

Strange, when I first saw that I was thinking shovel also, great minds do travel in the same rut. When my lived in Florida as a young woman she told me the skeeters were big enough to suck a cow dry of blood and then pick up it's bell, then hid in the trees and lure the farmer in by ringing it and drain him of all his blood too. I think you may be able to take a swing a skeeter that size with a spatula that size! Nice job on the handle.

I like the sound of ventilating with a .22-250. Only problem with that is once I started ventilating I might forget to stop :D

If you finish filling in your profile and let us know what general part of the world you are located in perhaps we can hook you up with a local founders group and/or individual. I reinvented the wheel for myself, well more or less, see I went to the library, preinternet days, and got books on how the ancients did and went from there but now there is the internet to connect us all together so if you can give us a location it may help us hook you up. Casting is such a glorious thing to do, it just "lights your fire" so to speak. I never got tired of the pour. There is something special about the transformation from a solid, well kind of solid, to a liquid back to a solid. I'm just total hooked on metal, something that comes from a rock and is turned into a useful object. That's the wonder of us smiths, we get to be a part of that process, we made(and make) civilization happen.

Look forward to seeing more progress photos.

With many more years of casting behind me than in front of me I would suggest that you follow FeWoods advice and practice with some very easy to work with silicon bronze it will get you off on a very positive note in the fine art of casting. I started off trying to use scrap plumbing fixtures and boy was that an attempt at failure, off gassing, no pyrometer to check if I had the metal hot enough to pour, cold molds, just lots of ignorance about casting. However I guess it was all good experience doing it the wrong way because I sure learned how to do it the right way over time. Bronze age swords were usually cast in stone molds or in clay molds where there was a wax model on the inside that was burned out, the same for axes, daggers, spear heads and arrowheads. Once the Iron Age came along it was the start of the ascendancy of the blacksmith and the forging of these items for wrought iron instead of cast bronze. I not saying that there was no wrought bronze but most of it was cast except for helmets, shields, jewelry, cooking utensils. Quite a number of very large cauldrons were of forged bronze and then the sheets of bronze riveted together. This was an age when the metalsmith was nearly as magical as the shaman and held in high regard in the community. He held the secrete of turning stone into metal, now that is magic! Anyway it is easier today to buy your bronze already made up in ingots from a major supplier than to try to make it yourself. I have done it and it doesn't take any specialize equipment, just a means of melting the metal and a means of getting the proportions correct. You will learn as you go on how to do it. Be careful as molten is unforgiving if you are careless, it will burn a hole clean through you in a nanosecond so wear you leathers, face shield and head covering and sturdy leather boots and tape up the laces so no little glob of metal can get in there, you'd be surprised how long it takes to get your boots off with a glob of metal the size of a BB burning the inside of your boot.

Nice score on the eBay stuff and at the scrap yard too. Looks like some old shovel handles in there too. Way to go! :P

"Sadly my toddler has started copying them..." Had a similar problem when my kids were crumb crushers too and I had to start feeding the cat on top of refrigerator otherwise his bowl was always empty. Johnson's Paste Wax is pretty good for non-food items, Renaissance Wax is good but is it ever expensive so I just plain brown noncrystalline wax that I use for lost wax casting on non-food items it cheaper just not as refined a RW. I still like carbonized linseed oil finishes on iron work it seems to last a long time. I never made all that many food use items to worry about what to use on them.

I wonder the other day when it hit the coast if all the smiths down in the path of the storm were OK. There are still a lot of smiths in the path of the storm that could be hit with flooding and other storm relater damage. I hope and pray that all turns out well, God bless them everyone.

During that transitional period in the homeland of the Norse before they were forced to become Christian by the king they were often of both faiths in the same household. I do have a problem with forced conversion, that just ain't proper you know. I don't care for that at all it must be of your own volition or not at all for it to work. I have seen that far to often in history for me to have any desire to have a part of that. I don't care what the religion it is or politics for that matter, just ain't right. Nice old mould, thanks for posting it.

Over the years I have seen these vises in sizes that range from 2" jaws up through 6" jaws and they are the precursor to our modern bench vise. I don't think that the little ones are all that rare as they were something that an individual could buy to clamp to his kitchen table to some small work on and the types of work that a jeweler/watch maker would do would have used a much more precision vise than this. These were the 18th and 19th century version of a Harbor Freight vise not a Wilton. Here's an itty bitty one in Hungry that's for sale on eBay with only $9 shipping http://www.ebay.com/itm/ANTIQUE-BLACKSMITH-VISE-MINIATURE-/271046777259?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3f1ba599ab

When you are filling up a flask the size of garbage can you need to use a power mixer, it ain't no jewelry project for sure. I could have used a vacuum pump but I didn't have three phase at the time to run one big enough for to vacuum a flash that big. When you're pouring a hundred plus pounds of molten bronze you want it to come out as clean as possible. One of the things that vacuuming does besides get rid of bubbles is boil off the water. In a vacuum it boils at a lower temperature so it gets gone and makes the burn off go faster to, save time and speeds that up to. If you surround your investment with the steel flask you don't need to worry so much about explosions. I went up to one of the junior colleges and the professor was just turning out pure junk for the students when it came to casting their projects and he challenged me to do a better job than he, he had a MFA and I didn't. So I set to work, he used cardboard boxes for his flasks, quarter inch sprues everywhere and just a whole forest of them, while I used a steel flask much larger sprues and fewer of them but all of them in the right places but the really big difference was burnout time. He only melted the wax out while I totally eliminated, all of it! I burned until the pouring cup was white, all the wax had been carbonized, nothing was left. I can burnout anything that is organic, wood, bone, wax anything that will burn can be eliminated from the mould with enough time and this professor was only just melting so that some of it ran out. When the molten metal would hit it, EXPLOSION, molten metal every where, no wonder his student assistants had to wear full fire suits. When it can time for me to pour all I wore was tee shirt, jeans and sneakers, not the best idea but I knew my mold was safe, no wax or moisture. The professor thought I was just lucky, I knew better. His students started coming to me to have their waxes poured into bronze. Two things make a good pour, good burnout and good sprueing, oh yeah there are other factors like having your metal hot enough but get those first two right and you are going to have a better chance. Remember metal in, air out.

Glad to hear that he is doing well. I had a good friend have a six bypass and it sure changed how he feels about life. Lots more energy! He can actually do something without feeling fatigued. May God bless your recovery. Jerry

Nice looking chains, is that Viking weave or knit? Looks really good. One of my son's friends wanted me to make a Thor's Hammer but I feel that as a follower of Christ it is something I should not be making but that is sure nice workmanship you all got going there.

No, shell is whole different process from what I am suggesting. I mix up a small batch of investment to a creamy consistency and paint it on with a brush. When you mix it by hand you get very few bubbles and when you paint it on you burst the bubbles. This way you have a pretty good chance of having a fair chance of have an easy job of chasing the finished casting. I let this set until it is pretty well set before I pour in the rest of the investment so it doesn't wash off. I use schedule 40 steel pipe cut offs as casting flasks much like one would use for centrifugal casting machines but mine a much larger, 6" through 24". I mostly use the smaller sizes since my spinal injury some years ago I just can't lift the big flask empty let alone full and my current oven will only take a 14"dia. X 14" H. flask, kind of small but I can crowd in three 6"dia. flasks. I have a home made recipe for investment that works fairly well, does crack a bit though, 1/3 Plaster of Paris, 1/3 hydrocal, 1/3 silica sand, water, mix till about like a thin milk shake, then pour into flask. I usually put a ring of dry P of P around the outside of flask and only pour in about an inch of the investment in about an half hour before I mix up the big batch of investment. This seals the flask so you don't end up with liquid investment running all over the floor. You have all ready placed you waxes on the floor and stuck them down so that they fit inside the circle of the flask, they will be held in place with this one inch of investment and held steady when you pour in the large batch of investment. Fill the flask right up to the top and place a piece of hardware cloth just under the surface of the liquid investment, this will help prevent breakout during the pour. Let set for and hour and then put in burnout oven. Start out with a low temperature for a couple of hours, say 200F, then bump it up to 400F for four hours, 600F for four hours, then 1,000F until there is no more black in the pouring cups, when the black is gone shut down burn out and let cool to 400F. While oven is cooling to 400F start melt of metal, when metal is ready to pour get flask out of oven and pour metal, let cool and do break out, sand blast, cut sprues and finish casting. Sounds like a lark.

One of the discussions we used to have in my "high" art classes was about the art of the so called "savages", the primitive man, was his high art better or more advanced than our high art? It was all a rather supposed deep philosophical discussion according to the Phd leading the subject but I thought at the time that perhaps their "high" art was a whole lot better than what some of folk were turning out. I was having a hard time with a black square painted on a red background with a white line through it as being high art while looking at a primitive mask that was really just fly and funky in its weirdness or Albert Paley's Running Fence, makes you want to go out and put one around your yard but is it any better than a "savages" fence? I just never wanted to paint that black square on a red background with a white line through it on my house somehow but I wanted to make a mask.

I have done a fair amount of lost wax casting with and without the benefit of vacuum and if you paint your wax with investment first you can skip all the that use of vacuuming. You will not get nary a bubble on your finished product. It ain't at all hard to hit the sprue ifing you put a pouring cup on the end of the sprue like you supposed to. And there is no preheating the mould ifing you take it from the burnout oven directly to the pour. Yes, there can be some expense for making a rubber mould but I have had some success plaster moulds for simple objects without undercuts, just don't forget to soak them in water and lubricate with liquid soap. Casting has been around for a long time and it sure ain't rocket science or brain surgery so go get some books and make a detailed study of it and you too can be a foundryman and make successful casting with minimal equipment.

"art is something that inspires people".........I don't know that this is always true or needs to be. Sometimes it is just there to fill a blank wall or add a focal point to a garden and nothing more than that. I sure don't think my art inspired anyone, I sure ain't no Michelangelo or Michael Moore, I use art as a way to get some of the objects that clutter my mind out of it. Is doodling a high art form, low art form or even art at all? Perhaps that all I'm doing, making big doodles in steel. They don't need to inspire anyone at all.