Bentiron1946

Is that a form stake? Interesting use of common materials found around the house I'd say.

I just don't think it's a good idea to go messing around with a crucible, it holds molten metal and having seen them break full of metal you just don't want to mess with them. So what I'm going to suggest is making you furnace taller to take the taller crucible. A taller furnace isn't likely to get you into trouble as fast as a broken crucible and is a lot less work and safer in the long run. Just don't mess with the crucible.

Nice looking tree, good to see there are non worthy of hanging there, no horse thieves or traitors there. You did good for sure.

I have some square copper windings, about 3/8", that were covered with a thin layer of fiberglass and I put them through the fire. It need annealed anyway so I brought them up to a dull red to anneal and the fiberglass just curled up and fell off in little globs. Then I could forge it out into flatter pieces. It sure took a toll on my poor back but it made some nice bracelets.

I have used "black pitch" it's hard compared to the "red pitch" and I have used brown microcrystalline wax to hold some of my jewelry projects, it pretty nice and inexpensive. There is a company that makes a "pine pitch" up in the Pacific Northwest that is coming into favor with some folks as it has a more pleasant smell, is less flammable than the traditional "black pitch" and is made from a renewable resource rather than a by product of the petrochemical industry.

It's nice to see all the photos of the work progression, it helps in get the process down. You workmanship is really good and has improved from first to last. Thanks so much for sharing with us. You done good!

Maybe good he is doing that. It has a hardface on it that looks kinda funky to me, just something off about the whole anvil. Like maybe it's a cast iron anvil with a hardface added on later. You just wouldn't know until, as you say, "felt it up" in person. Wait for another to come along that doesn't have that funky feeling to it, you know like a really nice Fisher.

I have done lost foam but I just don't like the stink and all the soot so having done and seen what it's like I just don't do it, there is enough crap in my lungs the way it is. It is nice to carve the blue foam though and then use resin bonded sand and then pry the foam out. That way you have the ease of working in foam and you don't have the stink and soot of pouring into foam. At the iron pour this year Adrian Wall ( www.adrianwall.com ) did that in an open face mold and it turned out really good. He is such a talented stone carver and this was his first adventure into cast iron and was pleased with the result.

Please don't use a grinder on the face, wear the face away with actual work not abrasives. I like the vinegar idea a lot better for removing the rust than taking a flap wheel to it, that way you are only removing the rust not any metal. Then if you still need some more aggressive work put a wire brush on you angle grinder, still no metal removed just crud. Nice looking anvil.

Folk ask me from time to time if I'll sell my 300# Fisher and I always say "Yes" and then I get the offer of a life time, $0.50/#. When I sell it the price will be more like $3/# and that sounds reasonable to me but they keep hoping for a bargain. I paid $0.50/# in 1978 for it. Why would sell it for that now? Harold bought my second anvil for $2/# and didn't bat an eye, made me wonder if my ask was too low he jumped on it so fast.

Had to tell with all that paint on there, let it go, there will be another one that you can tell what is what.

In the past forty plus years I have made a half dozen melting furnaces using common fire brick as a furnace lining using fire clay as a mortar for the bricks. I cast a bottom in the water heater 4" to 6" thick of a 1/3-1/3-1/3 mix of fire clay, silica sand and portland cement, then start my courses of brick up the inside. A standard fire brick is 8-7/8" x 4-3/8" x2-3/8" or there abouts. I stand them on end with the narrow 2-3/8" face out, looking down you see a 4-3/8"x 2-3/8" rectangle with the 2-3/8" face toward the fire side. This will give you adequate insulation, still don't expect to be able to put you hand on the outside it will still be very hot. Now for the lid I so the same third/third/third mix as a monolithic pour. Sometimes the hardest part of building a melting furnace is finding and old water heater. Be sure and leave a hole near the bottom for the burner and place a half of fire brick for the crucible to rest on. Oh, nearly forgot, I make a plaster of fire clay and silica sand and coat the entire inside of the furnace. After a few firings this will take on a glassy appearance. Typically this lining will last about 6 to 8 years before you need to replace it, it will last longer if you replaster it yearly.

That first one looks to be in pretty good condition. It is also of wrought iron with a tool steel face plate. It is of much older pattern when anvils were shorter and less graceful, look more like a Mouse Hole style.

Each has it's appropriate application in industry. For myself it is like this I don't want to forge a bronze sculpture with the artist's fingerprints in it, for that I would cast it by the lost wax method. I can't cast a patterned welded steel blade, for that I would forge it. See you use what is appropriate for the application. Casting is just wonderful for some items and not so good for others and forging is wonderful for some techniques and not for others. Ruger has been manufacturing guns using the lost wax method for decades using cast steel parts and they make wonderful parts that wear well and function as designed. The same parts could be made by forging and then machining but with casting there is much less work to be done. So which is better casting or forging? It depends on the application.

Nice little shop and so well organized, mine never was so neat as that, and I like your hammer rack too.

I, too, have a Diamond rounding hammer and used it for the first two years of my smithing Odyssey and then sought out a cross peen hammer and that took awhile, then used a 6# sledge for a few years and finally settled on a 3# cross peen of no name made in Japan, but I used it all the time, every time I had the fire light. It wasn't any worse in my hand than my $125 Jim Keith cross peen and it only cost $0.50 for the head and a $1 for the handle, I made the wedge. Maybe I should polish it up and use it on my jewelry I'm making now. It's not always the cost of the hammer but the years of skill behind it that make the difference.

http://www.museumsecrets.tv/dossier.php?o=145 A friend sent this to me and wanted to know what I thought of it? I didn't have much comment on it, do you all have any?

What a question, yes, I like all your ideas, make one each way and since I like rivets make three little pigs that a way and a wolf and a little brick house too. Sounds like a fun project. If you don't do the rivets really tight you can make the legs move on all the critters.

Horn or no horn you can still forge on it, even in that condition it is still a working anvil, maybe not the best but you can make first class art on it.(or crack walnuts if you want)

DK, I started out doing bronze casting and migrated into blacksmithing. I, too, started out with only hammer and anvil but found out that I could only make so many sculptures in the 12" to 36" range before I needed more help and that hiring an apprentice/helper was more expensive than buying a power hammer in the long run. So I searched out and bought a LG25# hammer, now I was able to go much bigger and do it faster. There is a limit to how much your body can take in terms of doing it by yourself. Even Danger Dillon probably started out doing small forged sculpture and then got bored with that and eventually moved up to the really big time steam hammers. Tom Joyce of Santa Fe has a similar arc of creativity in his forging history, started small and ended up doing very large work under rented time with industrial hammers of extreme size. My friend Michael Anderson of Phoenix has had similar experiences, small to very large and then to fabricated works to mimic the forged look. My arc had now gone to doing very small forged copper and brass works that can be worn by the client, my body is shot. The sooner you get a hammer the longer you can extend your working years.

I think that's what I was trying to say when I put in the ".410" which is not a gauge but a diameter. I was out hunting as a teenager and this other idiot put his .410 barrel down into the stream to shoot a turtle, his barrel didn't make it but the turtle did. The end of the barrel was somewhat larger than .410 after that! Have fun making your shot mould.

Yeah, you got to know what size barrel you got first before you can make a ball for you barrel but for shotgun pellets just about any size that is .30 will do for 00 buckshot. You can then put the buckshot in a heavy paper patch that will fit down your shotgun barrel. I don't know if you are using a percussion or flint but you can make up the cartridges before hand. Before the age of making swaged shot they used to use drop towers where molten lead was poured through iron plates to form droplets of lead and it would form into spheres as it cooled and dropped and would land in water at the bottom. It was a pretty good system but long discontinued now. The gauge system is supposed to be based on the number of round balls that can be made from a pound of lead, i.e., 12 gauge= 12 balls, 16 ga,= 16 balls and so forth, the only gauge that is not that way is the 410, it is .410 for the barrel diameter. I think the smallest gauge is 32, that a lot of balls from a pound lead. There are some that are smaller but I think for the most part are totally obsolete now, I have seen .22 smooth bore shotguns from after WWI made for the Boy Scouts to use inside for trap shooting.

I like what Ptree had to say, safety gear is just the starting point of being safe. At the recent iron pour I was attending one of the rules is if you are pouring you need to have on leather boots. Well one guy had on leather boots all right but more suitable for a night out on the town rather than molten iron. I suggested that he something a little sturdier on and he "thought" these would be good enough. I found the pour director and he got the safety lecture about what molten iron would do to his boots and he got an appropriate pair of boots to wear. He had some iron spill on the top of one boot when they were botting the furnace and it just rolled off the boot, left a burned trail but didn't go through. He did thank me afterwards but when I turned him in for not having the right gear on he was sure PO'd about it. The safety gear didn't really cause your problems, sure you got tangled up in them, but the problem was all the distractions around you. If you want to demonstrate to family just stick to simple things like drawing out a taper, that kind of thing. I've done stupid things too, like heating up a piece of steel till it's like a sparkler and then hitting it hard. Real showy but I got to buy a lot of new tee shirts for the kids standing nearby and it sure got the moms all a flutter from the scorched cotton. What a mistake, the kids were in awe though. About a half dozen kids with splatter burns on the tummies and chests, moms sure are protective aren't they?

I made a half dozen small fish out of copper, about 3" long, this past year and then made a copper stringer for them to go on. It was a big hit at he iron pour, then I gave out the six fish to friends that I may not see again for a long time. I riveted on the fins for added dimension.

Aside from the general lack of social skills my wife soon taught me to blow my nose in a Kleenex twice before going out the door to church because no one wants to see the black boogers during communion.