Michael

The wagon axle drama struck me as odd as well. Great looking scrap pile there!
A little neat though.

You'll be fine! That feeling will completely turn around when you sell out everything you brought before half the day is done.

These are some of the horsehead openers that I do, starting with 1/4 by 3/4 stock.

Recently figured out a kind of clothes dryer exhaust/leathery sort of smell in the smithy, after I've been working a while and the anvil's warm to the touch.  Turns out the live oak stump is toasting a little, from tongs and tools laid beside the anvil and just the accumulation of hot scale,

took a while to figure this one out, thought I was smoldering my apron for a while there.

I don't really get the working on the ground part, unless its a very pre industrial forging setup or the long forge is for heat treat on longer blades. For occasional use heat treating swords, that would be fine but for regular forging use all that squatting and stooping is going to get old.  Starting out on my sixth decade I like everything in the smithy at about anvil height: Tools, forge, vise table, swage block...even my quench tub is raised up off the floor.

Forge you have is beautiful! love those wide steel wheels

Second on the ATF/Acetone combo! It's freed up some really rusted stuck wheels for me.

Nice work, I like it. I would go for a bit less neck on the bug, but you got the head nice and round, could you double that and have two big round eyes? 

Ask a four year old. Darryl Nelson, who does a lot of animal heads, has a 4 year old rule. "When a 4 year old can tell what it is, you're done!".

Got one handy? 

As to what to do with it, back pile. Can't say how many practice hooks, leaves etc are on bars too long to scrap and too short to go back in the stock rack.

That looks great! Plumb to the floor is overrated on something like a post vise. Should roll around the shop to where you need easily with the vise right in the middle.

Yes, but a little loud over the horn!

104 lb Peter Wright, found in Oakland, CA for just under $3/lb and I'm thinking I was lucky to get it for that.

No picture.

Nice find! My local scrap yard keeps steering towards more aluminum and copper, radiators and window frames and less and less steel, drops, plate etc.

Nice work on the elephant head! Where did you pick up your chiseling technique?  I just watched Freddy Rodriguez at a CBA conference work much the same way making troll and dragon heads.

Nice, love the very SC display napkin! need to make a slot punch.

I took a Brian Brazeal class a few months ago and he described how they did the hardy holes in the striking anvils we used.

They were 1 inch hardy holes, the steel blocks were about 5x7, 2 inches thick. According to Brian, they drilled the hardies with a 7/8 bit cold, then got the blocks nice and hot in the gas forge (that took a while I'm sure) and drifted them square with a 1 inch square drift, made of some hot work steel. I don't recall the alloy they used, but only having to go a 1/16th wider, you could probably get by with a high carbon drift if you were only doing a single striking anvil.

When I needed the wedge for my larger post vise, dug around in the scrap bucket and found the very first piece of metal I ever forged in my brake drum forge on the 75lb section of I-beam anvil.

as said above, a section of wood will give you the rough dimensions to match with a metal wedge, leave it long on both ends, and don't throw away anything you've forged, you never known when it will come in handy

A half a BBQ chimney of charcoal as a coal starter works great! it takes 10 or 15 minutes for the charcoal to get going, great time to get set up, (in my case, pull out the anvil and uncover the tools, fill the slack tub, get out the fire extinguisher etc)

Haven't been grilling all that much lately so its been scrap wood cut into kindling and shavings to start the fire.

It took me close to 3 years of forging with coal to get to the point that I understood the use-the-leftover-coke-from-the-last-fire-to-start-the-next-one tip.  Years of burning charcoal had gotten me in the habit of burning my fire down to nothing, doing final little heat 'n finish type of work.

Used to only burn coal on weekdays, when everyone in the neighborhood was at work, but its gotten pretty easy to get a mostly smokeless fire going now.  Shut down of the fire is just shoveling the burning coal/coke onto the forge table and letting it go out in 10 or 15 minutes.  Lots of fuel to start the next fire.

Now I'm getting used to finding, fishing out and working around clinker.

Nice, love the mini door knocker style.

Thanks Rashelle, that's a good idea. I was thinking I needed to keep the spike square ended, upset just below the candle cup, make a tenon and then, maybe while heating with a torch, upset the spike above the candle cup and finally point it. 

Monkey tool sounds easier, got some 5/8 drill rod that will do the job perfectly.

The new Coal Bin is here! The new Coal Bin is here!

Got a deal on splitting a 500 pound coal order with a friend, 5 50 pound bags of Elkhorn on top of the 100 lbs already in a plastic trash can on the patio.  The bags are bio degradable and disintegrate, from the bottom up, (DAMHIKT-Don't Ask Me How I Know This). I'm fine with a large pile of coal on the patio but  the family not so much. Piled it into the wheel barrow and parked under cover while looking for a bin or materials to build one. Funny how often you find you need the wheelbarrow when its full of coal.

On one of many trips to the building materials recycling place, having passed on $25, 55 gallon drums painted decorator colors, found what I have to assume is the top 2 feet of a heavy plastic bin of some sort, $3.  Screwed some scrap 2x2 to the bottom edge, weathered scrap fencing nailed across the 2x2 and sawn off and the bin has a bottom. An old pallet in an out of the way corner of the yard and the coal has a place now.

Bin size is a perfect fit for an oil drip pan as a cover even. Cheap, used scrap and pallet wood and I got my wheelbarrow back.

 

Its just a 6 inch piece of angle iron, with 6 cuts in it. a half inch from each end, both sides of the angle iron, almost to the middle, and one inch from each end, on one side of the angle iron. Hardest part was getting it to sit level

Tony Austin's Real Nice Business Card Holder from the January 2004 BAM newsletter.

looking at the plan I made the cuts twice as wide as directed, no wonder it looks like a couch!

Wife and daughters were out dress shopping Saturday, so I was able to get a good 4 hours of forging in at the backyard smithy.  

Trip to the scrap yard first was a little sad. Still plenty of bar stock, even octogonal steel, but the rack of drops, plate and the odd machine tool have been replaced by recyclable alumimum and copper.

I get most of my project ideas from the online files of various smithing groups newsletters and all three of these projects came from that source, mostly BAM if I recall correctly.

Business card holder from angle iron, more sawing and bending than hammering. The woodworking friend said it looks Greene and Greene, the daughter said it looks like a couch.

Tree hooks for a friend who has a cabin in Big Bear, CA, And since EVERYTHING up there is bear motif, I thought some trees might be a nice change of pace.

Finally a candle trammel that's been on the list for a while.

Learned a few things-the bottom whole the rod slides thru doesn't need to be a tight fit-the adjustment holes need to all be pretty square to the plate and the same size-the hook on the rod needs to bend a little past 90 degrees to hold well, and you need to upset the rod the candle cup sits on BEFORE you bend it round and rivet the cup on.

Still trying to figure out to to both rivet the candle cup AND leave a spike to hold the candle.

thanks for looking

That vise is a saw vise, for sharpening handsaws.  No reason not to use it for knives I suppose.  Great finds, especially that swage block, and the big cone mandrel. You don't see those out West too often.