Ric Furrer

Thank you Ric

Another winner John.....send me a dozen in 1/4" size changes to try for a decade or so 1/4" to 3" should be good. http://www.iforgeiron.com/public/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif Ric

I suggest you go to the Metals Museum: http://www.metalmuseum.org/ and find a local smith/knifemaker through them...then have them show you welding. Ric

Next Grants tricked out set-up this is the slickest thing I have seen: Ric

Fe, Several things I have found useful. Keep the bar twice the length or maybe three times in this case. You would have had four bars...heat two at a time and work down the tapers. Set one away near a fan (or outside in the Winter) and keep the other on a table near the hammer. Heat the other two and do as before...comparing them to the one near the hammer for sizing. When those are done then cool the first two and flip the bar..forge as before. Repeat for the last two. no tongs and positive control via your hands....though more weight I think you may like the control. Cut the bars for upsetting (the extra steel in the middle will find a use at some point). Upset by bouncing the bar off the ground on a thick plate set on the ground for such a use. Use both hands and rotate the stock between bounces. I take a wide stance and pound more or less right in front on belt buckle bringing my hands to about head height and forcing down. You can loosen your grip a bit just before it hits to lessen the wear on your body. Be aware that on rare occasion the bar bounces higher than expected and can plonk you a good one. Reheat as needed and keep water near to cool areas as needed. Just as a reference...here is what a 265 weight hammer can do to 2 5/8 simple tool steel (W2). I have made better fitting tongs since this video. Ric

Full replacement of tools and shop building as well? Ric

Most of life is "maybe sometimes". Ric

Not so much a two part...my 3B has a depression cast in the foundation where the anvil sits on wood...the hammer sits on 2" of wood above and over the anvil.....4x8x4 foot deep....wish I had a bit more concrete under it actually. So... it is one monolithic pour isolated from the shop floor. If I had a 2B I would put the anvil on a leveling pad of urethane and bolt it to a 2" plate about 4x8 foot..set the hammer on "I" beam or "C" channel also on a stiff urethane pad and set that whole thing on the concrete with another pad under. It adds some weight, but now the whole tool can be lifted and moved rather easily. If you will do heavy use then cut out the floor and pour a pad...but i would still have the machine on a single bit of steel plate. Good luck with the rebuild! Ric

OR placing it in the spare forge with other large forging I just finished with a brick in the front so parts can not fall out and walk away..cause I do not have a safe place on the floor for hot things to cool (melted my tape measure the other day cause I simply set a bar down to cool without looking). Heat treating could be used to form austenite, but not as an end goal I would think...stopping just short and doing a spheroidized anneal maybe more useful if machining were the next step. With so much potential for secondary operations and the whole host of effects occurring during, at and after heat is applied one may think books could be written about it. Ric

Not theonly place I have wind Grant...would do it differently again or may trim down the dies at some point.............maybe its the lack of power in that last 1" that makes me want to have a 6B...want..not need. I get even less power when I drop in the swages and such which shorten he blow even more. However, Not much needs doing here in the shop that can not be done in another heat and I do have a certain comfort in knowledge that the ram will not bottom out. My dies were cut/milled from a bottom die block off a drop hammer...Finkl and Sons "FX" or "FX2" steel not sure which....if you have a large drop hammer place near you it may be worth a call for dies they no longer need...mine were used as is with no heat treating beyond what they were in their past life and they cut and machines fine. Have a look at the Finkl website and give a call. http://www.finkl.com/ Ric

I could take the same A series bar Grant, forge it down and cool it in a way that would NOT allow it to harden...still heat treating? Would ANY change from austenite to any other structure be heat treatment?..be that martensite or pearlite or any of the other "ites"? As to the 6" bar...once it got above 1250F you changed the crystalline structure...another 300F above that and a floor cool would have refined that grain. Forging from 6" to 3" does not guarantee the closing of center porosity....it makes it more likely, but by no means guaranteed. Some wonderful openness can survive that reduction due to force penetration and what exactly is moving. I do not think I could hit hard enough with my 3B or the 45 ton press I have to close up center holes in a 6" square (or round for that matter)...heat, die size and such come into play then as well as alloy and a whole host of other things. Working from the cast ingot is an odd thing as you know. Ric

I have die key chart, but not a die chart... send me an email and I can send that to you. ric (at) doorcountyforgeworks (dot) com You know that the ram has a tick mark for max extension....worse comes to worse I suggest you build the new dies a bit longer than that to allow for safety margin and die resurfacing over time. I think I made mine (3B) a full 1.5" longer than the line...could have done 3/4" and been fine I think. Ric

I would have to agree with Patrick. As an aside: Years ago in knife making the term "edge packing" in which a smith would take a low heat and work the blade with many light blows to "pack the edge" and beat the "molecules closer together" for a stronger edge. Besides the fact that metal has no molecules the reality is one can not make a solid more solid unless there is space to get rid of (as in Patricks example of reducing porosity in a casting). What IS being done is that it may be the first time that smith has bothered paying attention to the temperature and by working near the low side of forging he is bringing the blade just into austenite phase and allowing it to cool ... in doing this several times the smith has normalized the blades and this thermal-cycling just above austenitic and then to black heat has allowed the steel to refine its grain and equal out stresses from forging...the hammer blows are insignificant at that point metallurgically speaking...though he may be removing his hammer marks...or putting new ones in...who knows. So...in the case of edge packing you have grain refinement and normalization being done under the guise of forging....heat treatment being done without knowing about it. Ric

Hi Todd, Have you had a look at "nail making anvil" on google? If you were to make many of these you would have had special tooling and sized stock to sit that tooling. I am sure if all were set up to do this a one heat nail would be a quick simple thing for you. The issues we have is that our tooling is general because we do not do A certain activity all the time..if we did then we would have a more or less permanent set-up for that operation. As Bigfoot says...a spike is different from a nail and if you go larger I do not think the forge gods would mind several heats. I have seen cutlery anvils where the "anvil", such as it is, would be very long and tall and have maybe four transitions and shaped hardies on top...all in place all the time (think drop hammer with die stages)...the smith/billet moves progressively down the anvil as the blade is worked. We all do things we should not do..from hitting cold iron to leaving the hardy in to whatever.....sometimes the job requires that to be so and other times we are taking risks with no benefit (or worse...risks with not idea that they are risks). I think your doing fine and should worry more about the price of tea in China or if it will rain tomorrow and less on how many heats it takes to get to the center of a nail-pop. Ric

I have posted a photo here: http://www.doorcountyforgeworks.com/Wanted.html click on the photo for a larger shot. 64,000 pound gross weight..she is not a light tool. I have several Nazel/Lobdell literature brochures in PDF form....been thinking about posting them as a downloadable file on my website. I would not mind hosting some other hammer related literature which is out of copyright and would be useful to the wider world. Should anyone have anything they wish to distribute I will scan it and send the originals back. Ric

No and neither is throwing it on the floor to cool after forging. But Oddly enough...heating it up to very low forging temperature and doing nothing but watching the color drain away...IS.... a form of heat treatment used to refine grain...riddle that one out. One definition I found was this: "A process where solid steel or components manufactured from steel are subject to treatment by heating to obtain required properties, e.g. softening, normalising, stress relieving, hardening. Heating for the purpose of hot-working as in the case of rolling or forging is excluded from this definition. " Obviously a term used for all metals and some ceramics and glasses as well as baked goods such as bread, but....its a start. Why do you ask Frank? Another book? Ric

That would look rather good in titanium...with bronze or copper accents. Ric

Hello All, Has anyone seen a Nazel type C for closed die work? Know of one for sale? Ric

Society Insurance in Fond du Lac, WI I have the shop and contents covered as well as all my product to, from and at shows..some tool coverage for installs. Standard aggregate for 1 Mil, plus some other features. Just under $2,000 per year...and increasing 10% per year for three past years. They cover some teaching in shop. No issues with knives/swords. Got a quote from another company (forget the name) for $5,600 or so for the same coverage. The Hartford several years ago was more expensive, but I'll try again. ABANA was to have a policy carrier as well, but I have not looked into it. State Farm will not do blacksmith shops. Ric

I do not think that titanium or Ticarbide would move across the interface and bond with the steel surface given the conditions of the powder/torch method...one needs a bit more technology for that to occur. I do recall my teacher, Paul Marx, saying some 20 years ago that he used such case hardening products and when the "Right to Know" law came out in the 1970's the compound stopped working. It took them a few years to get it to work again....his belief was that they removed the cyanide which was the energizer for the carbon uptake into the steel surface. Without an energizer (barium works as well and perhaps the Potassium salt) the carbon migration is slower so you need more torch time at temp. The difference between this and typical cementation (i.e. blister steel or gas cementation used in industry now with dry cracked ammonia) is the time and complexity of the technique. I would see no reason that this would not work, but as has been stated...the carbon rich layer is very thin due to the short time of heating....if you soak the tool in the powder inside a box in your forge you could get the carbon to go all the way through a 2" square bar...but that is not the point of this powder. All things being equal it may be best to just use better steel for the job to start out and give it a proper heat treatment. I believe that Rob Gunther Super Quench may be a good choice of A36 structural steel for quickie chisels, jigs and such in the shop...though I did quench some higher carbon A36 (one never knows what A36 is chemically as the designation is for PSI yield and not chemistry) in that once and it did not go so well. Ric

I would wager that they do not do this, but one can take 1050 and get it to 28RC and then quench to 55 easy....I would think they are using "mild" steel with little carbon to begin with though. I would have used a larger hardness tester. It is a case hardening compound..one of many on the market. They used to contain harmful chemicals, but maybe today they have found a safer way to do this. Ric

Greg, I learned from a teacher (Paul Marx) at MATC near the Oscar Meyer factory. The school bought all the equipment and for a time had the classes going. I would call there and see if they still run the "forging" class one night a week. I t was a struggle later on to keep eight folk coming once a week...the program may have died...not sure. Paul retired and sold the equip to the school..then the class was taken over by a few other smiths who taught...maybe the college wishes to begin it again? It was an evening class once a week for three hours...nice opportunity to tip toe into the craft. I took the classes while at UW-Madison. That said...join UMBA and fins locals who have a shop. Go to meetings and ask for anyone interested in having you come to their shop and learn or help or what not. Ric

I understand what you are trying to say Randy, but solid phase welding is quite a bit more complicated than hot and cold, but I may have had more issues with the technique than most. Certainly when starting out you need to keep the concepts, explanations and techniques simple, but at some point discussions of angstrom distance, interface diffusion, oxide films, forgeability related to yield strengths and such come into play. Such things are far from simple...at least in my experience. Ric

Do you have a name? I donated the gas forge at UW-Platteville Engineering Dept... Prof. Kyle Metzloff is a friend of mine...known him for 19 years or so. I corresponded a bit with the Art Dept there, but never really came to anything. They have a coal forge. I know of Pat....we may have met once..I forget now...we have corresponded a bit though. I am about 140 miles East of you. Ric

You are welcome to my shop in Sturgeon Bay for a few hours and I can walk you through the basics of a forge-weld....but first I need to know who you are and some background on what you have been doing in smithing. I have spent much time in helping others only to have them drop the craft shortly after...i would rather put my energies and time toward those who will stay active in the trade. I just did a demo for UMBA at a meeting in South Beloit where I did a fair bit of forge-welding...I would think there are smiths in your area...they may be a better resource than I given the distance. Ric