freeman

Thanks. I have to admit after the 2nd 3 hour session hammering away on this thing I've never wanted a power hammer (or a striker) more. The next one I do will definitely have a mild steel body with a tool steel bit, my hope being I won't have quite as rough a time shaping it.

Indeed they are sir, good spot. I've examined the shoulders on the pein in question and one is definitely in need of dressing. Must have missed a stroke at full power and mashed it on the anvil or something. Thanks for pointing that out.

That is truly a quality looking piece. Much better than my efforts to date!

Weird. I'm still getting an error whenever I try to attach a photo so I guess I'll have to add it inline. Pretty atrocious hammer marks on this one, but I'll take it given the sorry state of my tooling.

No fullers, no flatter, no striker, no problem! While it's definitely no work of art I learned quite a bit working on this. Unfortunately I can't seem to upload pictures at the moment. I'll try again later.

If only someone had taken me aside when I was a younger man and explained this simple concept...

Go to the cleaning supplies section of your local grocery store and pick up a box of 20 mule team borax if you can find it. Toss some in a steel can and set it close enough to your fire that it cooks down to a solid. Bust that up and use the resulting powder as your flux. Works like a charm.

Give it a try! The first attempt got away from me but the 2nd time around things went fairly smoothly. I used 1x1/2 bar stock for this pair, which is what I think they're using in the video. Next time I make a pair I think I'll try mild steel. The set I made is 4140 and I thought my arm was going to fall off by the time I was finished drawing out the handle.

My alter-ego is a white water kayaker. If you're looking at doing a rafting trip in the Gorge area get your money's worth and run the Gauley, just, whatever you do stay in the raft!

I'm not exactly in your neck of the woods but I drive through Morgantown at least six times a year during summer on my way up to the New River Gorge. That's beautiful country up there.

And it's kid-friendly ;)

DClaville & bigfootnampa, thank you both for posting! I've never used a drawknife myself. Based on what both of you have said it sounds like I've got a bit more finishing work left to do than I thought but it's worth the extra effort if the finished product works better. Mark, I didn't take measurements on the file before I started in on it. Due to the taper at the end of the file I was only able to sneak about 6 1/2" of workable blade. Smaller than I wanted but hopefully it'll work for my Grandfather. If not, I suppose I could try making another one with mild steel handles welded on if I can find another source of tool steel.

Update on this: After a failed experiment involving trying to fabricate a replacement spring from a hacksaw blade I decided to scavenge the spring out of my el cheapo harbor freight drill press. Works like a charm!

I tried fullering that groove by myself with a chisel style fuller and ended up making a mess. The leftover marks from that little experiment are hiding on the back side of the blade. After examining some historical and modern draw knives I've come to the conclusion that groove is optional. I think that it's more about reducing the overall thickness of the metal so there's less area to file/grind when sharpening, but that's just a guess.

I was visiting my Grandfather a few weeks ago and he mentioned wanting to make some axe handles and that he was having a hard time finding a decent drawknife. He'd picked up one at a farm auction a while back but it was missing handles and wouldn't take an edge. After examining the one he had I concluded that the blade was too worn to warrant reforging so I found a blueprint (thanks to Jay F. Knowlton for putting it together) online for making a drawknife dug up a rusty file out of my scrap pile and forged him a new one. I'm not quite done with the file work yet, once that's finished I'll heat treat and make some wooden handles to go on it.

That sounds like a fantastic piece. Do you have any pictures?

tl;dr: You aren't letting me down. I don't care what you do as long as you're having fun, you don't get any on me and you don't leave divots in my anvil. These kinds of questions have a tendency to pop up around activities where 1. people have a tendency to romanticize the activity 2. practitioners derive some (arguably inappropriate*) portion of their self-worth from said activity 3. available techniques have changed drastically in a short period of time My favorite example of this would be rock climbing. The climbing community has been split along arch-traditionalist lines since the 70's, with no end in sight. Without going into a whole lot of back story, the argument boils down to using portable protection in natural rock features vs placing expansion bolts at regular intervals to protect the climber from a fall. At the extreme ends this means climbing hundreds, if not thousands, of feet off the ground with sub-standard protection assuming sheer holding power and safety are your only metric. Many climbers have lost their lives (due to equipment malfunction and other accidents) due to adherence to a staunch traditionalist ethic. Fortunately, as blacksmiths the worst we're likely to encounter is catching the stink-eye from another smith at a hammer-in if our "ethics" don't match and the work shows it. One irony of this (and this is something blacksmithing has in common with climbing) is the overwhelming majority of the populace at large have no idea there's even an argument, much less an opinion on the subject. Given there are even smiths (and climbers) who don't much care about the traditionalist vs modernist debate, the total number of people on the planet that even care enough to have an opinion couldn't muster enough bodies to win a seat on my local school board, and that's assuming they all voted the same way. I have met arch-traditionalists that claim it's inappropriate to use any techniques that are historically inaccurate, typically without providing a hard cut-off date. If welders are declared off-limits, then that date must be some arbitrary point before 1881, when the arc welder was invented. Power hammers seem to be considered safe, so our cutoff must be after 1837, when Scot James Nasmyth invented the steam hammer. But what about materials? Is It disingenuous to throw out modern fabrication techniques but embrace modern engineered alloys? Should we all be using wrought as our primary material? As technology progresses, new tools and techniques have become available to every trade, metalworking included. Do we really believe that a smith working at a forge in 1885 wouldn't have used a mig welder if one was made available to him? Or a CNC milling machine for that matter? What about 3D sintered metal printing? There are concrete examples of purpose-built machines enabling process automation and increasing efficiency in the realm of blacksmithing dating back to the mid 1700's and Thomas Jefferson's nail factory at Montecello. Fast forward a few hundred years and there isn't a one of us that can compete on accuracy, part count per hour, or overall efficiency with purpose-built robotics. Clearly then this isn't an argument about efficiency. What does that leave? Aesthetics. So it appears to me that at worst you could be accused of producing unaesthetic work if you do a bunch of welding. Aesthetic taste being profoundly personal, this is hardly a damning accusation. Finally, since there is no objective definition of "Blacksmithing", no clearly defined rules, and no opponent the term "cheating" really can't be applied. "Cheating" implies some kind of unethical behavior taking place within the context of a contest of some kind. * You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your <snip> khakis.

So I was out in the shop this evening plinking away on bottle openers (this is what I do while I'm trying to decide what I'm doing) when I spotted a stack of 10 gauge sheet rectangles a friend had dropped off at my shop six months ago. At the time I didn't know what to do with them but they where an interesting shape so I tossed them on the pile and promptly forgot about them. I had recently read through an article on fold forming in an old blacksmithing mag I had lying around so I decided instead of getting into anything purposeful I'd do a little "free play" this evening and popped one of the sheets into the fire. After doing a few experimental folds and finding myself pleasantly surprised at just how organic the results where, I ended up with a partially folded plate that looked like it wanted to be a door knocker.

I picked up a new (to me anyway) drill press for the shop over the weekend. This is a very old, very heavy duty unit that's seen better days. When I got it, there was two coats of paint on everything, including the parts that shouldn't have paint on them. The wiring was so old the cable sheathing was flaking off in chunks. The handle for locking the bit depth was missing. The motor pulley was on upside down with the set screw jammed in the key way with no key in sight. And for the finale, the quill spring and any keepers that may have belonged in the spring housing was flat gone. I haven't managed to get all the paint off of the placards yet so no clue on the manufacturer or model. I've replaced the wiring, put the motor pulley back on the right way after fabricating a replacement key, and I'm in the process of stripping off all the old paint and repainting. All in all things are progressing nicely and I could have the unit running in 15 minutes. The only thing left to do to get it back to good is to replace that missing quill spring. I tried scavenging a section of spring from an old blown up chainsaw that was lying around, but the silly thing won't stay coiled in the housing. During those brief periods before it uncoils itself it doesn't have enough oomph to pull the drill back up into the housing, and this after I've buffed off the rust and lubed everything up real good. Given the age of the tool I'm pessimistic about finding pre-fabricated replacement parts. Any suggestions on getting a working quill spring?

Wow! Having done some armoring in the past I have to say that is an incredibly ambitious project. I can't wait to see photos of the finished results!

I don't want to hijack the thread but I'm curious where folks are sourcing their 15N20. My local metal distributor has no such animal on the books, is there a common supplier/source for this material?

That's pretty awesome, how do you get them into a bunch?

Nakedanvil's right. I found that out the hard way after making a set of round jawed bolt tongs. They work, but the 2nd pair I made had a v jaw (at Nakedanvil's suggestion) and they grip much better overall.

What kind of treatment do you typically use on grill implements to keep them from rusting?

Congratulations on your successful venture into toolsmithing! They won't win any beauty contests, but then again either would any of the sets of tongs I've made. If they're functional (and they certainly look functional) use then until they break or you make a better pair. There's something profoundly satisfying with bootstrapping your own tooling!