Thjoth

OK, so here are some updated pictures. I have to say it looks a lot better on the outside...you can also see how much water gets into the place, although this is a bit less than usual for some reason, especially considering the torrential rainfall we've had for the last two days. I also took a picture down in the pit (third) so you can see that now. I'm not too far out of town at this location. Within a 5 minute drive, you're in a subdivision. The city sort of expanded around us. However, knowing the...dubious construction methods of practically everyone in my family (on that side, anyway), the line might very well be lamp cord patched with bailing wire running through a garden hose conduit. I would be a little surprised if it wasn't. As I've discovered more and more hack-job "fixes" that they've made over the years (a broken beam in a barn that was wired together as if it helped being one of the bigger WTF moments), my faith in their ability to repair things has declined. I also have a good idea of where the electricity comes from, but I'm an idiot and didn't take a picture while I was out there. There's another building that sits right under the electric pole that feeds the back part of the property. I'm fairly sure the electric comes off the pole, runs through that building and into the ground, and then crosses over to the shop. I can't actually get to the pole to see if anything runs directly off the pole or not due to nature running wild (copperheads are coming out, and that undergrowth is thick enough to repel a concentrated flamethrower attack). There IS a 220v outlet in the shop that used to power a welder (one of the stick types), so it MAY have run directly off the pole. Now for the bad part of that if I'm right about the building...that building is in way worse shape than the shop is. It's amazing how a year of neglect gives nature a toehold to take down half the stuff you've built. Anyway, the building that the electric routes through effectively has no roof left, which is why (I assume) the power has grounded out and cut off in the shop. I could very well be wrong about that, though. I might try to bribe my friend's dad into taking a look at it, he's been a licensed electrician for the last 25 years so he'd know what's going on. I'm a little leery of touching it, myself. I've very briefly crossed a 120v line before and that isn't an experience I'd like to repeat.

As far as I know, the roof keeps water out as it is. I won't know for sure until what's left of that insulation comes down. The whole building has sheet metal around the outside and it's pretty water tight. Where water gets in is at the large sliding door at the front. For some reason I can't fathom, my uncle (I assume he's the one that built the thing...Dad seems to think it was him, anyway) decided to have a very slightly sloping concrete pad on the outside that slopes towards the door. Once you're on the inside, the floor continues sloping the SAME DIRECTION (c'mon man, did you really build this with the expectation that the door would keep all the water out?) all the way to the back, where it levels off for the last 6 feet or so. The door rides in a groove in the concrete that's around 6" deep, so it takes a good rain to start flooding the place, but once it gets over that little groove it's all downhill from there. Come to think of it, is 6"x4" DepthxWidth enough to get a French drain system in? I think it should be... If so, once I've replaced that door, I could stick the drain right in that groove and it would solve that particular problem quite handily. The groove is already KIND OF acting as a drain as it is, but it was just meant to be a track for the door to ride in. The fact that a tree grew up in the middle of it doesn't help it for either function....I need to get that stump out somehow... As for the garage doors, I never thought to look on craigslist or for used ones. I need to measure that door to see what size I need, but I just sort of assumed that I would need to have a door made specifically for that gap. They seem to want to charge at least $2000 for a new one, though, which seems a little crazy to me. I really like that beer cellar idea I need someplace to age my ales that need a little time on them, after all... We pulled up the rest of the boards that went across that pit as soon as my friend fell through, and there wasn't anything cool under there, unfortunately. Just some milk crates and a layer of grime that had washed in on one of the tides coming from the door.

My family has always lived on the same farm, but we finally moved for the first time ever to another farm. This shop building is on the one we lived on up until a year ago or so. The shop belonged to my uncle, but when he got his own farm and moved all of his stuff over there, it fell into disrepair in a big way. It's been completely abandoned for about a decade now, maybe a little longer. The calendar on the wall is still on August of 1987, but I know it hasn't been that long as I wasn't born until August of '88 and I remember them working up there. The building is still fine structurally, but it has several problems that will be pretty obvious from the "before" photos that I have for you all here. A couple of my friends have been helping me clear it out, so far we've only worked on it for one weekend, though. Repaid one friend in pizza, will repay the other in beer. I shudder to think of reaching an age where I can't repay favors with food and beer. To be fair, we mostly drink craft beer so I suppose it's a bit pricier beer than normal, at least. If you see anything that you want to make a suggestion on, go ahead. This is very much a work in progress and anything you guys could mention that I haven't noticed could save me some work, now or later. Now, I've got this about 80% cleaned up but I forgot to take pictures as the process was ongoing (well, the interior was a lot worse, I forgot to take a "before" picture so that's more of an "in the middle" picture). I'll have to take some "in progress" pictures later tonight or tomorrow. The main problems (that I can and plan to fix) that this building still has are as follows: 1) The Amazing Disintegrating Door (Seriously, I have no idea how it's still together) 2) The collapsing interior ceiling (fiberglass insulation, started coming down when raccoons got into it. Little bastards.) 3) Electricity got knocked out at some point 4) Needs new planks to cover MASSIVE PIT in the floor as my friend stepped on one and fell through. Bruised his knee, hip, ass, and pride. Mostly his pride. 5) Drainage due to sloped floor The problems that it has that I can't fix are as follows: 1) Sloped floor (would really prefer it to be level) 2) MASSIVE PIT to get under vehicles right in the middle of said floor 3) No electricity (the line is underground, not sure if I can fix it or not, so I have it on both lists) What I've done so far: 1) Moved the old tractor/riding mower and bunton-style lawnmower (had to tow the tractor with a truck) 2) Chopped down the two trees growing up through the door (honeysuckle and something-berry, I think Dad said it was elderberry) 3) Pruned the other trees back out of the way. Leaving them because anything that shades that tin roof is welcome. 4) Cleaned massive amount of refuse and what is effectively compost from said trees off of concrete pad outside (1 55gal drum and half a truckload) 5) Removed all trash except for about 10% in one corner (3 truckloads) 6) Separated out all the scrap steel from everything else 7) Cleaned off the bench (probably needs new planking for the bench top) Still to do (that isn't already on the "I can fix it!" list): 1) Tear down the ceiling. No idea what (if anything) I'm going to replace it with. 2) New door. Garage doors are expensive, might wind up building a door just like the one that's on it now out of new oak boards. 3) Drainage. This thing has no gutters, and thanks to the sloped floor, water runs to the back of the shop and stays there. 4) Ventilation. For obvious reasons. Buried Treasure found so far: 1) 18" section of railroad track 2) About 50lbs of spring steel (in the form of medium sized coil springs mostly, some leaf springs) 3) About 150lbs of scrap steel of various unknown types. I'll figure out if it's actually usable later. Some plate that's 1/4" or thicker 4) Incredibly old table saw type of thing (visible on the right in the interior picture) 5) 1 ball pein head 6) 1 cross pein sledge head 7) 2 massive chisels (one is about a foot long) 8) Model 1816 bayonet for Springfield .67 caliber rifle used in US Civil War (random find of the week, rest of the gun was unfortunately nowhere to be found) So, this is what I'm doing and have gotten done in the pursuit of a shop space apart from my father's, which gets ridiculously packed with stuff. I figured I would post it on here in case anybody had suggestions or comments on it. It'll also work to keep me honest and working on it instead of having my attention drift elsewhere and it never getting done.

Just keep in mind the Norse were a little more practical than that. The Mjöllnir ("Crusher") of legend can change size so that Thor carries it around in his tunic (imagine your hammer shrinking so that you could carry it in your shirt pocket), and when he needs it, it will change to whatever size he happens to need it, usually the one that lets him crush skulls. Although, there was that incident where he flattened a mountain... ...in any case, I doubt you'll see it shrink up and go on a necklace or something in the movie, because Hollywood has no setting other than "huge, loud and flashy" As an interesting aside, Mjöllnir is actually a screwup. The handle was supposed to be longer, but while the smith was forging it, a fly (purportedly Loki in disguise)came down and bit the guy on the bellows in the eye, which made him stop pumping air into the forge for a second and messed up the heat. Apparently whatever material Dwarves forge is very finicky for heat, and their forges are very finicky for air...

I'll have to dig out my belt sander and give that a shot. Would you recommend smoothing out the entire thing and coating it with something like black engine enamel, or just smoothing out the working surfaces (like you said, they're all that really matter) and leaving everything else? And what about the faces that look like they've been mushroomed out with use, do you think that they're meant to be that way or should they be ground back flush like you do occasionally with chisel striking surfaces to keep a piece from flying off and harpooning somebody's eyeball?

How would you go about getting the rust off of hammers? I've got several hammers that have some serious pitting all over them (including on their faces) because of rust. Any ideas on how to get these squared away so that they're relatively smooth again? The only tool I have available for any kind of heavy polishing is a bench grinder with a grindstone on one side and a polishing wheel on the other, and I figured the stone would be a bit rough to use on this. The ballpein isn't too bad, but the crosspein sledge and the...whatever the third one is are pretty chewed up.

Thanks for the replies, folks. The left burner just had the mother of all spiderwebs in it. It was actually a solid plug of web through most of the burner pipe...I've never seen such a thing in my life. It looked like someone had tightly packed cotton in there. At any rate, I cleaned it out, and I'll probably get some LP tomorrow to test it. I also broke the regulator loose so that the knob turns now, as it was pretty well stuck in position. So, this forge CAN weld, you just have to take it really slow and easy, is that right? By the way, here's the stamps on the anvil, which are mostly obliterated: It looks like an old one in any case, and it is indeed a mousehole. It's kind of amazing that you could tell from one bad picture of it :D

I just added my location. I'm in Central KY. I'll have to get to the forge later tonight and look at the regulator. Do you think that's what kept the left burner from coming on, rather than a blockage? I actually managed to find the forge online (NC Whisper Deluxe) and it says it gets to 2350 degrees, which is about 500 degrees short of the melting point of iron, so I suppose welding just isn't within its capability. Maybe I'll have to build another gas forge for that. I don't really want to deal with coal, because we used to have coal fired stoves in the barn when I was a kid and I remember how filthy and hard to deal with it was. I got in trouble a few times for playing in the coal pile in my new clothes Making knives was actually one of the things I wanted to do. I've read on here how a swaybacked anvil actually helps with the straightening process, and I'll have to bow to experience on that one. It still seems kind of counterintuitive to me, though, to use two curved objects (swaybacked anvil and beveled hammer face) to produce a straight object, but if it works, it works. I'll also have to look at the anvil later as well, I'm sure it probably has the manufacturer written somewhere on it. Are mousehole anvils good ones? I know this one rings really loud every time you hammer something on it, and if it weren't for that big chunk of face that it was missing I wouldn't even think about using another one.

Hey folks. I have a sort of factory made gas forge that my parents got me when I was 15 (picture below, I'm 22 now so it's been sitting a while). A combination of things (just life getting in the way in general, I guess) has seen me completely neglecting it after only using it a few times, having only put one large tank of LP through it. My parents didn't want to buy more gas for me to waste with it back then, so there you go. It was also swiftly buried in the back of my dad's shop; it took me two hours to get the thing to the front when I dug it out a little while ago, and it's on wheels for God's sake. One thing that was discouraging when I was first using it was the fact that it wouldn't get anywhere even remotely close to welding temperature, and one of the first exercises in a blacksmithing book I had was to make a tomahawk head by welding a strap. I've come to find out that forge-welding isn't as elementary as the book made it seem. 1/8" mild steel strap could get to about a lower-middling orange at most. The manual is long since gone, but I don't remember it telling me how to adjust the pressure, just that it had to be at 12PSI (how I remember that after 7 years I have no idea) and stay there in order to work correctly, which it did right out of the box. The left burner isn't working right now, but doubtless it's clogged up with a wasp nest or something, I'll just have to clean it out. So, my main question is, can this sort of forge get to the higher temperatures for welding at all, and how might I adjust it to do so? As an aside, you can just barely see my main anvil there. It's quite swaybacked and has pieces of the face broken off. It's incredibly old, and it came out of my great-uncle's garage, and knowing him I have a feeling it's encountered some dynamite at some point in its life. It doesn't have a 90 degree edge anywhere on it, the heel is the only 4 square inches of flat surface left on it, and the table (I think that's what it's called; at the base of the horn) is rough as a cob with chisel marks. Does anyone think it's still usable, or should I buy another anvil? I have a cheap Chinese POS cast iron anvil (also in the picture) that I bought for cheap that isn't really worth anything beyond scrap value in all honesty, but I figured it'd at least provide me a flat spot to hammer on for a while. Found a brand-new looking 70lb NC Big Face on Craigslist in my area for $175, and that's a bit pricey for my college student budget. I also have an old pair of horse hoof clippers that I was using for tongs back when I was 15. Would it be worth it to just go ahead and re-form them into actual tongs, or should I just stop being a cheapskate and buy some? I got off on a bit of a tangent there, but I tend to do that. Mostly I just need to know about the forge itself Thanks!