matt87

Cool! I'd love to come along, but it's a few thousand miles out of my way I'm a second-year archaeology student at the moment. I want to take an MA in Exerimental archaeology once I'm done and do some work with living museums and such. I'm into a fairly broad period, from the early iron age to the upper mediaeval. One of the reasons I forge on charcoal! :D

Welcome, JAFO! Which period do you guys portray?

Depends if it turns out any good. Once I get my delivery of stock and start making more stuff, I'll be giving away a fair amount of my products to friends and the archaeology dept. at my uni.

That is probably the most beautiful knife I've ever seen! I'd suggest black leather for a sheath.

Beer? Now that sounds like my kind of super quench! Wouldn't highly carbonated drinks produce a nice colour case hardening finish? :D

I have a feeling that most modern factory made heads are tempered all over, so the poll would be hard too. Be careful!

Do you use the axe as a hot cut by any chance?

As I recall from some (minor) research I did last year, helve (power) hammers were developed to work blooms faster and easier, and larger blooms too. Ditto powered bellows. Working a bloom into a workable piece of stock is quite a long and difficult process, as you found out, which explains why they invented power tools several centuries ago to help with it! :D

To clarify a little, I live in the UK, not the US. Thanks for your advice Frosty, especially the safety aspect; I was aware of the possible dangers, but many people read this site. I was brainstorming, for want of a better word. Perhaps a safer idea would be a thermopile. Build enough junctions and you might be able to run a forge blower, or maybe some lights or somesuch. Don't know how much power might be available, but the Russians made kerosene lamp powered valve radios post WW2. A Stirling engine might be another possibility. Throttling would not be all that easy I think (or likely very fast response time), so using it to run a dynamo powering an electric forge blower (via a regulator perhaps).

On page 21 of Basic Blacksmithing (Davies and Heer) they suggest a thin mixture of earth and water as a suitable alternative to oil for quenching. Never tried this, but it would certianly not be flammable, environmentally friendly and free (apart from the water perhaps)...

I've been toying with this idea for a while: using the residual heat from my forge to make steam, to power a forge blower! Not something practical right now, since my forge has to be fairly portable or disposable right now (rented house). Also it would need a semi-complex throttle/injector system. If I were to use a flash boiler (say, buried just under the surface of the refractory) it would work almost as soon as I lit it. Throttling could be incorporated into the injector mechanism too with a flash boiler.

You could use a power hack/band saw. There are two power hacksaws on Vintage Projects (plan on making one eventually), if you don't have one. Bet it's useful for cutting stock!

You got a scrapyard near you? Try there. I happened upon 14" of rail at my local 'recycling centre' (read: 'small scrapyard'). Got it plus some 1x1/4, a 1-1/2lb ball-pein and a large cook-pot for

Two hair driers? You tried it with just one? Fleas are proportional to amount of air, and I've heard that one hair drier should be enough.

Tap (mains) water is not pure water. Depending upon your locale, it may be 'hard' -- have minerals dissolved in it. This is what makes limescale. In some areas, chlorine, fluoride or other chemicals are added to water for various reasons.

You might want to buy single bags at a time until you know that that particular brand has few 'fleas' (big sparks that fly from the fire).

This http://www.iforgeiron.com/blacksmith-blueprints/index.php

I can understand why; we had some problems over here a few years ago with kids derailing trains (or nearly doing so) with concrete paving slabs on the rails. Kinda hard to enforce though.

I've seen a few demos and such at living museums as a kid. Always been interested in metalworking, and seeing as I'm now studying for a BA in archaeology (and wanting to do an MA in experimental archaeology) decided to give it a go! Not done much yet but am quite keen. Possibly something I'd want to into as a career (with an emphasis on the arcaheological/experimental/replica side).

Perhaps you could set up a helve/trip hammer as in the period, but powered by an electric motor... like this YouTube - Martillo Pilon

You could forge it out of mild, and then forge-weld a carbon plate to make the face. That's the old way to do it.

I managed to hump 14" of rail about a mile to get it home, and I'm scarilly skinny! I put it in a large rucksack and took it slowly. Had some scrap mild, a large cooking pot and some other junk in there too.