matt87

Welcome to the forum Duco. A very interesting and useful first post!

Looks like at least one clasp-knife blade to me... a sheepsfoot and a clip-point slipjoint blades with brass liners and ironwood scales would make for a pretty little gentleman's pocket knife/whittlin knife.

Pulleys? I attached a DC power supply to the heater fan out of a lorry and just got on with it... ;-) Some more explanation of your situation and what you're trying to achieve woudl go a long way towards helping us to help you! Adding your location to your profile might help too, you never know when there's a friendly smith just round the corner.

Well after realising my retire-by-age-25 invention is a no-go it turns out I'm sitting on a load of hot air! You might laugh, but dung is used as a fuel for many purposes around the world and through history, including smithing! No bullsh... erm... hmm family forum, best move on... Quite possibly, but it's difficult to say without looking at the individual design and it sounds like a lot of unneccesary bother to me. There are many ways to build effective forges with 'found' materials. One that surprised me how well it worked was a few old housebricks and a piece of pipe from a dumped shopping trolley. I basically formed a firepot by arranging four bricks in a hollow square (air pipe coming in one side) and adding 'depth' to the fire with a couple more bricks on top. Fuel was charcoal, blower made from one of these Uxsight: Barbecue Hand Crank Fire Air Blower BBQ Accessories : BBQ Tools & Accessories I got from the

Dagnabbit I was just about to patent my invention and retire on the royalties...

From that I can infer that you want a tough edge that will withstand regular throwing (and perhaps the occasional miss) without breaking, and a hard enough edge to retain enough sharpness to stick -- but you're not looking for 'good' edge retention. Sounds like a job for a medium-to-medium-high carbon steel to me and you'd be well off to avoid 'mild' steels like railroad spikes. JMHO, and remember how much you paid for this advice -- it's worth exactly that! ;-)

I don't know a massive amount about torches so if I'm way off someone please tell me, but how are you planning on annealing an entire leaf spring with an OA torch? I'm not sure I'd be happy having a 2-foot length of mystery steel with a random, inconsistent heat-treatment and a considerable risk of pre-existsing stress fractures sitting around a workshop for any length of time... Solid-fuel forges aren't rocket surgery; they're easy to over-think and I'm as guilty of this as anyone. Assuming you don't have peaty soil you can do very well with a hole in the ground about the size of your two fists next to each other. Add a pipe (even copper water pipe will do) leading into the bottom of the side wall of the forge at a downwards angle, making sure the pipe doesn't stick into the 'void' and keep the earth damp. Add an air source of any type -- electric is convenient if you can power it. If your landlord/lady/parents/whomever are happy with you running an OA rig I'd be surprised if they're not happy with what is essentially an 'assisted aspiration' camp fire Assessing, planning for and mitigating the potential risks and demonstrating this should go a long way towards getting the "OK"!

Wrong way round. Silica (silicone dioxide) is what's in 'wrought' iron (the material rather than the style) and gives it that characteristic 'woodgrain' effect. Unfortunately it's also what gives it its characteristic propensity for splitting and piping. Sulfur makes iron and steel 'short' (want to crumble). What do you mean by 'stronger'? Abrasion resistance, able to hold an edge (as in a blade), tensile strength... most of these can be dealt with usign plain medium-to-high carbon steel carrectly heat-treated. High-alloy steels can be 'nice' but I can't think of any applications for which they are essential to the beginning blacksmith.

Are these 'hawks intended to be functional? If so, for what purposes?

I've used 2 or 3 vac-forming machines in the past, on HIPS and acrylic up to abou 3mm thick. They all used a rack of electric heat elements to soften the sheet, which was clamped in place cold, the rack being swung or slid away when ready so that the form had sufficient clearance when the table was raised. I wonder if some sort of hot-air gun or hairdrier could be substituted for the heaters? Easier to get hold of, less scary to play around with, and you might be bale to keep teh heat going as you are forming. If you made the device in two parts I think you'd avoid a lot of awkwardness. The first is a box consisting the pump, (fixed) table and guides for the second part. This second part has a rigid frame for clamping the sheet and the hot-air gun mounted. To use you would clamp the sheet to the frame and switch on the heat. When it's softened you switch on the pump and lower the upper assembly (with sheet) onto the lower assembly, with the form on the table.

Thanks Grant, that helped me to solve a problem I've been considering for a while!

Are you just chucking fresh coal into the fire or working it in from the edges and allowing it to coke up?

The lambsfoot or sheepsfoot is a very traditional British pocket-knife design, e.g. Wrights of Sheffield Rumor has it the name derived from it being a very useful design for trimming... sheeps' feet...

Hi Tom, I can recommend the courses offered by the Blacksmiths Guild though I admit Westpoint is a lot closer for me than you Send John B a message, he'll be best able to advise you.

I'm liking your forge Double Edge, looks to be very versatile! I'm not saying you're wrong, we all work differently and if you're happy and it works that's all that matters. I'm no expert and don't seek to depict myself as such, you have more years' forging under your belt than me! All I'm saying is when I used to burn charcoal it took me a while to get out of the habit of using a shallow fire, and it helped enormously. I would agree, careful control of the blast is a very important part of fire maintenance especially with charcoal and it can help reduce scaling. Nothing wrong with charcoal. If I could get a consistent supply of UK-burned charcoal it's what I'd go with. Smithing coke is about 50p/Kilo (soaking wet) at the moment, the price advantage over charcoal is... narrowing.

I'm glad you like it. For the record, coal can only get slightly hotter than charcoal, and considering that's beyond welding heat anyway there is little benefit in that regard. Charcoal and mineral coal are essentially the same stuff (the same allotrope of carbon), it's just the coal is denser and has more impurities. A pound of charcoal will last as long as a pound of coal, but charcoal has a larger volume so it seems as if it's being used faster.

Whatever you can get your hands on. I've used 1" and under with side-blast forges (charcoal and smithing coke) and works just fine. I wouldn't use any smaller than 3/4" if I had a choice though. Bigger is better (to an extent) because it offers less reistance to the air blower, though this can be helped by giving it a smooth transition (from one size/shape of tube to another, e.g. from hair dryer to pipe). You could for instance modify a plastic funnel or the top of a 2 liter bottle.

Erm... 20mm fire depth with charcoal will make for a pretty oxidising fire. Yes it will probably heat the work but not that quickly and you'll get a fair amount of scaling. From memory you need about 8 diameters of charcoal to get a neutral fire -- therefore if your charcoal is one half inch diameter you need 4 inches of fire depth to give a neutral fire, and the same above it. I've only ever used one bottom-blast forge (I built it) but a lot of what I read from experienced smiths indicates that 1-3 slots are better than several holes; they clog less and the blast can be controlled a little better.

Some more details would be greatly appreciated. What blade thickness do you have? What blade/grind geometry? Are you chopping or batoning through that wood? Across the grain or with it? What wood is that 2x4? Just how 'sharp' is the blade before and after going through the 2x4? Did you try any other grind angles than 25 and 19 degrees? How close to magnetic north do you consider 'acceptable'? ;)

What design of forge are you using (side or botom blast) and what fuel? I've used 1" and under with side-blast forges using coke and charcoal, not ideal but they work. Many water-cooled back/side-blast forges use tues of under 1" diameter and they've been in widespread production use for over a century on all sorts of work. I've welded in a coke fire using a home-made duck's nest with 1" air hose because it's all I had to hand. None of these were ideal and the blowers were typically squirrel-cage (high volume low pressure) designs -- again not ideal and the pipe certainly hindered things by choking the blast. However it just meant that each heat was a bit slower and I had to be a little more careful with fire management.

Mark Aspery makes and uses a 1/8 inch thick slitting punch in one of the demos on his website. As I recall he used some surplus spring steel, nothing fancy.

I like that a lot Brian. Have you tried her out yet? How does she go?

I like to use a wood shavings, kindling and scrap wood. A couple handfuls of charcoal can be used to replace the kindling. Kerosene-based firelighter blocks can be used but I find that they don't burn up by the time I'm raking the coke and tend to produce nasty fumes.

Steam if you can show us a few photos we'll be better able to advise you. Surprisingly you don't want a pristine anvil when you're starting out -- until you get good hammer control it'll be a waste anyway. Arguably you don't want a perfectly flat, square-edged anvil at any time. As Thomas and Jerry have already pointed out the few various refacing techniques are somewhat involved and take a considerable amount of knowledge and skill. We are spoiled for choice for anvils in the UK so if you really need/want a better condition anvil it would be much cheaper to buy one.

No video, but some pictures and useful information in this thread: http://www.iforgeiron.com/forum/f83/forging-anvil-1041/ Also, here: Ernst Refflinghaus - Anvil-forging