metalmangeler

Most of my tools are just functional, I may need to do more art. very nice.

On thin punching I use bees wax. On thicker stuff (like hammer eyes) I use small chunks of coal, I think the soot may work as a lube, the expanding gasses also push the punch back out, once the hole is through the stock you might notice this effect is lost. I will go several blows before removing my punch, I think doing so after every 3 blows would be better than what I do, this will depend on how fast you are moving etc. The main point is that your punch is expanding due to heat and your hole is contracting due to loss of heat so they will want to stick together. It is better to separate them before they become a sculpture. :)

Might want to bring screws as well, and maybe a flux spoon.

Seems like a ton and a quarter would be 2500#.

Flatland Forge is Jim Poor and his wife last I knew. They were or maybe still are comptetive farriers. he makes some high end farriers hammers and other farriers tools. I would think that his clinics or classes would be geared toward the farrier. I am sure he could also do other types of classes, but he has a lot of name recognition with that crowd so they would be the natural client.

They must be thinking about the wishbone hill mine as I am sure anything up castle mnt. would be a longer time frame.

pretty nice, I like the drop point better.

Well as expected I missed this meeting. I would like to know the dates for our next one and the location if that has been determined.

Hello Zak:
The meeting will be in Anc. this time. Bring what ever you would like to show others what people are doing is usually interesting. Maybe someone will have another method of making what you have that you would like to use, or you could ignore their idea if you don't like it.
I will send a PM. Mark

I would really think no bounce = soft. Might be fine, might not depends. heat treating unknown steels can produce less than the desired results. I would look into finding Doug and seeing if I could pin down what he used before I heat treated the hammer.

Remember with coke you will get farther with 100# than you would with 100# of coal.

I expect the next one will be planned.:)

It looks like it has a makers mark, if so what is it? I think all of the ones made by Tom Clark were 1045 of course it only takes one hammer to make this statement untrue, but if he is the maker that would be a starting point for heat treating.

You might be able to draw the thick side down to match the thin side by heating the thick side more by strategicly placing it to the side of your fire then put your mandrel in place and forge the thick side while supporting the thin side on a flat. You will likely need to work to get everything straight again after you draw down the thick side, and your eye will be larger than before. A fuller is the term you wanted earlier.

Hello Zak

   Where are you located? Genenrally? It is good to have a new voice here. Mark

 Jim had mentioned that he might be able to get Darrel Nelson, apparently we were too late for that. Not really surprising when you are looking at top shelf people. I was interested in this man more than just animal heads as he is very VERY good at this venue.

I think 6 months or better a year would be much more respectfull of our demonstrators.

I plan to be with Esther dog training instead of being at that meeting. I am in contact with some new people who might make the meeting. Hopefully someone is thinking about who we might get as a deomonstrater this year. We really should have had this finished a few months ago as most summers are busy and getting someone here in the winter could be challenging.

A commitee will deturmine how it goes. I will let you know how it goes after I know.

You are right Rebecca is a very happy person, she has some unussual talents, and I think this might be in that catogory, we will see about that as well. One thing seems to be true at least in my mind she has had a number of very marketable ideas, I plan to make a bunch of componets for her to mess with (weld together) so she can make some smaller less involved items for sale. She is quite happy with this idea. I expect you will see her this summer or at the fair so you can check with her to see how she is liking it then.

We are trying to get her into a juried show.

Thanks Frosty;

   You are right, probably 50% of the time in this was me cleaning enough floor to weld it. :)  Well maybe not quite, but there was a lot of stuff in the way.

    We have plans to market it but I will have to wait to see if it is accepted. If the plan does not work I think it will sell through our normal shows.

    The tooling like most tooling does not look like much. You may have to have Rebecca demo for you.

Michael; This is more a matter of the dad helping on the kids project.

   On garden art I try ot keep things pretty simple as I think it would be easy to go over most of my markets budget. So the dragon fly is pretty simple, I have a narrow V block die with an opposing fullering die for the power hammer, I close up the end on a peice of pipe, then neck down the neck then forge down the tail then flatten the end and cut the claspers on the tail. The wings are just round stock flattened in fullering dies. These parts are then mig welded together. Bill Epps has a video on making insects I think he might have a dragonfly there, it likely is nicer and more traditional than what these are. It is not likely my daughter would have stuck with it on a tradtional type forging like that.

Trlistan: I am not sure how much time we have in it, as you probably know about me I try to get things done with minimal time into them, we did some of this on Christmas break and some on spring break so we have months into it just not as many hours as some might guess.

This is a project that Rebecca recently finished. I am really trying to see if I can post pictures on our new (6 month old computer.)

 Here is a picture of her arranging it.

And of course doing a little forging after all this is a forging site.

depending on what type of bowl you want if you just draw the center portion and not the rim say using a flat ball fuller oposing a flat die the drawing action will produce a bowl shape with the rim having thicker material than the rest of the bowl.

Frosty has a pair of tongs that are just plyers with handle extentions arc welded on. They look like what they are, but he has used them quite a bit I think and they did the job for him. Normally you start out crawling before running. I have quite a few tongs and think that they make my life easier, but I started with just a twist tong and farriers tongs.