wooginator

Not sure if this is the right forum for this question, but here goes: What kind of glue should I use to glue wood to metal? Specifically washers to metal? It doesn't need to withstand a great deal of pressure or force, it's more or less decorative, but I don't want it to be loose.

Ohh see I was planning to get pipe with thick enough walls that I could basically flatten the outside corner and leave the rest unchanged.

I will, but I won't be able to work on it for a while yet. I rent space at a forge and right now I'm still at college for another week or so and can't get to it, and even then I'll have to buy the materials first.

It's 5" pipe, so it shouldn't be a problem. It seems to me that if I just heat one side then it won't try to collapse on me, whereas if I heat it all at once it'll deform when I hit it. And yeah, I'm going to weld end pieces on with bevels of their own. A bevel seems different than a taper to me though.

This is a follow-up to a more general question about a project I posted a couple days ago (people were super helpful, thanks!). This is a lot more specific. If I take a segment of steel "box" tube (i.e. square tubing), 1/4 inch thick, and use a blowtorch to heat up an individual edge at a time while leaving the rest of it cool, can I then hammer that individual edge until it forms a bevel? Ideally the bevel should be about a half an inch wide and quite flat. Basically I'd be turning the square into an octagon, turning each edge into another flat surface. If this wouldn't work, could it be done using tubing with a thicker wall, say, 1/3 inch?

Eh, metalworking is metalworking. I'll consider that. Currently I'm liking the idea of cutting it into segments and drilling a hole through the middle, layering it with washers (possibly washers dipped in silver nitrate for a silver plating) and running a piece of round steel stock through the middle. At the bottom I'll pound the round stock until it flattens out some and the wooden/washer bits can't come off, then at the top I'll weld it to the hammer.

To be more specific, I'm working with a large round steel shield, so some of my options are limited.

Is there a way (short of dipping it in silver nitrate) to make steel look like silver? More white, I mean. Steel by itself is always more grayish.

That's not a bad idea. I'm using this as the handle for something that weighs 15-20 pounds, and so I've been concerned that when I swing it the dowel would snap. If I do this though then I can run a steel rod up the middle to reinforce it.

Thanks for all your help guys. Honestly I was just planning on using a segment of dowel from Home Depot, sanding it down and staining/polyurethane-ing it after the inlay. This all seems a bit tricky.

Honestly, I was just going to forget the engraving. It looks cool but it's well beyond my skill set. I'm justifying it by saying it's not in the comics. Heh. But you think I'd be better off making the whole thing from plate instead of trying to use a segment of box tube?

Cool, thanks! Did some googling, and it looks like the best bet would be to make little grooves like you said and then to get soft silver wire and hammer it into the grooves so it flattens out a bit.

Right, but the way the hammer is any and all edges are bevelled. So it's not just the edges of the face, it's also the edges of the box. I think you can see it in the picture if you look closely.

Hahaha. Best of luck to you! Forging weapons is fun. I feel like a real war hammer would be simpler than what I'm doing since I could just forge it out of a solid piece of steel.

So I'm not sure if this is the right place for this since I don't think steel would be the ideal metal. I'm looking to inlay a wooden handle roughly an inch in diameter with ornamental metal bands (thin, silver in appearance). They rise a little bit above the wood in the item I'm trying to replicate, but they're not round so I can't just use plain wire. Does anyone know anything about this? I'd attach a picture but I honestly can't find one online. If any of you are huge nerds like I am, I'm talking about the handle of Thor's hammer Mjolnir from the Avengers movie.

Depending on how large a scale you're looking to do this (i.e. something less than a truckload of coal) you can buy 50 pound sacks of coal online, which I did for a while. It generally ends up costing about $40-50 a bag because of shipping though.

I know absolutely nothing about casting, unfortunately.

That's definitely something I was considering, but I'm not sure if I could properly bevel the edges of the box tube. Could I heat them individually and hammer them into bevels even though they wouldn't be too thick?

Oh, I want it to be heavy. Before I realized it was going to be 15-20 pounds I was considering filling it with concrete. If it's too light it just doesn't give the same amount of nerd cred. ;) . I'm pretty decent at welding, but that's always been round stock not sheet metal so I don't know. I've got a teacher who can help me learn if it proves difficult though, thankfully. I'm thinking that having the bevels as separate pieces welded onto the other pieces might be a bit more work than it's worth and I should just forge them into the shell. Also I thought I attached a picture of Thor holding the hammer. I'll do that now.

Hey all! I've dabbled in some very rough, rudimentary swordsmithing but now I'm looking to make something nice that I can be proud of. However, as I won't be going into battle with it, I'm not so concerned about it having a proper balance or being the right kind of steel. Basically what I want to know is if there are any tips, tricks, pointers or advice you can give me on making something that basically *looks* like a European sword. Thanks!

Just realized that there's an artistic project forum and this ought to be there. Any way to move it? So I'm a huge nerd, and basically I'm trying to make a replica of Thor's hammer from the recent Avengers movie. However, since making it out of solid steel would be impractical, expensive and massively heavy (it's 8"x5"x5") I was planning to weld it together out of sheets of steel, maybe a quarter inch thick. This would be easy if it were just a box, but all of the edges are bevelled. What's the best way to do this? The ways I've thought of so far are: Buy a single sheet of steel 8 inches wide and 22 inches long (5 for each face and 2 inches for the 4 half-inch bevels) and hammer it into the shell, welding it along a seam on the bottom, then taking square sheets roughly 7x7 (5 inches for the face, 2 extra inches for each one-inch bevel because the bevels on the ends are longer) and welding them to the ends. OR Buying either two 5x5 L-shaped pieces of steel 8 inches long and about a third of an inch thick and welding them together or a single, 8 inch long piece of square pipe (also 5x5) and trying to hammer a bevel into each of the edges. I'd heat the edges with a torch so that the whole pipe wouldn't get distorted while I was bevelling it, then I'd cap the ends like in the above technique. Would this work, or would the plate be too thin? Also on the table is a strategy similar to the first one but instead of having one big sheet, I'd have four 8x5 ones and I'd put one bevel on each then weld them together. In closing, I understand if this is too long/hard to picture and you didn't read it all. Thanks for any help you can give me. Attached is a picture of the hammer (and Thor).

Thanks for the advice, folks. Tried charcoal again while gradually adding coal (nasty charcoal briquettes, I'm afraid, Home Depot was out of the good hardwood stuff), then cardboard, then kindling. No luck. Ordered more coal this morning.

Thanks for the advice, folks. I think I'm just gonna buy more coal and use that with the coke.

So I used coal until recently when I thought "Hey, when I burn coal it becomes coke, which is hotter and doesn't release all that nasty smoke. Why don't I just buy coke from my supply website?" So I bought a bag of coke. It's xxxxxxxx impossible to get the stuff to light. My ordinary method (charcoal + lighter fluid on the bottom and coal on top) works maybe 15% of the time, and when it does it takes an hour to really get started. It's driving me crazy, especially since I just got my first real anvil and I'm really eager to try it out.

My first anvil! I decided to go simple and took two chains, looping each around the other side of the anvil and then stapling it with big fence staples to the side of the stump.