basher

thanks for the reply Glenn I must admit that I was under the impression that putting a link of any kind was banned. anyhoo..... I had a chance to try this today, it seems to work incredibly well. I welded up a standard 7 layer stack ( standard for me) and twisted a 1 foot section 31 x 360 degrees.I forged a bit of it into a knife. so far so good. If anything I have a feeling that the weld is better than my normal flux welded version less layer separation at the edge (none in fact)....... I welded under a 50 kg power hammer and did nothing different from how I would normally weld in a gas forge apart from turning the gas up and not fluxing or oiling. I would like to thank J D Smith for sharing this and Justin Carnecchia for posting it here and making me aware of it. as an aside ...... My 20 year Journyey through smithing has involved me learning and trying no less than 7 variations on forge welding including this one (using borax and not) and all of them have worked well within their limitations , I have yet to try the paraffin (kerosene) ........

mirrors worked great for me . people always have wall space . floor space not so much.

It is a complicated thing. I used to make mirrors and all the work is in the corners, big mirrors take the same time as small ones , glass is cheap. However big mirrors can command a much greater price. as there is a perceived value in the size. I had a ford production engineer here on a class and the same is true for cars, the bigger they are the more profit is in them. I have found that people have quite strong ideas of what they will pay and if you are greatly below that or above that then they will pass on the deal. In my experience clients like the big picture and the idea of hand made/ forged/ crafted but do not give a monkeys about the details...

I have owned a few like that peter wright and other unmarked . We would call them a ship writes anvil or dockyard anvil here. the step at both bickes differentiates them from the continental anvils. looks like a fine anvil.

There is also a better thread than this on the bladesmiths forum in the hot work section . quite a few people posting who have done this. I wont post a link. This site does not exist in a vacuum and is far from the be all and end all as far as blade work is concerned.

I am keen to see more of this done. that is...low temp steel on steel welding without flux in an open forge environ as opposed to the high temp sparking welding that would be a standard flux less forge weld in the UK (as in the video above). I am not a big fan of borax, both the fumes and the way it eats furnaces make it unpleasant to use. I will however keep using it..........for the time being, as it is my proven method. I think it is great that people are spending their time experimenting this stuff time will tell if it becomes a norm practice or not.

thank you very much for the kind words. All the best Owen

nope no way, everything will last a little while but thats it.

from germany on a pallet about £80 to 100 I have had a few........the big ones are just a little rich for me (compared to our prices)

There is no way that you will be weather proofing with a clear lacquer even from clean steel. The only treatments that I have found that have any longevity on steel are some kind of galvanising /hot dipping or a full paint job as done on automobiles , starting with clean and layers of primer and top coat. If there is any rust present under paint then the paint is a goner.

I do not know of any studies. A good Venturi burner should be around the same gas consumption as a good blown burner in the same forge at the same temp IF the forge has the rite internal dimensions and enough exhaust to allow a Venturi burner to work optimally. most of the other advantages and disadvantages have been outlined above. I will add that you can but very good Venturi burners but pretty much have to make blown ones yourself.

I am looking forward to this event. I have wanted to meet Brian Brazeal for quite some time. And look forward to meeting some other names from this forum. All the best Owen

well, my take on it all is that you only know what you know (if you are lucky) and you defiantly dont know what you don't know... now the problem is that some of the things that you don't know can seem to run contrary to what you do know....when you first get to know about them. Mostly we just chose a narrow set of things to know in order to keep it all simple..... Makes sense really. and what Rich Hale says about only trusting information from known sources makes sense too. The problem is that we also have no clues as to who may know the stuff that we don't know.... so..... wonderful info can come from every direction and place and every kind of person . Often these people are not from the safe and trusted set of people you have vetted. I have a set of working methods that are proven to me, around that are a set of methods that are not proven by my trial but come from trusted sources and around that are lots of wild off centre ideas that can come from any source internal and external. I am constantly pulling the outriding ideas in and trying them on, sometimes they can whirl for a decade or two just as ideas.... Sometimes an idea from here immediately seems like a workable useful one , to take a recent example :- Using superglue to hold bits of damascus together before welding . Im thinking does this really work ? wow it would be cool if it did. so I stash it as a mental possability. I was demonstrating at a forge in weekend before last and talking about the trixy bit of pattern welding I was doing and how good it would be if I could superglue it all together whilst I assembled it and a few of the audience affirmed that they did this ( one of them Was Hank Knickmayer who is an amazing Damascus maker and a known and trusted font of info) so a good idea from here now has back up and I will try it and see if it works its self into my normal practice. What I really like about this site is the breadth of info that is brought to bare . I am constantly learning from here.

It took me a day and a set of milling carbides to do one of my anvils so £50 seems fine to me.

Tim Gunn knows what he is talking about. my guess would be that one of your burners is behaving more optimally at that gas pressure for that orifice size . Ii the poor burning burner is burning lean or rich , you could tweak it by either choking the air to make it richer or by putting a smaller tip in to increase the gas speed and therefore the ventury action. Back pressure also plays a big part in how well a burner works for a given forge

I use wd 40 on all my billets , I store my cut steel in the stuff I found it improved my welding so now I spray it on before putting the billet in the forge . borax does nothing until its liquid so I figure that the light oil between the layers is using up any available oxygen that is trapped there. once the billet is warm enough for borax to stick I flux as normal. I have made hundreds of kilos of damascus this way. My figuring is that if you can help prevent the early low temp oxides forming all the better, but figuring aside it defiantly works. Making damascus is all about finding a best practice that works for you and sticking to it.......many ways to skin a cat (including using fish oil no doubt).......

not yet. its all stripped and re built but no motor back on it. it has been a busy year...

Id include myself as an "art" smith hammer user..... no instruction on hammer use apart from personal experience and how to draw tapers at college....... which is exactly what I used a hammer for for 15 years....... I would recon that the majority of us do not have a clue how best to use these machines at all. my eyes were open'd by the Clifton Ralph video and the stream of information on this site.

The clear space masses are certainly doing somthing special, somthing so special that I have never met a Massey owner who knew that these hammers could operate like that. In practice most of the ones I have used have been down right scary. Often you have to operate your foot past heavy blows (full power blows) to get the progressive recipricating blows that one would expect from normal hammer operation. Possably a case of "art" smiths badly operating an industrial hammer or poorly maintained or set up hammers? The valving on an alldays is a lot simpler.....I can understand it! The compressor is compressing on the up stroke and pulling in air from he front piston on the down. In idle the compression stroke is exhausted to air , so the ram chugs at he top of stroke. As you rotate the valve, some of the exhausted compression air is sent to the front piston so the ram lowers progressively,increasing untill full blows are reached. At full blow this is a simple backward and forward action , a closed system .the drive piston is oversized to allow for losses in the elasticity of the air. There are one way flap valves in the rotary valve, during hold up and hold down the hammer is working the front ram at either compression only, or vaccume only. On hold down you can hear the pulse of he piston but I can't feel it in practice( I seldom use this feature) The ram has to have a large surface area so that the partial vaccume fom the sucking drive piston will lift the ram, there is a dead space at the top of the ram bore to prevent the ram hitting cylinder top at top of stroke and a little one way flap valve to channel the compressed air to the top of the cylinder and prevent it being stuck at he top of the stroke. The large front ram makes for a big bearing surface,these are big hammers for their weight. In practice these type of hammer perform well under hard blows and seem to run a miss,tap,miss, tap when wanting light blows... Some of them have a valve to divert the drive piston to atmosphere so that there is less starting load on the motor. By altering this valve to nearly closed it is possable to get very light blows. This s a wonderfull feature and makes a powerfull hammer a usable pussycat.... I have thought to link the main rotery valve with this divert valve to allow a more progressive flow through gentle blows and into the harder blows...... as soon as you go suck and push above and below the drive piston I am a little lost.....

I am happy to forge on any anvil 200weight and up. I have an 800lb anvil in my main forge and its nice but hard to move around I find no advantage to its size unless forging on the bick where there is almost no movement.. I have just got a 550 and am considering swapping them over to try for a change. being able to move an anvil is useful and 200weight seems about my easy move limit. I am not sold on the anvil rebound thing at all . once you put a bit of soft hot metal in between anvil and hammer I do not think rebound comes into it at all. I am just as happy forging on a block of mild steel as a hardened anvil. Anvils can be quite beautiful objects and I will admit that I have acquired a few older ones that will only rarely see a hammer.......

I run between a 60lb goliath mechanical hammer I have turned on next to a 225lb alldays and onions vintage air hammer I run them together often using both hammers in the same heat.and get my combo of power and finishing strokes . I also run a 50kg sahinla for separate jobs and its starting to take over roles previously held by the big/little combo. If I had to keep only one it would have to be the sahinla.......although it hurts me to say that as I have a much greater attachment to the other two. Im voting modern self contained as that is the recent reality.......

this was welded in a gas forge with borax. nickel was 0.4mm stock.

Thanks for all the replies. This ask out went viral and was picked up by a few Facebook pages. I have had a good response. I will be meeting with people who got in touch with me at the beginning of next month.Many thanks to those people who contacted me.

I have welded pure nickel and damascus shotgun barrels (cut and flattened out) the shot gun barrels are nearly pure iron (or spark that way. welding was not hard but from memory I did it hot by my standards but way below sparking.

this is defiantly a job for a super heater nozzle. one of those pepper pot nozzles for oxy acetylene or oxy propane my preferred method Draw your taper and then clamp the thick end in a vice hold the other end (thin)in a twisting wrench. start at the thick end and work down to the thin end , that way there is enough stiffness in the colder thin end to twist the thicker material. forges are only one way of heating.