Matt Bower

I second the suggestion to sell the copper scrap and buy Si bronze with the proceeds.

Yeah,half inch is pointless unless you want the thing to double as a ballistic shield The diameter you have in mind will also make for a big forge by most hobbyists' standards, even with all the insulation. That's fine if you need it, but it wastes gas if you don't.

BTW - it probably wouldn't work that great for 1095. But I've had two auto coil springs tested and neither was 1095. Both were very close to 5160.

Grant is right. That will probably work pretty well.

Is it just me, or is that a tiny little leg vise in the first set of pics?!

Little bits of shell won't hurt anything. Whole shells might pop if they're full of trapped air.

"How did a blacksmith amass 3.5 million dollars? " A few smiths, particularly ones who run high end architectural shops, make very good livings. But Nebraska isn't the place to get rich doing that. In this gentleman's case the explanation is more likely that he lived frugally, lived a long time, probably worked a long time, and invested wisely. He also had few expenses (wife/kids). All that, combined with the miracle of compound interest, can go a very long way.

If you've got access to sawyers' anvils, what about sawyers' hammers?

I think you mean one cubic foot to burn forty to sixty thousand BTUs, Warren? That sounds a little fishy to me. What's the book? Does it explain the basis of that conclusion?

That's right, the "turbolator" is stationary and causes the incoming air to swirl. Can't tell you whether those are available in the UK, but I would bet they are.

High Frequency Induction Heating Cool stuff, but making a truly functional induction forge is not simple.

Well that's a much nicer compressor than I'm using, but it sounds like mine could still do the job. Maybe I will put my name on the list.

Well hi there, welder19. Fancy seein' you here. I'm matt22191 on BYMC. You know, I never really paid a lot of attention to that burner thread. You're basically pumping air through the SS tube and siphoning oil with the copper tube, right? So it's basically a Daggoth burner, except that the pre-fabbed fitting makes it a bit less complicated to make, right? How big is your compressor? Mine can only produce about 5 SCFM. Would it be able to keep up?

Yes, I do try to round those transitions -- but I'm still chicken.

I'm sorry; I'm really not trying to start a semantic argument. There's just this ubiquitous fascination among bladesmiths with soft steel -- soft backs, soft tangs, soft everything -- and it bothers me, because it's based on frankly confused ideas about the advantages of soft vs. hard steel. I know that a lot of great makers have gotten away with dead soft tangs for a long time, so I'm not about to claim that it won't work. But all it really proves is that dead soft is usually good enough, not that it's ideal. A dead soft tang will bend under a load that would cause a hardened and tempered tang to flex elastically and snap right back. Since it seems that most tangs are rarely stressed enough to bend, this usually isn't a problem. But I'm not at all persuaded that a tang that bends easily is ideal. That said, I do tend to shy away from hardening tangs -- but not for reasons of toughness or strengh. I'm just a big chicken. I worry about stress risers in the ricasso/tang transition. I should probably get over that.