Mike BR

I read the preview as “Spandex left on the grinder.” Had fun trying to work that one out.

Just for the record, I only knocked that out to prove to myself I wasn't hallucinating about using mild drifts in stainless. If I was making an actual wrench, I would have taken the time to make proper drifts. Though looking at it again, it's about two heats shy of being a bottle opener . . .

And more on topic, the one time I regularly use a glove is on the hand holding a non-handled punch or chisel. Missing the punch and driving my hand onto the workpiece got my attention. (Luckily, I learned that lesson cheap. It was one of those where you rub off the ash that was once the top layer of skin and you're as good as new.)

It's not completely airtight, but the workers' comp laws normally prevent employees from suing their employers over workplace injuries.

I have a few drops from #5 (actually 16mm) stainless rebar, so I flattened an end, punched it, and drifted it to 5/8" square. I used mild steel drifts I had on hand (I went to 3/4" round and then 5/8" square, since the 5/8 drift had a rather abrupt taper -- I think I made it to finish a tapered hole at some point). In any event, the drifts worked fine with the piece at a nice yellow. The rebar is a "duplex" alloy -- S32304 -- that's twice as strong as 316. That's cold, of course, but at 23% chromium I doubt it's any easier to forge.

I bought my only leg vise over 20 years ago. When I bought it, there was a big crack across the spring, just above the clamp. I decided to weld it up with Ni-rod and make a new one when it failed. So far, that hasn't happened.

I'm pretty sure I've successfully drifted stainless steel with a mild steel drift. But it's easy enough to forge a drift from a piece of coil spring if you want to be safe. I'd just drift slightly undersized (or use an on-size drift which will result in a slightly undersized hole when the material cools), then file to final size. That should remove any mild steel from the drift. You might consider punching instead of drilling, which would leave more material around the hole and make a stronger wrench. Of course, there still would be potential contamination from the file, and none of it would be passivated. But you're making a wrench, not a through-hull, and it would probably be fine. I forged a stainless pot handle a couple of years ago, and left the finish as forged. It gets washed and air dried two or three times a week -- no trace of rust so far.

Churchill is supposed to have said something like "I will leave my actions to be judged by history. And I shall write the history." (And whether or not he said it, he certainly did it.)

I had a few Greek (and Roman) history classes, but not language ones. A couple of my classes were on the top floor of a 19th century building. To get there, you passed a doorway that opened onto a narrow set of stairs. Next to the doorway was a laser-printed sign with an arrow upwards that said "Attic Greek."

Just to throw it out there, a practical solution might be to make the "socket" part separately with a through-hole and braze it onto the back of the handle. If you're going for the clean lines in the original photo, you could drill a hole in the body of the handle with a diameter equal to the diagonal dimension of the shank, and braze on maybe a 1/4" thick disk with a square hole. (I thought I had gathered that one could use a rotary broach in a lathe with the work and cutting bit spinning, and the body (broach holder?) stationary in the tailstock. Or you could spin the body in a mill and fix the work in a vise, with cutting bit not rotating.)

Very cool, especially with the video Frosty found. I'd heard the term "rotary broach," but I think I had it mixed up with annular cutter. (Or maybe penannular brooch?) I think I'm glad didn't try a broach for my flypress. On the other hand, I may have an excuse to waste a hundred hours building another accessory for my 7X10 . . .

The cap could work. One could also forge the end of the outer pipe into a (partial) hemisphere instead of a taper, and keep the water jacket full thickness almost to the end. I was thinking about suggesting copper, where the thinner walls and better conductivity might both be advantages. But then I looked at the price of large-ish copper fittings.

My thinking was that the tapered 1-1/2" pipe would form a water jacket, joined to the inner air pipe only at the end. That way (nearly) the whole nozzle would be water cooled, and hopefully it would have a reasonable life. (It also would avoid the need to retap a fitting, though of course the fact that I don't have pipe taps doesn't mean no one does.)

If I were trying this, I think I'd take a short piece of 1-1/2" pipe with threads at one end, and swage the unthreaded end end down so the ID matches the OD of 1" pipe. You'd want to thread the other end into a coupling -- or a thread protector -- when you do the forging. Then insert a longer piece of 1" through the inside of 1-1/2" so it's flush at the tapered end. If you didn't want to send it out to be welded, you could forge braze the two pieces at the end (you'd need to forge the 1-1/2" a little smaller than the final size and clean up the inside carefully with a file). Then thread the other end of the 1-1/2" pipe into a 3" - 1-1/2" reducer, and proceed as Frosty describes. If you're bringing the air pipe out through the other side of the tank, it might be easiest to switch to a piece of radiator hose inside. That would eliminate the problem with trying to align the threads with flanges on both side of the tank.

Apart from a sacrificial nozzle, it seems like assembling pipe into the wrong side of the tapered thread in the reducer will require some form of welding or machining. (I just tried it with a reducing tee I had handy, and couldn't even get the threads started.)

Maybe Frosty can expand on his thought. Commercially, a hardened cutting tool (broach) would be forced into the blind hole to cut away the material in the corners of the square. I've thought about making one to use in my fly press, but that seems like a lot of work for a one-off handle (and I don't have a firm sense of what it would take to make it successful.)

I didn’t completely follow the description, but is there a fullered grove at the base of the ball? If so, if you isolate a 5/8” cube, you’ll have a little more material than you need for a 3/4” sphere — quite possibly the reason the original has a 3/4” ball. So this should be pretty straightforward. (It’s also not hard to upset the end of a bar if you need a little more material for some reason.)

And I thought it was just the drain traps that were different To make a blind square hole, I'd start with a drill with a diameter maybe 15 or 20% larger than the square rod, and drill it as deep as you can get away with. I'd then grind a short taper on a piece of stock the same size as the rod, heat up the handle, and drive it in. If needed, you could then go to another square "drift" with just a chamfer on the end to deepen the square section. I think I've only done this once, and ended up with a tapered hole, since the part I'd already drifted stretched further as I continued to drive the drift. But you can always forge the sides back in.

Yep, a round hole in the handle. It threads onto the rod, and the set screw locks it in place. This is probably obvious, but when you thread the rod, the die needs to be bigger than the stock thickness - -maybe a 5/16 die on 1/4 square (or an 8mm die on 6mm square, I guess). It is possible to drift blind holes square, at least if you can drill a hole somewhat deeper than the square section you need. But it's kind of tricky (and the threaded square rod was once pretty universal, at least on this side of the Atlantic).

I just saw them for the first time in northern Norway at the beginning of September. We'd been talking about them the whole trip; even though it still wasn't getting completely dark, we deliberately sat up the last night to look for them. When they appeared, my wife's friend said "I saw that last night when I got up to use the bathroom, but I didn't know it was the northern lights." Funnily, earlier in the trip we went to an open house on a sail training vessel that happened to be in port. When we went around a corner, so to speak, and I said "there its is," she said "Oh, I walked by that earlier but I didn't see any sails so I though it was abandoned." Though it probably doesn't sound like it, she's a very intelligent and accomplished person. I guess honest is the least of her virtues.

I remember reading that the date back before matches, when embers (“coals”) were the only ready source for fire.

If you can shape your punch with a file, it’s probably too soft. Of course it’s easy to overheat a punch and thus over temper it, so it might just need a new heat treat.

That’s quite a yarn.

Maybe take another look at the T-burner page? One tip it gives is to shorten the MIG tip if the mixture is too rich.

Sealing the opening shouldn't affect mixture. However, hot gasses leaking out between the pipe stub and the burner tube can heat the latter, potentially contributing to burn back.