anvil

Looks good! Hope to see a pic when it's finished.

Interesting. Especially about packing. Back in the day via experience, Smiths discovered that if they basically followed the process you described, they got a better blade. They called this process "edge packing" Lol, Jen, I'd call it an improper heat treat, figure out where i messed up and learn from my mistakes and not get bogged down in semantics.

Thanks, Patrick. Not in those words, but that's how I think of it. When you strike anything, there is more force on the surface than in the middle Thus to draw out a piece of stock and not get a fishmouth,start at the end, make a point, then draw the body down to this cross section.

Thanks for catching that. The flame should be perpendicular to the rivet shaft and parallel to the wood/bracket. Don't point the flame tip down.

Holding the small tip parallel to the rivit shaft (parallel to the wood) is pretty critical. Start at the base and a quick wrist flip up to the tip and the shsft is beyond a yellow. The shaft is too small so the strap acts like a heat sink and still protects the wood. Learned by experience doing sign brackets out of wood, iron and stained glass. I can prolly dig up a pic. The wood guys wanted no char and the stained glass wanted no melt or cracks. If I screwed up,,, I bought the sign bracket.

I've never put too much thought into it, but I think of a billet as something forged and square or rectangular in cross section. No reason it couldn't be round, but I don't think of it as round. Size wise, pretty much what Thomas said. Shear or slip? I can't say I've ever heard of slip. Maybe so, maybe not. Lol, just don't remember. I've always been aware that either forging too cold in the middle, or forging a large cross section with too much force can cause the outside to shear from the inside. I've never had it actually shear, but certainly had the outside move more than the inside. There was a good smith in Rowe, NM, Named Russ Swider. Thomas may know of him. I think he left before Thomas trecked to the great southwest. He was very good with his Chambersburg. He could do all the cool stuff,, drive a finish nail with no mark on the wood, shut a match box without crushing the box, bring the hammer down on a fresh egg end up and not crack the egg. Anyway, he was playing with big iron, prolly 4" square and did in fact shear the outer from the inner. Jen, I'd love to see you do your experiment. For what it's worth, I've finally been able to dig thru an old computer and dug up the beginnings of my never finished how to vids. I found 20 some 4-5 minute clips on a project I was working on,,, three masons tools. A small trowel and two pointers. It pretty clearly shows how I work at the anvil. There's still missing clips, but they are time stamped so I can go back to the dv tapes I have and add the still lost clips. I can, to some extent, do more than use too many words and still pics showing the end results in a discussion. No matter what,these last few daze was a great glimpse into my time capsule from '02-'08 and the crazy things I was doing with stone, iron and log for my dream shop. Alas, it ended up being either a great practice piece or a cool piece in my scrap pile depending on point of view. Which brings me up to my next dream shop attempt in the here and now.

Keep at it with your hand files, not just a few licks. I had to do far more cleanup on the hardy hole of my last "Gunther" reface than you show. 30 minutes work maybe?

Actually normalizing is one of the steps in heat treating. Check out this for some help: "heat treaters guide companion". It is a free APK on Android and I believe ipod as well. It will give you the specs on how to heat treat nearly any steel you may come upon.the basic steps are Forge, normalize, anneal, cold work, harden, temper, final cold work.

Actually, I realize there are many ways of doing what I need. Basically, I chose this way,,, just because. However, I don't think any emulator will emulate FireWire. Thus no new dv data. I'm not looking for advice here, I just wanted to show a low tech smith with a high tech hobby, and share my last few weeks of play.

Lol! How true

Billits and cranks aren't my area of expertise, so thanks for the info. However, if you slowly heat a piece of 1020 or a36 to a nice yellow throughout, and forge it rapidly with a 25# lil giant, you get the same fishmouth and you will see the same thing. Meaning it's not just a temp differential that causes shear. Basically no matter if it's a temp difference, type of steel, or too heavy of blows, the outside gets drawn out quicker than that towards the center, and something has to give. I'm curious, did you do your experiment with your hand hammer, or did you have a power hammer? I agree about knife makers. There's is a very competitive market. Far more than architectural iron. I look at their business as being similar to photography. If you take 100 pics, you are likely to get one good one. Think monkeys and a typewriter. However, a good photographer will take that same 100 pics and have 99 excellent salable photos, and only chooses one to sell. That's one of the reasons I chose to not be a photographer

I believe cranks from a billet are drop forged, them machined as needed. Heat treat is a multi step process of which normalizing is one of the steps

Very Nice! Just a note, if you use a small ox/acetl torch and hold it parallel to your wood, you can heat only the rivit without scorching your woodwork. even the straps wont get hot. A cold rivit may be good enough, but a hot rivit is a better rivit.

I'm the opposite of most. I have a low tech business and a high tech hobby. After Viet Nam i began making my living between hammer and anvil. About 1980 i changed my focus from farrier to architectural iron, again with the addition of a forge and never looked back. Around the time of Dos 5, i got my first computer. A friend( an early IT, i suppose) advised me to learn dos, and not deal with Win 3.1. So I did. Around the time of XP, i decided to start a vid project. I started documenting my jobs and associated techniques via digital tape. Around '08 I built my last computer. DV tape tech was going strong. I began my Journada around .02. With the release of Win7_sp1, I began a time of no power. As a traditional smith, it didnt matter, but i had to put my 'puter and vid project aside. Alas the little 4 legged wild critters trashed my computer just before moving here a year or so ago,,, all but the 3 hard drives. Last summer i started figuring out what was next for this project. I have 3 Hd's,couple hundred DV tapes of my projects and tech has passed me by. W10 doesnt support firewire. This winter i built my new computer based on a motherboard released last june that can boot to win 7 or 10, depending on what bios you chose to install. I 've found a new software that overcomes the hardware problems associated with moving an old system to a new hardware setup. I call this my Time capsule Project. Im bound and determined to clone my old system to my new build, turn it on and be able to slowly watch the digital doors of my time capsule open to circa '02-'11. I have a "lost partition" on one of the hard drives, so i'm in the process of digging up the files and folders to rebuild it as best I can. Just three days ago, buried in the rubble i found 20 some critical avi files from my project. I had a great two days reviewing these watching me forge a small trowel that i did the stonework with, amonst other things. Still have the trowel, and am starting a new stone project for my new shop. Time to do more stone using the tools i built to do stone. Its the Blacksmith Way! Times are good. I added this here because it seemed appropriate. Lol, I just read your post, George. Im not restoring cards to tape, but i am restoring from mechanical storage to the new nvme ssd tech. not bad for an ole broke down blacksmith.

Trolls, may they remain on Facebook.

Just to add a bit, if you don't have a Bic, use the point of the horn.

Thanks, Patrick,

Dian, you left out anneal

I'd hand file the dovetail.a triangular file with a safe edge would do it. You could even shape your triangular file to match the dovetail angle.

Case hardening is as good of a guess as any. I don't think it would work, tho. Good point, JHCC. Along with that, we don't know what kind of stock it is. I'd guess it's from an axel My guess would be some sort of Super Quench. But I don't think either guess would do anything worthwhile.

Like was said above on the step a wire feed or even a torch and bailing wire will work. On the face for any repairs, large or small try this. This repair technique is the gold standard https://www.anvilmag.com/smith/anvilres.htm Also like had been said, use it for a while and see if it's in the way before repairing.

I nearly always advocate refacing using the Gunther method. Especially if you can weld and follow instructions

To be clear, my morality statement was meant as a general evil we all encounter and in no way meant towards anyone here. We blacksmiths are often confronted with, as an example, someone who wants our work with no makers mark in order to resell our work for antique prices. I encountered this, again, a few years back. It still a sore topic.

I have no doubts as to this process for case hardening. It is tried and true, not to mention traditional. I've used it myself for a few things, springs included. It's more what the vid implies. He implies, no, flat states, you can get penetration by extending time. Even tho this is true, it's impractible and has been so thru time. Can you imagine the amount of coal or any fuel you will use, not to mention the control to maintain a proper temp for even a few hours, much less 8? And 8 hours will only give very slight penetration of carbon. You can check it out by learning a bit about contemporary metallurgy. In the past, this process was used to make high carbon steel. It was called blister steel. Blister steel was not done or considered finished by just using this process. Many pieces were case hardened using this process, then stacked and forge welded.this process was done a number of times to get a more or less constant amount of carbon throughout the piece. This is the reason high carbon steels were so expensive and not easy to come by. It's the reason that an axe, for instance, was made from wrought iron and had a high carbon bit forge welded in in order to make a good cutting edge. Perhaps Thomas will add a few books/pdf's and comments for you to learn a bit more about this, and without a doubt, give you a better understanding than I can.

"Practical Blacksmithing" by Richardson is a good possible source on how these can be made. I believe they were forged in 3 ways. Forged down from one piece, forge welded, and tenoned. I'm looking at the top and the shaft. I believe, it's been a while, these three ways are shown in Practical Blacksmithing. Drop forged and open die forging are two more ways.