DSW

Do yourself a favor and get a note book and keep notes on what you made, what it cost, what you charged, and if you think that was appropriate. That way if you get asked to do another one later, you can reference your notes and decide if that's what you want to ask again. A year or two down the road, you may not remember. Picts along with your notes will help greatly.

I have some picts from the Aug meeting in 2013 that shows a number of the forges members brought to that meeting. That meeting they usually have several forges up and running doing a bunch of different demos as well as having open forges so people can try forging. Steve Genshiemer brought 2 or 3 of his little one burner Freon cylinder forges using the burner he sells. Also he brought his larger 2 burner gas forge. Andrew brought this side blast forge. Some one else brought this one to that meeting. Last is a pict of one of the coal forges in Andrews shop from last Saturday. I don't have picts of his long gas forge that was in the shop.

depending on where you are out that way, you might try and get in contact with member TMIB here. I believe he does some smithing with Scouts out that way. www.iforgeiron.com/topic/42003-building-low-walls-around-a-smithy/ Stupid "forbidden" message won't let me post the whole link....

Nice. I've never really sat back and thought about how to go about making that bracket. I'll have to look closer at the ones on my two vises out in the shop next time I'm there.

You got a chance to play with Ivan instead. He actually made it out to last years October PABA meeting at Andrews shop on his 1st time thru on his grand adventure. I got to meet him then.

Most of mine are detail shots showing joinery, architectural elements or fixtures since that's right now what interests me most as opposed to sculpture. A few of a table Andrew had in progress. Only a few turned out well unfortunately. Andrew punching some of the parts for todays project and the adapted ball peen punch he was using. Lastly some other members work ( sadly I forgot who did these). he had a few other knives, but my pict of those turned out to blurry to see and I only took one. The one of the RR spike knives he made doesn't show the nice detail he did in the handles. Sadly again the detailed closeups either got washed out by the flash, or were too blurry.

I just managed to get in from there. I had a great time, managed to meet JW and NickOoh for the 1st time ( shame Marcy couldn't make it due to work) and the weather cooperated for the most part. A bit of spitting, but nothing major. I managed to pick up 1000 lbs of coal from the place down the street shortly before the closed for the day. I got so wrapped up in talking to people I knew I almost missed getting there in time. Probably could have squeaked another 500 to 750 lbs of coal in the bin, but it was getting close to noon when they close and I was getting a bit tired of standing on the slope of the pile shoveling. That should do me for a bit and I'll probably end up sharing some with Tod ( guy in the background of the 1st Fallen Angel pict in the green sweat shirt) who lives right down the road from me. I don't have any good overall picts but I do have a few detail ones from around the shop I'll try and post later after I dig out the camera and down load them to the other computer. Maybe later tonight or after work tomorrow.

Very nicely done.

Meets vary depending on who is hosting them. February one this past year was in Mt Joy. April meeting was in Quakertown, June one was in Bethlehem and August was in Wernersville Pa.... I don't know about inclement weather. Never had that issue before. All the meetings are inside, though the August one is mostly outside. As far as bringing your own gear, I guess if you want to try and forge if there is an opportunity and have a favorite hammer etc, it can't hurt to bring it along. Same would go with a small project you have a question about and would like input from someone else on. Mostly when I go I watch the demos and talk to those members I know, peruse the shop and look at what tooling, jigs they have for ideas, take picts of things for reference later etc. 2 years ago, I made it to the October meeting a bit early since I'd never been there before and while standing around waiting for the meeting to start Andrew asked if I'd mind striking for him. I've done minimal striking in the past, so I got a 10 minute "crash" course, then spent most of the meeting swinging an 8-10 lb sledge for the demo. I'm still on the fence as far as Saturday. I really want to go, but I don't want to deal with a bunch of flooded roads in an area I'm unfamiliar with unless I have to. I also want to get half a ton or so of coal, and the only way to load my truck is to stand there and shovel it in the bin I'll bring. Did that last year in the rain and really don't want a repeat performance. ( I hate being wet, and spending the rest of the day soaked including the 2 hr drive was less than fun...) Besides I don't feel like paying for a lot of water needlessly.

With all the rain they are calling for Friday thru Sunday, I may bail on trying to make it this time. I have a number of customers with basements that flood, so I may choose to be on standby in case I get a call to come out and help pump out a basement or try and stop the water from coming in. Shame the nice weather couldn't have held out for one more week. This rain is messing up my work schedule big time right now.. Grrrr.

j.w.s hopefully I'll make it and maybe I can get the chance to meet you. Best pict I can find of me right now. If you see me come introduce yourself. I'm Doug by the way.

Old hair dryer, old bath fan, fan from one of the power vent water heaters, shop vac, leaf blower. list goes on and on... Soft coal doesn't need a ton of air, so just about anything that blows will work. Anthracite likes more air and a constant flow, you you want to tend towards a slightly bigger fan, but you don't have to go crazy.

Thanks Josh. That's a bit too far for me to drive on a regular basis, especially with them raising the bridge tolls to $12 on my truck on the Burlington Bristol bridge.

Josh is a member I believe. I'm sure he'll know what ever meetings there are etc. I can never find their web site, not that I have time usually to make any meetings even if I knew when and where they were going to be.

Question comes down to what they are looking for. In many cases I've found people who seem to love my "mistakes" better than the "perfect" ones I've made of things like split crosses, key chains etc. I think a big part of that is that they don't look like machine made items and it's very clear these were hand made with all their imperfections. I've found occasionally someone at a demo will pick up a previously forged item and ask if I can make a small change to it. " Can you straighten out the top of the cross?", "Can you add a hole here so I can hang this?" "Can you make this bigger, curvier, straighter, add more texture or make it smoother, or what ever...?" I'll often leave the items unfinished for this reason and only coat them after the person is happy with the item, or if I'm going to store it away for a later show. Leave yourself time to make changes, do test samples or what ever so you know what they want and how they want it to look. Some like to do sketches, but I work best in 3D myself so I prefer to do prototypes or samples of small items.

looks like we are playing the "forbidden " game again today. You are welcome to come to meetings even if you aren't a member. I believe they prefer that only members forge for insurance reasons. However that isn't always the case as I know the June meeting is an open house type format where they encourage anyone to try their hand forging. What happens at a meeting changes from meeting to meeting, depending on facilities at hand and so on. The December meeting is a Gallery meeting where everyone brings in something they made thru the year as opposed to a "shop" style meeting where they have an active forge. December meeting is also down past Philly in Paradise Pa so that's a hike possibly for you. The Facebook page usually has the meetings coming up as well as location information. https://www.facebook.com/events/1619011711652531/ Most of the "shop" type meetings are usually some sort of demo. If after the demo, there's time often members can make use of the forge as many shops only have one forge. Andrews shop meeting in October is a bit different as he has two forges usually up and running. One for his demo, and one that can be used as a "teaching" forge where members can get help from others work on questions etc. The June meeting is another one where they usually have multiple forges up and running.

If you aren't doing anything Saturday Oct 3rd. PABA ( Pennsylvania Artist Blacksmith Assn) October meeting is in Stroudsburg PA. https://www.facebook.com/events/1512515985704633/ That's pretty close to Northern New Jersey. I think the meeting at Andrews shop is one of the better ones myself. I also take the opportunity to get my smithing coal while I'm up there as Peoples Coal is just a couple blocks down the street from his place and they have decent blacksmithing coal.

Back in the late 90's one of the guys from the dive shop who used to run trips, took all of us on the trip on a night dive in Ginny Springs FL. The main cavern goes down to 60' where the grated opening of the cave is. After getting everyone situated in various positions where we could sit and watch, he signaled everyone to turn off their lights. At that point there is zero light in the cavern as the roof blocks out all light from outside. He then pulled out a ziploc bag that contained a bunch of activated glow sticks that had been cut open and released the material into the outflow from the cave. For a brief few seconds he was outlined in this odd green glow before the contents broke up into a thousand tiny points of light that drifted thru the dark cavern like stars in the Milky Way. One of the more impressive night dives I've even been on. Once the material spread enough you could begin to see dim shapes of others in the group, but you still felt like you were alone drifting in space.

Now that would look great out front Halloween night filled with liquid and a small bubbler or air line in the bottom with maybe some dry ice tossed in to create a fog over the surface.

Fire brick for a coal forge you should be good. It's only in something like a gas forge or furnace where you'll get those high elevated temps that you need to worry about standard fire brick breaking down and need to go with higher temp rated ones.

Brand on the wood looks a lot smoother than I thought the actual item was. I was afraid the kink in the C would wreck the look. Brand itself doesn't look at all bad to me. Note that the closest I come to live stock is helping a friends kids move their 4-H pigs and getting the odd call to come out and bury a horse on short notice.

I've also found there is an "up" and a "down" to leaves. When doing the 2 turn neck down off the anvil, the body of the leaf faces down. If you go and neck the back down on the opposite side of the anvil with the body of the leaf down, you stress the stem by making it flex a lot. Instead rotate the body to face "up" and now the back of the stem and leaf are supported and flat. Same goes when you spread the leaf. Put the flat back down, and the leaf is completely supported while spreading. If done the other way, the stem either flexes, or material gets pushed under the stem causing cracks. Noticing this made a huge difference in how many failures I had when forging stems and leaves. Now I just need to work on getting my spreading even each time. About one third to one half of my leaves end up looking closer to 'feathers" after spreading it seems...

Guy I know has a big 6" round chunk of S7 he got thru work I believe sunk in an angle iron V groove "saddle" that he uses as his horn to draw out stock.

I've yet to understand what or why things get forbidden. By accident in my last post I copied what I thought was the link to the video and it too it no problem. Great! Then I realized I'd copied a different website to post up to some one else rather than the rounding hammer video. I went back in and deleted the wrong link no problem, but every time I tried to post the youtube link, I got some sort of error message, though I've posted links in other threads. There seems to be no good rhyme or reason to this ongoing disaster.