DSW

I like the use of rivets for this. Sort of sets it apart from the cheap Walmart stuff.

There are all sorts of fire resistant materials you can use. "Tin", or more correctly probably sheet steel or alum would work well against most incidental contact with hot metal. Fire rated drywall would be a decent all around fire resistant construction. So would the various concrete based tile backers that are sold for ceramic tile installation ( I use a 1/4" thick chunk of this to protect walls from direct flame contact while soldering pipes). Cement fiber siding is another good fire resistant option.

Thanks guys. An update on the demo. Things went fairly well. I gave them an invoice for the agreed upon $100. Materials and all weren't as bad as I'd thought, so I did reasonably well with that guesstimate. I could have picked a slightly better spot. I set up where it looked like it would be in the shade the whole day, only to find the "sunny" spot ended up being the nicer spot as far as the shade was concerned and my spot ended up in full sun from 11-2pm. Made it hard to judge metal temp by color when it almost immediately lost all it's color as soon as I hit the sun. Live and learn for next year... I did make a point of wanting the truck as close as possible, and that turned out reasonably well. I handed out a ton of business cards and talked to a few people about small possible jobs, so we'll see what comes of it. Didn't really sell anything, but then I didn't really have much on hand in advance to try and sell anyways. We'll work on that for the next time around. If nothing else, I hooked back up with one of the guys who was in my forging class this summer. Turns out he lives not all that far from me. We may team up next time around. He also has access to a fairly well equipped shop in the city, so that's a bonus. The Parks dept was really happy and asked me to put them on the schedule again for next year.

Bryn Athyn College in Bucks runs a 4 day blacksmithing class in the summer. They also offer a regular class during the semester I believe, but the college program isn't about blacksmithing. I've taken the summer class the last two years they have offered it. Depending on where you are in the city, I'd say you were about 30 minutes to an hour away most likely. http://www.brynathyn.edu/academics/sacredarts I think Peters Valley up in the Delaware Water Gap offers classes for credit thru Kutztown University.

That needle sharp point in the vise gives me shivers. I just see way too many ways a serious accident can happen. I understand the need in some cases, just be really careful around it mounted that way. Stepping back into that or stumbling over something in the shop accidentally would make for a fairly serious injury. Safety aside I think it looks great. Good to hear you are getting your son involved. I think way too many kids today don't get enough exposure to hands on fabrication since most schools don't have shop classes any more.

I had a welding instructor about 10 years back whose full time job was doing welding repairs on cranes. Some of the steels the manufacturers use for newer cranes can often top 160 KSI and he mentioned they have had some issues with some that top 180KSI. Most of those steels get their strength thru heat treatment and tempering, but I don't know the exact specs. Lots of his comments went way over my head at the time. Maintaining strict weld parameters was really important with these steels, especially pre and post heat and cooling rates. He did have one sample he brought in that showed what happens when some of these specialty steels aren't welded properly. Someone simply ran a bead of 7018 on the piece with no preheat/post heat etc to attach a light bracket. Under magnaflux the piece looked like a shattered glass window with a huge spiderweb of micro cracks thru a large section well away ( 4-6") from the weld area. What you are trying to accomplish in general is certainly doable. I'm not sure however you can get the results you are looking for without access to a full heat treatment facility. You are also talking about tiny incremental gains. Max gains will probably come from generic structural design. IE you go lighter with a truss vs using higher strength thinner materials in a conventional wideflange design. You can minimize weight even further in the truss design by isolating tension/ compression members and using say cable for pure tension members and saving your weight for larger lighter stiffer compression members. We've gotten "sloppy" in modern times as far as this is concerned. Look back at an older truss bridge design and you'll notice that they frequently used cables in tension members and built up structures for compression members vs just selecting a generic beam size like is common today. It's when you have maxed out the structural design that material science will start giving you an edge on average.

I like the look. I can't wait to see what the finished fence looks like.

Hey Geoff. Good to have you here with us. I'll have to take a look at your project when I get a chance. It's been quite a few years since I lived out in Keyport Washington but I really enjoyed the area. I wish I could afford to pack up and move back out that way from the east coast. Getting back out there to dive in the Puget Sound is on my bucket list.

Glad you are ok and didn't get seriously hurt.

I've seen similar plans for a hammer somewhere, but I can't remember them right now. I'll disagree with him as to the cause of the weld failure however. I think it's not really due to "metal fatigue" but more a case of simply poor welding. That weld looks too shallow and doesn't look to have penetrated well. The other welds that I can see also look fair at best. I do like the arches at the top. It adds a nice "antique" look to the piece.

We used to use a urethane based sealer designed for stamped concrete. The good "toxic" stuff I used on my driveway years ago resists everything including diesel fuel, tranny fluid and gasoline with no degradation. Mustard for some reason would cause stains. The newer stuff we got about 2-3 years ago when I last worked with it wasn't bad, but diesel fuel caused it to discolor badly. Something we found out about the hard way when a customer spilled some home heating oil on a decorative concrete basement floor we did. The stuff on my drive even after several days you can just wipe it up or wash it down with simple green and there are no stains.

Question, why use that material for a drift? I made my hammer eye drift from mild steel. I did 3 hammers out of 1 1/2"+ 4140 with it and there's zero distortion or wear on it. Granted the punch was made from H13 for use on the power hammer, but all the drifting was done by hand with that mild steel drift.

I managed to get a bunch of coal in the same manner. My helper's grandmothers house used to have a coal furnace and the coal bunker in the basement still had coal in it. When they went to sell the house they wanted all the coal out of the basement and I managed to get 4 55 gallon drums full. Down side is it's all anthracite, and around me that's all that is sold for heating. It works, well sort of. It's a pain to start and you need to keep the blower going full bore all the time. You get a really hot fire but it's not as controllable it seems as bituminous. The stuff I got also seems to develop a fair amount of clinker, but some of that might be due to things like wall plaster than may have flaked off the walls over the years and ended up in the pile. It's better than nothing, but if I had a manual forge it would be almost worthless. I'll probably burn it up anyways, but if I find a decent deal on bulk bituminous, I'll dump the other stuff somewhere so I can have my 4 drums back.

Oh you might want to think about sealing that concrete before you start slopping oil around. I used to have a really good sealer, but the newer government mandated "environmentally friendly" formulas don't hold up as well to oil as the old ones did. I'd need to do some research before I could make any suggestions about current formulas.

Prayers sent. He's very lucky to be alive. I guess I'm just old fashioned. It doesn't occur to me to type on a phone when it's so much easier to just dial and talk to the person. At least that way your eyes hopefully don't leave the road even if you might get distracted like some do on the phone.

Rebar cages are slightly different. In some cases like light poles that want to bend in the wind, the footing can act as a vertical cantilevered beam. In that case the bar which is tied to the anchor bolts does several things. One it helps transfer loads from the bolts that are trying to get pulled out in tension to the concrete. The 2nd is to keep the concrete from bending if the footing is long enough. This would be the case in a concrete column for example.

Don't worry about the wire/rebar. It somewhat of a pet peeve of mine from working in the industry plus the fact I have a bachelors of architecture and studied civil engineering before that. I get a bit tired of all the bla bla bla about wire rebar from home shows and building inspectors who don't know Jack about what they are talking about. I've had inspectors tell me exactly the wrong way to do things, including telling uus to go directly against engineer stamped drawing because they think they know what is going on because the watched Bob Vila on TOH. I'm very impressed if you managed to cut that deep with an abrasive blade vs a diamond blade. Based on depth of cut I'd have guessed a14" or larger diamond blade. Safety warning: NEVER use water on a fiber reinforced abrasive blade. Also NEVER use a fiber reinforced abrasive blade if it has gotten wet. The matrix breaks down and the blade will grenade. Since I'm on that subject, they make two different types of abrasive blades in metal cutting. One for gas saws, and one for electric chop saws. The gas saw blades have a higher RPM rating than the electric saw blades. If you wind up one of the lower RPM blades in a gas saw you have about 5 seconds as the blade starts to wobble uncontrollably to cut the throttle before it grenades. When this happens you have a high chance of catching the parts in your legs, crotch and face if you are leaning out to the side to view the cut. The idiots who used to work as laborers would constantly grab the wrong metal blades from the shop so we quit buying the lower RPM blades and simply used the gas ones on the electric chop saw.

It's often easier to lower the anvil than raise it. I cut my anvil stand down about 4 times until I reached a height I was comfortable with for working on the face. It would have been much harder to keep trying to add height. Since my stand is a fabricated wooden one, a couple quick cuts with the circular saw and I'd shortened up the height.

To kill sound in places like concert halls and recording studios they do several things. One they often separate the two sides of a wall. The wall board attaches to only one side of a stud, and the 2nd side is attached to a different set of studs so vibrations don't transfer between them. The 2nd thing they do is use simple mass to deaden sound. The sand filled walls mentioned above probably work on that principle. In commercial sound proofed rooms for recording studios it's not uncommon to use double layers of 5/8" thick drywall for mass and frequently they use either lead sheeting or leaded drywall for the same purpose. Just a simple double layer of 1/2" drywall is something like 10 times as effective in killing sound as the fiberglass insulation that gets touted all the time as "sound proofing" on home shows. If you are going to insulate, the poly spray foam is a better choice than fiberglass. #1 you get almost 2 times the R value depending on the mix you go with and the density of the foam as well as the fact it fills all voids and cracks greatly reduces sound. One interesting thing with sound. If you have a small opening, then sound radiates out from that point and in many cases can be louder than it the sound was unimpeded. It's a common issue when they put up these "sound walls" along highways. The people who live right next to the walls have the sound cut. However now the sound radiates out from the top of the wall. This frequently allows the sound to travel farther and causes more noise issues that never existed before. Previously the sound stayed down at ground level and got soaked up by trees homes etc. Now since the sound is above all this stuff, it carries significantly farther and thus is louder over a greater area.

A bit off topic, but tow weight is a bit different than payload capacity. There's a lot more to towing than just the numbers though. I frequently see guys pulling loads behind single rear wheel trucks I wouldn't even think about hauling with my F550 with the electric brake controller, dual rear wheels with stiffer side walls and heavier load ratings, significantly larger brake disks and almost twice the simple mass to fight the trailer if it wants to get pushy. Then you get into bumper hitch vs weight distributing hitches, goose neck vs 5th wheel and so on. A health dose of common sense goes a long ways when it comes to payload loading and trailers. Unfortunately common sense doesn't seem quite as common any more.

I know a guy who uses one for demos. While it's not a solidly mounted as my post vise, it's a lot easier to transport. A wagon vise like that is on my "around to" list of things to locate at some point. Either if I spot one at a reasonable price, or if I locate a damaged post vise I can pick up cheap and convert to a similar purpose.

There are good and bad points to a dirt floor. It's a real nightmare if you have any sort of water issues. Mud sucks. It's also hard to move heavy items around on. Pallet jacks, and small wheeled carts don't deal well with dirt floors. I will admit it's easier on the back, that is unless you have to lie on the ground under something... Concrete has it's own pluses and minuses. I've worked off dirt, gravel, blacktop and concrete floored shops over the years. Given a choice I think I prefer concrete for most things. But then again I usually use shop space for so many things, metal working, machining, woodworking, auto repair/plow maintenance. painting...

Are you doing the move yourself or did you hire a riigger? It's nice to have the toys to move things like that yourself if you are serious into stuff like this.

I stand corrected then. I generally think of them interchangeably.

Rant time! Green can be carried to so many extremes... I hate how people think electric cars are "clean" when most of our electric comes from coal in this country. Then there's all the environmental issues dealing with batteries and heavy metals... At some point anything electric based probably has some fossil fuels in the mix some where. If it's the composite structures in the wind turbine blades, the vast amount of energy needed to produce solar panels or even the vast amount of energy needed to create the cement needed for a hydro dam ( many places outside the US use waste tires to "burn" out cement.) On a practical scale, even if you took a shovel and dug your own ore, cooked your own bloom, forged your own tube, forge welding tube clusters typical of modern bikes would be a XXXX. Most people have trouble welding up tube clusters with an arc welder of some sort, let alone trying to do a forge weld on one. You bike would probably end up weighing as much as a small car and I seriously doubt you'd enjoy the ride on solid tires. ( do you really want to try and make them from natural rubber without any fossil fuel involvement? Last time I checked rubber trees aren't exactly "local" to most people...) Also your carbon footprint will probably be significantly higher burning wood for all the required stages. Wood fires aren't usually the most efficient way to convert matter to energy in a "clean" way. I'd love to give all the extreme "green" lovers their greatest wish. I've love to pack them all up and let them live for a month on a small island with zero fossil fuel derived products and see how they enjoy their new life. No refrigeration. No synthetic fabrics. Let them wear rough spun pant fibers and leather/ wool/furs. ( most are vegans or anti fur so that will cut choices down even farther). No phone, no laptops, no cable, no electric lights... Most can't survive without a Starbucks coffee. let alone all their electronic gadgets..