DSW

If I remember correctly a lot of the iron work there was all done by Yellin. As far as the detail, it's wouldn't surprise me if all of that wasn't done hot having just been looking at stuff on th Bryn Athyn cathedral which was done around the same time frame. The stuff in Bryn Athyn was all done hot.

Oh when all else fails, get your kids to do the compacting for you like my neighbor did. :lol:

That's what we did in my bosses horse barn to keep the horses from digging holes in the dirt floor. We managed to get some nice clean clay and rototilled it in well with a bit of portland cement into the existing dirt floor. Then we lightly sprayed the floor with water and continused to rototill it in. You want the floor damp, but not muddy. Rake it out and then you cpmpact with a plate tamper if you want a smooth floor. Right now you couldn't dig in that floor with a shovel and a pick just chips out small pieces. ( PITA when you have to did out rotted stall posts) Other options are crushed concrete, asphalt road millings, and "modified" which is a mixure of 3/4" stone down to stone dust. Modified and crushed concrete pack and knit well when you dampen them slightly and then compact. Millings will knit pretty much on their own dry, but high temps in the summer helps them knit better. You can often get road millings for next to nothing if they are doing repaving in your neighborhood. Note they will probably want you to take at least one full truckload. If you have room for more, be careful what you ask for. If the contractor can dump close to the job site and save on fuel and possibly dumping charges, you may end up with way more than you bargained for if you aren't careful. Crushed concrete is often cheaper than crused stone. Some places specialize in "recycling" concrete. They often get paid on both ends, you have to pay to dump the concrete at their yard, then you have to pay to haul out the stuff they crushed... Crushed conceret was our favorite choice if we needed a cheap solid base material. Note it doesn't drain well, so it's not good for places where you want drainage like french drains. As mentioned a foot tamper or "jumping jack" will beat the snot out of 8-12" and pack them really tight. Down side is they aren't the greatest for getting a nice smooth floor. We'd usually cover that layer with a thin layer to smooth things out, then hit that with the plate tamper.

Wow great deal. I wish I could find a nice anvil like that even at twice the price. 80 lbs is a bit smaller than I'm looking for, but I'd have had the cash out so fast it would have made your head spin.

Propane powered forklift. Down side is it only goes up to 8' and doesn't have any brakes, but it didn't cost me anything. A better one is on the shopping list when I'm out at auctions. I do miss the 15K excavator my buddy used to own for when we needed to move bigger things. On the smaller level, I've got a small engine hoist I've had for years.

I built one of those Zoeller burners and a brick pile forge. My original had only one burner and I had to reduce the size down quite a bit to get enough heat. To have an opening 2 foot by 2 foot, you'll need a ton of burners and a huge amount of propane to feed it to get anything accomplished, not to mention a tremendous amount of bricks. The other down side I found to it was that it weighed a lot. That made it impractical to use as a "portable" forge where I could roll it out of the shop and use it when needed, then put it away for storage. Fire brick does bad things when it gets wet and you heat it, so it needs to be protected from rain. You can see my original set up had an interior of roughly 16" x 8" x 6" and one burner was totally inadequite. I reduced the interior volume to about 8" x 4" x 4" and managed to get a decent heat out of it but it took a bit of time to get things to heat up. The gas forges we had in my forge class were all 2 burner Whisper Moma Forges from NC Forge. Inside size was about 12" x 3" x 6" IIRC and I think Centaur sells them fopr around $500 plus shipping. I did find that some of my larger pieces needed to be worked on the coal forge in class because of ho large they got, but the fact I could light up and shut off the gas forge was a big plus. I'm betting by the time I got done getting the brick, gas regulator and so on I was most of the way towards simply buying one of the Whisper Momas. Most of the stuff I had like an existing gas reg didn't work right and needed to be upgraded. Eventually I'll probably sit down and build at least 2 more burners for my gas forge and probably copy the NC design and make a Kawool lined metal forge for portability. If not I'll just save the burner stuff to build a casting furnace and simply buy a gas forge.

Nice score.

I have a soft floor in the "shop" so mine is sitting on a 1" thick chunk of steel with a hole in it roughly the same size as the bottom of the post vise.

I located a link that covers some info on the metal work at the cathedral. http://www.newchurchhistory.org/arti...emetalwork.php

Lastly some newer handrails Warren Holzman of Iron Studio In Phila. made for the museum a few years back. Monel was cost prohibitive, but they managed to antique stainless so it's almost impossible to tell the difference between it and the monel elsewhere.Warren did some of the newer metal work in the cathedral also and teaches the forging classes for the college associated with the church and Glencairn museum.

The observation deck of the tower is all done in stone or monel.

Some interior picts of some details. Fireplace accessories and heating grate. All done in forged monel with pass thru joints and collars.

The courtyard doors off the main hall are one of the few places in Glencairn where the metal work isn't monel. The copper doors open out into the inner courtyard, and the bronze ones open onto the terrace. Again all hand worked. each one of the monel "disks" is unique. They didn't want any piece to be an exact copy of any other piece anywhere in the house since no two items are ever the same in nature.

Since everyone liked the picts of the Cathedral, I thought I'd toss up a few of the picts I took the week before on the tour of Gleancairn. Unfortunately I only brought my Nikon with me and it won't let me manually set the ISO to take nice picts without the flash ( flash picts were not allowed). Darn Nikon just wanted to keep slowing down the shutter speed and many of the interior picts came out too blurry to see anything. http://www.glencairnmuseum.org/ Not a lot on the metal work, but this video gives some good background on the concepts behind Glencairn and the cathedral.

I'm betting a tour could probably get aranged for a group like that. The college that is affiliated with the church is trying to grow it's blacksmithing program and something like that would probably go a long way towards promoting it. If ABANA was serious about setting up a tour, I could pass along the contact info for the person in charge of the blacksmithing program at the college and she could probably make the arangements.

I'm glad everyone liked the picts. I was a bit worried since this site posts up such small picts that people wouldn't take the time to actually look at many of them. I'd have loved to posted up larger picts, but my Comcast wireless is spotty at best and the bigger picts were taking too long to load. Stuart I sent you a PM.

And finally just a couple quick picts of some of the stone work. They put the same attention to detail and an attempt to make everything unique in all parts of the building, not just the metal work. I just had to edit the last 18 posts, please do not use over sized fonts, if your eyes are that bad you can enlarge your screen to read better using the Control Plus keys ^+

Winding down now... This one shows part of a monel framed glass door. Look at how they fitted the doors to the stone work. Note how they split the nuts that hold the panels together where they meet at the door to the fixed side lights. I wish the over all pict had turned out so you'd get a better over all feel for this one. Last pict shows the nut/bolt assembly from the side of the door with the door open.

Another railing and some misc grates.

Not too many more to go... The attention to detail continues to the hand forged monel window frames and window catches, plus the hold open hardware... Again each window handle is unique. These two rooms must have had 10 to 15 window handles each...

No detail is too small for them. A few of the Monel lights, and they even made the switch plates and switch plate screws and the nuts that attach the door hinges!

Next stair is probably one of the latter peices of the metal work here at the cathedral and shows as far as design style goes. Shame it's not readily accessible to the public. Again all of this is sheet or bar stock and forged, not cast. Note how the work turns in two directions at the corner to match the stair. I wish these picts showed the curve better than they do. It's not a straight 90 deg angle like it looks in the picts.

Ok now how about some stair rails... 1st on the list is one in the outer court. Like everything else it's all monel antiqued to look like aged bronze. In this case however the antiquing has started to wear off from exposure to the elements and you start to see more of the bare monel than you do elsewhere. It does allow you to more easily see some of the OA welds that they did to do repairs and so on to the work when they made it.

Again this one deserves two posts for picts... Each finial at the top is also different than all the others. Shame they are so high up you can't see them all that well. Detail of some of the pass thru joints and collars that are used to build this.

Inside there is another impressive set of grill work in I guess what might be referred to as the "chapel" possibly. The 4 panels are roughly 4' wide and 12' high and every detail is unique throughout the whole thing. Again you could spend hours looking at all the detail hera and how it's all put together....