maddog

some info here welding forklift tines

The opinion is 4140 or similar. Which is what you would expect for that use.

I don't recall ever using SifBronze but I have used a number of brazing fluxes and they all worked very well for forge welding especially in a propane forge. Just a lot more expensive than buying plain borax from the laundry aisle in the supermarket. I think brazing fluxes are mostly borax anyway. I have also used plain borax to braze and that worked fine too

If all else fails you can buy it from the pottery supply houses mail order.

Technicus Joe has a video on youtube of how to make bolthead tongs hes a great smith and his tutorials are very informative!...
I Hope This Helps!!

Just my opinion: There may be some useful tips in those videos but in general his forging technique is not something you would want to emulate.

"He asked what era of Blacksmihing I do."...........Folk would ask me that too. I just gave them the reserve office salute, a shrugged of my shoulders. I didn't do any era of smithing, I used it as a method to achieve what I wanted to accomplish in my art. I couldn't make what I want any other way. The question had no relevance to what I was doing. One fellow was very insistent that I give him an answer, I told him he was an idiot and to get out of my studio. I'm not a play actor of any period, I don't dress up for the American Colonial Period, Spanish Colonial Period, Civil War Period, Cowboys and Indians nor any other such thing, I made art. How many of us strive to be associated with a particular period of history? Not many, so we are contemporary smiths or contemporary hobbyist smiths, of this period in time, not the past, now.

Well said. Thank you. We live and work in modern times. There is nothing about blacksmithing that says it has to be frozen in some bygone era. People who do try to conform to some historical period are practising a specialty, like the weavers or carpenters in SCA.

Taper should be 1:12 or a bit less. If the nozzle projects 1.5" past the burner tube, that comes out to 1/8".

Zoeller sells preformed SS flares for $10 if buying ready made appeals to you. You can't beat a pressed form for this kind of shape. But IMO flaring a piece of 1" on the horn would be plenty good enough. Whether SS or black pipe my nozzles always die young.

You might consider doing without the nozzle and forming the flare in the kaowool itself. Make a carboard cone of the right length and taper, coat the surface with a heavy layer of ITC 100 and push it up into the aperture in the wool. Fire up the burner and the paper form will just burn out.

If it were a cell phone, who would she be talking to?

Over the last 2000 years I would think the means of powering things would have changed things dramatically.
Off the top of my head it would have progressed from water to steam to electric/internal combustion at nearly the same time.
Add to that the development of electric/electronic and hydraulic/pneumatic drive and control systems and you have some very large impacts that moved and shaped the industrial revolution.
The latest development that has been at least as significant as the Bessemer converter,if not overshadowing it, and a huge change in the balance of labor to material has been what we now calling the "digital age" and computer controls for dang near everything.Digital controls and robotics are probably the biggest change in manufacturing in history to date in relation to labor/manhours vs materials vs manufacturing cost reduction....

Well the wide spread adoption of the water wheel was really the precursor to the Industrial Revolution. The consequences of the digital age will be huge, no doubt about it. It will probably overshadow all the changes that have gone before. It's already had a big impact on the steel industry but it hasn't really hit smithing yet. At least not enough to be considered a revolution. All these changes are in the last few hundred years and part of an era of rapid and accelerating change so they sorta belong together.

I have no argument with the significance of the innovations you listed but I guess what I am asking is, between the dawn of the Iron age and the Industrial Revolution, what profound changes occurred in the craft?

... i personally have set up my shop as what was available in 1910 and am amazed what tools were available! power hacksaw, grinders, mills, lathes, power hammers, fly press, punch press shears ect were all available by 1910 ! in fact oxy acyl welding rigs were around by then... i cant think of much that i use to make product that wasnt around by then...

MIG, TIG, plasma cutters, CNC come to mind. What else would you add? None of those brought fundamental changes to blacksmithing or ironworking.

In the 19th century, the Bessemer converter and the change in the balance of costs between labor and material that came with the industrial revolution brought profound changes to smithing. What other comparable events have occurred in the last, say, 2000 years of smithing history?

augh! Now I am going to spend more money!

I think shall unload some of my books and DVDs in the tailgating section.

Well my anvil is an old HB and I have welded it in places, mainly to build up edges and I have plans to do more. I've been using the Messer MG740 that irnsrgn recommended in his BP and 7018. So far so good. Soft doesnt bother me. Even annealed, the plate holds up very well for my work. And if it does deform in a few years, hey I welded it once, I can weld it again.

But creating brittle regions worries me. I would rather take the torch and draw the temper on the HAZ than leave it hard quenched as Grant explains.

You might consider packing the interior of the forge with soft material, old clothes and the like, to stabilize it during travel and soak up some of the shock.

One can do large work with a small forge. The work does not have to fit into the forge. If you make a porch at the mouth of the forge and set up a soft firebrick wall to reflect back the heat, you can certainly bend and get stuff to yellow. I've even done welds like that. But I get the impression that you are all fired up (har har har) about your forge design so it's moot. It looks like an interesting design.

If you haven't done so already, you should check out Frosty's design for a variable forge. It appears similar to yours, essentialy a roof and a floor while the walls are fire brick stacked to the required height. MonsterMetal also, has just built a ribbon burner forge with what appears to me to be a variable chamber. If it were me, I would proceed incrementally. Construct the roof with the burner, set it up with stacked soft firebrick walls and see how it goes. After using it that way for a while, I would then design the side modules.

AFAIK there really is no way to get kaowool or fire brick, or refractory to span a horizontal gap when laid straight across without support. The brick will sag when it gets hot and then crack when it cools. Kaowool can be glued onto metal but you will only bond the top layer and the rest will just sag and cause the protective coat to flake off. The solutions that I know of are:

1. Insboard or equivalent.

2. Kaowool tethered to the roof with nichrome wire and refractory buttons.

3. An arch structure made of wool or refractory or carved fire brick.

4. A block of pleated kaowool. Grant Sarver (NakedAnvil) discusses this and has a picture posted in one thread.


Ribbon burners don't turn down very well. They depend on a minimum flow of air/gas mixture to cool themselves. If you turn them down too low, they are prone to ignite the mixture in the plenum at the back. This means that when you want to operate in small volume mode, you may have way too much burner. The Pine Ridge 4x4 burner is matched to a 1 cu ft volume.

I get tired of listening to grinders.. and other power tools, I know that my hand tools are not as fast as power tools... but they also lack most of the noise too....

I like using files .. chisels ... planes ... I work iron and wood.... over power tools.. it is just more satisfying... that is not to say I eschew them... I just enjoy using them when I have the time...

just a thought...
Cliff

Cliff,

I feel the same way. I much prefer using hand tools. I use my hacksaw and wood saws whenever reasonably possible. For a small job, if you factor in setup time it's often faster. I particularly hate the screamers: Angle grinders, chopsaws and routers. But it's not just the noise. There is a feeling of contact with the material that gets lost when a power tool is involved.

But I couldn't manage without power tools. This morning I had to grind out some crummy welds on sheet metal. That would have been an awful job with a chisel and a file.

This is kind of a design question, so hopefully this is an acceptable thread in which to post it.

Do ribbon burners have any inherent advantages compared to more common forge burners, other than more even distribution of the heat? Larry commented in the other thread that his new forge is getting extremely hot with the ribbon burner -- but what's making it so hot? Is the ribbon burner just using a bunch of extra fuel (compared to a lower-tech burner), or is it using a similar amount of fuel more efficiently?

Ribbon burners achieve more effective combustion. Tube burners produce a single large flame envelope and there isn't sufficient time for the mixture to burn completely. The problem gets worse when the flow is cranked up for high heat since the flame cone is now larger and has, proportionately, less surface area for its volume and the mixture velocity is higher. Ribbon burners produce an array of little flamelets with a much higher surface area per unit volume of mixture.


The shop made ribbon burners being made by smiths are probably far from optimal, since they are designed by "seat of the pants" engineering, yet people report a significant increase in fuel efficiency together with very high performance.

Cold chisels have always been the step children of my tool collection. I used them for the odd brutal job like shearing a rivet head but always considered them a very limited tool. Anyway today I needed to cut an arc out of a piece of 1/8" strap. I hogged the cut by hackswing a series of cuts down close to the line and then clamped the piece in the vise and sheared out the strips with a chisel which left a very ragged edge. At this point I usually reach for the grinder but I had been using it all day and was sick of it. So I decided to see how far I could go with the chisel. I quickly found I could pare out thin chips with surprisingly fine control. The photos show the piece after chiseling. It took only a couple of licks with the file after that. I dont think a grinder would have been much faster.

I think I will clean up my cold chisels and learn to use them.

The pre and post heat help deal stresses in the HAZ and also help with distortion and cracking due to shrinkage.
I have also had a lot of luck running short beads and peening the weld while still hot.I use a needle gun or chatter gun with a single round chisel in it rather than needles and run down the center and then the sides of the bead before continuing on.
I figure if it works for welding cast iron then it can`t hurt to use the same approach on other tricky unions of finicky or less than friendly metal.
"A proper beating will teach both parties to behave" is a time tested old school technique I believe.

Lol. Thanks Bob.

Pine Ridge Burners sell a small ribbon burner for $120, which seems absurdly cheap. Especialy when you consider it's professionaly designed.

http://www.pineridgeburner.com/sales#prices

Some pictures of the inside would be useful. I went and found a picture online of a ProForge but it only shows the exterior.

From what I know of refractories they are rather delicate and brittle. My forges dont travel. Bouncing around in the back of a truck going over unpaved roads sounds pretty rough. But a lot of farriers carry propane forges out to their work. So there must be some answer. There are hi temp refractory repair materials for patching and even adhesives. Gluing the ends onto the cylinder might cause more stress on the cylinder and make it crack faster since it wont be able to slide around. Kaowool doesnt last long in forge interior unless it's coated. It's still pretty fragile and the coating will rub away easily. Fine cracks are not always a problem but if the hot gas finds its way out to the outside, it can damage the steel shell.

Why don't you contact the manufacturer and ask them for advice? It's their forge. They want farriers to be happy with it.

I really think this ad is tongue in cheek. Hard to know. It' pretty xxxx funny though.

I do think they are both parts of the same anvil. It broke at a weld and the flaps on the side of the broken piece were to dress the weld. On most American style anvils (narrow waist) the step is way out ahead of the body. The plate must have just broken with the weld. Forge welding is the gold standard repair but I am sure I could do a very effective repair with a deeply vee'd arc weld.

I'd give $50 for it without hesitation if I could pick it up. It's great to know that this old tool is going to be brought back to life and live in a blacksmith's shop.

People do that a lot, but it only helps with the mechanical stresses - a little. The main thing is the "heat affected zone". As you weld, your puddle raises the temperature of adjacent material to above austenizing temperature and as you move on the heat is sucked out by the mass of the part. It might not look like it, but this is "quenching" as extreme as water! Even with a slow cool the "HAZ" will be hard as glass. Post heating is actually just tempering the hardened part and can only be done AFTER the part cools to room temperature.

As I understand it, this is not an issue if the anvil is preheated??

... I considered using a long pipe in the bottom of the forge, drilled with a series of large holes (to cut the back pressure as far as reasonably possible), and a naturally aspirated burner (I have a T-Rex) as an inducer. It'd be similar to this, but maybe with even better heat distribution: http://www.dfoggknives.com/photogallery/DrumForgePS/DrumForge.htm Since I'm not shooting for much above 1700 degrees, I figured simple black pipe could work for the ribbon, at least for a proof of concept. Based on what y'all are saying, even with large holes in the ribbon, a naturally aspirated burner just may not work very well in this capacity.

...

The term "ribbon burner" generally doesnt refer to a specific design. In the combustion industry it's used to describe any burner design where the combustion is distributed over an array of small flames, usually in a line. The glass blowers, and by imitation, the smithing community use the term more specifically to refer to a block of refractory with a grid of small holes. These are also referred to as "perforated refractory" burners.

IMO, the perforated black pipe with an atmospheric inducer, will work, if you can keep the burner pipe itself cool enough. This is the design used in barbecues and home heating furnaces. The flame temp is there, the BTU output is there if you have enough holes burning. Barbecues usually dont get that hot because they are not well insulated and leak away the heat. Heating furnaces are actively cooled by forcing air around the fire box. But you have a similar problem to that in refractory block ribbon burners. The mixture is moving fast as it exits the little jets but slowly inside the pipe. If the pipe gets hot enough (around 800F) it could ignite the mixture inside it.

It seems like a very easy idea to test. Just perforate a length of 1" black pipe, cap off one end, stick the TRex 3/4" in the other and go. There's nothing like real experimental data, it beats conjecture (and complex calculation any day). And hey, if it's a bust, you have an iron flute! Tack it onto the garden gnome you have in your front yard and impress the neighbors! :)

Here is a thread with detailed information on several different ribbon burner designs including some posts from the maker of Pine Ridge burners.

Ribbon Burner Thread

Its a must read if you are going to design one yourself.


Ribbon burners generaly have a low turn down ratio because of the plenum behind the burner block. Meaning they don't idle very well.

The low end of a burner's performance is limited by the need to keep the mixture flowing faster than the flame velocity (as Phil just explained) and also the need to keep the back end of the burner cool. When the air/gas flow is turned down, the back end of the burner starts to heat up. If the mixture is moving slowly in that area, it can ignite either from the temperature of the burner body or by the flame propogating back through the burner tube if conditions allow it.

The plenum in ribbon burners is prone to this. The plenum behind the block is a large volume, low velocity area. As long as there is enough flow to cool the plenum and the back of the block, it's fine but if its turned down and the plenum gets hot, the mixture in the plenum can ignite. This is usually not dangerous but will trash the burner quite quickly.

At a glance, that looks like a nice grinder kit. And for the work he puts into it, the price is cheap. I assume the motor is not included. But it seems over engineered. Is 1/2" plate really necessary? And is it worth the extra effort to be able to change belt sizes? Also a welded fabricated construction would be both stronger and a lot cheaper.

That's awesome CurlyGeorge. Should be very useful. Thanks for posting the pix. I think this thread could be a real help to people starting on their first forge. It's a clear demonstration that a straightforward, no nonsense design will produce a very effective forge.

Big or small, size really doesnt matter. It's how you use your forge that counts :)

lol

You're telling me I don't need a forge or a hammer?

I like this video. It's a reality check. He makes a living with that setup. Two goats for a spear head? You'd be lucky to get that price for your blades!

Well he does have a forge. He dug a hole in Africa which came ready made. The moving parts are a small boy which he probably made himself.

Notice that his anvil is securely mounted. And also that he uses his fingers to rake the coals!!

I just dont understand why he hasn't ruined his arm by pounding with that piece of steel. I've watched the video several times carefully and I dont see his hand releasing at the point of impact.

Phil, Thats a great little forge. I like the big tongs too. Actually I am right now building a small forge of very similar proportions.