Chinobi

unless the thread was edited the title shows 'Livermore california' :) steve does have a point though, you will be doing yourself a service to update your profile with your location so it will show up beneath your name when you post, that way subsequent topics can get more directed feedback. that said, welcome aboard! I hate to say it but you literally JUST missed the California Blacksmith Association spring conference, which was held down at the antique steam and gas museum in Vista CA, a little north of San Diego, from your road trip description I think you would have had a blast there, they have hundreds of old tractors and steam engines on display, and their blacksmith shop has a functional lineshaft powering several powerhammers and other tools. Being located where you are there is a strong CBA presence in close proximity to you, I would highly recommend checking out www.calsmith.org and becoming a member, their 'member year' has just rolled over (spring conference is kind of 'new years') so you will get the most bang for your membership dollar as you will get the full year, instead of partial if you join later on. there are a number of workshops held up in your area, but you might need to drive a little to get there, check the site to see what is coming up as they are recurring and pretty frequent. welcome again! :)

"steel nails" covers a lot of ground :) without knowing where you are i will default to my own experience looking at home depot and lowes for high carbon nails as premade small hand tool blanks. HD didnt carry beans in terms of appreciably harden-able nail stock, and lowes gave me the run-around claiming that they were 'getting another truck in on thursday' (without saying what was IN it). i eventually ordered some cut masonry nails from tremont nails, which clock in at a mere 35 points of carbon, which is not fantastic for much other than making it that much more irritating to file/grind/shape without heating them up and forging to profile. your experimental quenching results are consistent though, water is a faster quench than oil so it will be somewhat harder with the water than with the oil, somewhat. you could try knocking together a batch of superquench to try to squeak out a tiny bit more hardness, but i probably wouldnt waste the time. if you still have the box or label and can tell us exactly what you bought you might have a chance at some answers, otherwise, theres not enough info provided for the experts to give you anything more specific =/

congrats! do post some pics :)

I always thought about trying to learn to do the left side with my left hand, but I never felt it was really worth the risk :P so I do the left side backhand and haven't hurt myself yet! I miss having enough time to actually use my straight razor :'( im right handed, but my handwriting is so bad in general, that writing lefty doesn't leap out as being totally out of place!

i have to wonder if that is the culmination of the project brought up in this thread '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> and i wonder if it is even worth looking at :)

lot of variables some into play when you start to bring it into the real world. for instance, after the first blow from the smaller hammer the surface area that will be in contact at impact is now going to be larger, which will reduce the 'felt' PSI of the impact as it is spread over a larger area. should be a good way to keep velocity constant, may need to include some kind of catch to prevent bouncing secondary impacts. copper also work hardens, so if you are trying to determine a precise curve that may influence trials that involve multiple impacts as well that sounds like a fun set of experiments though, shame I wont be in SD for much longer than the conference this weekend or I would try to stop by and lend a hand =/ edit: actually, if you want to get rid of the idiosyncrasies of deforming metal and just determine the amount of force supplied by the blow you could switch the copper cylinder for a rod restrained in a friction collar and measure how far the hammer blows drive the rod through. that way the resistance is constant and you can measure linearly how far the rod traveled and graph that. but of course that is an attempt to bring practice as close to theory as possible, so the results should end up pretty close to the math.

well, he still hasn't given us what the material to be drilled through is, which makes a big difference. bits for chewing through a row of framing studs will differ from those going through metal, from those like the star dril Mitch posted, to those for masonry. what it sounds like he is describing is the wood drill bits described and diagrammed by weygers on page 159 (chapter 18 of TMB) which are made from low carbon/mild steel nails.

Small stuff can be done with a plumbers torch, but of course small is still relative...

I have to keep reminding myself that I already have one hanging in the closet at home XD I find this design so much more appealing than the ugly-nomic tactical 'hawks from the mass produced market, and the sub-tactical/woodsy stuff from places like CRKT.

sounds like a whirlwind trip!

its symmetric right? an equilateral triangle during setup? make a jig for your vise that has an adjustable stop plate to control the depth of the bend, and has a preset 150 degree guide (or maybe a little less, 145 or so, in case it flexes elastically back), then you can just set your depth, heat the ends of the bars, crank out 6 uniform bends and go straight to welding from there. I don't know if theres a very elegant solution to the awkwardness of trying to manipulate a large(depending on the scale of the thing) triangle in the forge and while trying to forge weld it though... it might be better to continue to weld them while they are parallel and just make yourself a 60 degree wedge tool to drive in and open the legs up while you hold the welded portion in the vise.

much so, thank you Thomas, the coffee has had time to work its magic and im with you now :) that sounds like a fun project!

Sounds like fun Thomas :) im having an acute attack of 'Monday brain' and im having difficulty tracking your procedure into a mental picture of it, do you have a real picture? it sounds like a big trivet? and thank you for now making me way too hungry thinking about eggs bacon and pancakes! as for me, my fiancé and I were just getting our coats and about to walk out the door from my sisters place after Easter lunch and my mom asks my dad to take a look at the leak under the sink which was apparently getting water on her shoes earlier. so of course im the only person with a flashlight handy and it turns out the garbage disposal is leaking from the body so my dad and I hump it out to home depot several miles away, buy a new one and a few consumables like wire nuts, come back we install the new one. it was fun to do because I enjoy fixing stuff and I didn't want my dad to have to do it himself (hes over 70), but my fiancé was (is...? O.O) pretty bugged that we couldn't leave earlier, as we had a variety of wedding planning stuff that we needed to get done. its pretty much par for the course for my family though, take a trip, something breaks, I cant remember the last time I went on vacation and didn't end up with a wrench, screw driver, or paint brush in hand at some point :)

The argument is about which variable will increase the effect (energy) more when the other is held constant. It's a moot point that you will get more benefit if you increase BOTH variables at the same time! Plus, If you are physically capable of jumping from a 2 pound hammer swung at (for simplicity) 'regular' speed to a 4 lb at double, it's a fair bet that you were working far below your potential to start with. Aspery's point in bringing this particular equation into the mix (obviously I can't speak for him, but I have read all 3 of his books and taken his 5 day course, make of this students opinion what you will) is to illustrate that you don't NEED to reach for a big honkin hand sledge to get more 'bang' for your swing, rather that you can increase your power just by improving your swing technique (let's face it, it's geared towards new folks like me who are still beginners or are entirely new to all of this, or people who are looking to improve efficiency) with the intent to increase head velocity at the time of impact. Usually by maximizing the range motion of each of the pivot points in your arm and snapping through with your fingers just before impact, which will REALLY goose up velocity, and therefore energy, without needing to exhaust yourself lifting and swinging a heavier hammer.

Welcome back and congrats again :). I hope everything went smoothly and you guys had a great honeymoon!

you do any forge welding with borax in said forge? thatl gum you up in a hurry. design your forge with a replaceable/disposable sacrificial floor layer for when you weld and remove it when you are not using it. if its actually molten scale....that's just scary hot....

looks great Darren! I don't often comment because it just gets repetitive, but your work is tight as a drum and very inspiring, keep it up! and did you redo/get a new touchmark, it looks different (in a good way ;) ), or have you just not been signing the last several blades?

my guess would be that there may be some of that Teflon putty (or is it tape?) obstructing the tube or the connection, there appears to be considerable extrusion at the nozzle of the right hand tank, might be a similar deposit on the inside as well.

It is intended to operate with both active, but it will work just fine with only one burning. No sense owning a twin if you plan to run it single, thats just a temporary solution to overdrawing, you still need to figure out WHY it is happening. You can brick up the back a little to reduce the chamber volume if it really came down to it. Just make sure you shut the choke sleeve on the inactive burner all the way or it will act like a chimney and fry the nozzle, could even damage the rubber hose.

if you look at the first picture, the tank on the left has a very well defined frost ring while the tank on the right doesn't appear to have any, are both tanks drawing equally in that configuration I wonder? at the forge school I attend we are running the same model forges (from what I can see) and each one feeds from a 100lb tank with a splitter after the reg to feed the twin burners. my memory is foggy but I don't think they are typically set above 10 PSI at the reg, except maybe on startup if we really need to ramp it up. even still, we sometimes have to shut down a burner in the afternoon and run it single because they start to 'chirp' if the tank is frosting up and dropping pressure. doesn't happen every time, just greater than zero. used to be a huge problem when we were running them on 20 pounders when the forges were brand new. try shutting down a burner (if it doesn't interfere with the work) next time that happens. edit: I should add that the forges I am referencing are in Los Angeles.

on the flip side, I read that as 'I have questions in several different fields, so rather than start 5 different threads in 5 places here they are all in one place.' Not as 'I know there are stickies and other threads covering this, but please summarize them for me', that one is implied ;)

Thats awesome Mike! i was lobbying to get brian to put a stop in to Los Angeles but unfortunately the schedule didnt work :( looks like you got some nice new tooling out of it and probably learned a lot too :)

bear in mind that if you are trying to purchase a product off the rack that will match what you end up with after squaring up a 6mm ROUND you are not actually looking for 6mm square. forging the round into square will leave you with something closer to 5mm square, plus or minus.

looks really neat! I think we can add another item to the collective theft deterrent suite too; forged caltrops! change that nice safe upset end to a rusty point and scatter a handful of those around the shop entrance when you go on vacation :ph34r:

shoot james an email from his website, or look him up on facebook. He is pretty responsive, and if that procedure is what you are after im certain he can do it. those particular how-to's will not net you a 'seamless' woodgrain either by the way. you can get a wood grain on either side of the billet before the split, however when you split it and drift the center open you will always end up with the ends of the billet visible, which will be a series of relatively straight lines (you will also be splitting in the same plane as your layers, which is a huge potential for the stack to fail and split in half). if you want a true seamless woodgrain you would need to make up a billet, flatten it out into a sheet of whatever thickness you want, and texture it to have the wood grain. then you can cut a circle out of it, and cut or punch a circular hole in the center of that, leaving you with a washer. now off to the ring mandrel to knock the outside circumference down and raise/form that washer into a more tube like form. this leaves you with your original wood grain pattern uninterrupted along the entire outside face of the ring. you will likely need to do some filing and cleanup, so oversize is better than undersize, and you can pad thickness and width with rails and an inner liner. hope that makes sense :) you could of course just check out Jim's website too ;) though I think I do see some strategically placed seams in some of them. http://www.mokume-gane.com/index.php?page=collections&subpage=mokume_patterns&subsubpage=woodgrain_pattern