Chinobi

cool, thanks :) I missed a bronze forging class taught by Dorothy Stiegler earlier this year and I have been kicking myself ever since =/

stroke of genius frosty, especially with so much vertical clearance you dont need to worry about clipping knuckles on the hot cut! it might be fun to forge a spike into a miniature putter for an office miniput set :)

those are beautiful! pardon the probably simple/silly question, but are the bronze elements cast or forged? they look like they are forged but i associate the material more with casting. just curious.

i might be able to put you in touch with a slump glass artist somewhere in the southern california area, she may have more connections in that field, but id have to stepchild the info through at least one other person because i never got her contact and have forgotten her hame :(

I know more than one very accomplished woodworker-turned-blacksmith that started out with the 'I just wanted to make myself a chisel' quandry, slippery slope my friend :) but one of the best slip-n-slides you can ride! given also your reference to in-n-out burger there is a better than 80% chance that you are somewhere in California? (of course there are pockets in Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Texas according to el google) drop a regional location into your profile and you might be able to get some face to face training from somebody near you who might have more experience with forge welding high carbon bits and hardening that are probably less common in the farrier trade. I cant recall if it was here on the forum or a conversation in person, but somebody said that they gauge their willingness to purchase someone else's metalwork by a comparison of what they thought it would cost for them to attempt to copy the work and get it right (time learning technique/reverse engineering the method, time to forge, fuel, material, specialized tooling etc) against what the asking price was. if it was going to cost significantly more to produce their own that justified the purchase price.

Havoc, excellent work! thank you as well for posting such thorough WIP photos here and in your hot set thread :) now the questions: what size/steel did you start with? final weight of the heads? would you be so kind as to post a photo of the business end of your (what appears to be) slitting chisel and drift? photo as well of what you use to fuller behind the face/pein? are you using a hardie/top combo, just one or the other, or a guillotine? do you have any pic's of the handle without the head attached, or a shot of your wedge layout? sorry to bomb you with questions, im getting overly excited about forging hammers being just over a month away from a hammer class at the end of September :)

temper colors are governed by the thickness of the oxide layer on the surface of the metal. as the metal ages it continues to oxidize (significantly slower at room temp, almost in real time at higher temperatures, allowing us to use it as a rough thermometer), altering the patina's appearance over time. this can be halted by applying a surface finish such as renaissance wax, bees wax, shellac, varnish, clearcoat or any number of other surface finishes (see the alchemy subforum, there are several good discussions with recipes over there). however: the application of such a surface coat WILL by itself alter the appearance of the patina, so be prepared for that and make yourself a sample blank of the same materials to see exactly how much it will shift.

one has to be careful of associating oneself too closely with a particular animal :) my fiancé's cousin (I forget exactly how) ended up associated with elk/moose, and now she has a full wall bookcase floor to ceiling packed with all variants of elk, stuffed, porcelain, etc. so choose wisely :) hope you can get some good use from the images, no worries if not :)

I dunno man, el google is coming up dry for as many permutations of your description as I can think of, so is youtube for that matter =/ sorry for the thread derailment :) moral of the story: don't use oil!

Frosty if you have a title for that (or some good descriptive keywords for a thorough googling) I would love to get ahold of a copy/link to the vid :) would make for a good training film!

Nice work there! looks very lunar with the hammer texture :)

again, or still? last I checked (2-3 mo ago) he was going dark for medical reasons, I didn't keep track of how long he was going to be out of it. I hope he is mending well! hmm, I guess it would be again, re-opened in may.

Coyote, that's a very different product from UMO. Its part of the preparation for the structural section of the road intended to act as a water barrier and binder to help the next layer (base or AC) 'stick' to the subgrade. see the 'primecoat' section here for example: http://www.pavementinteractive.org/article/subgrade-preparation-for-new-pavements/

Nick, thanks for the project idea and the book tip! Gotta see if i can get ahold of a copy :) Great job on the padlock, when can we expect the next example? ;)

i know its ludicrous to to make such an assumption based on just my vice and pics of what i have seen from you all, but wouldnt putting the leg beneath the jaw that pivots potentially interfere with the operation of the vice? the base of the frame at the point where that 'free' jaw attaches is the hinge, seems unstable and potentially detrimental to install the leg at that point, not to mention being a weaker structure. i would like to see a pic of this, now im curious :)

good thought yahoo, the natural form of the letters would lend itself to being drawn into the image of an anvil, left arm of the Y becomes the horn, top bar of the F becomes the heel. of course, its NS's touchmark, so his call :)

yep, that could work too, get a few hundred printed on some vinyl stickers and go from there. '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> for example and I cant for the life of me find a thread that I feel like I saw very recently about etching touchmarks into finished blades. IIRC the knife in the pictures was a really slick looking stainless blade and handle forged from a single piece. the author mentioned taking their touchmark icon to a print shop and having to get a few hundred to meet the minimum for a custom order. they were using a battery charger and q-tips held in jumper cable type clamps as leads and recommended using a copper clamp to attach to the piece to avoid/mitigate any scratching. but maybe im just going nuts....

rats, overshot my edit window. heres a PDF of it that is drawn in a 6"x6" box, that way it can be scaled down to any size and the relative image quality will only improve. if you start small and increase the size all your little errors, shakes, and pixels become BIG and the image quality goes out the window. anyway, I was shooting for it to be visible if produced on a 1/2" square punch (12x reduction). I was looking at ways to superimpose the anvil on top of the rooster, or put the tail plume off the heel or out of the hardie and the wattles on the horn, but it was getting kinda sloppy and I ran outa time =/ let me know if you like, or dislike anything. I saved the cad file so I can edit it indefinitely. also I just ran it out as a pdf because its quick, if you want a jpeg or whatever at some other size let me know and I can get to that after work. enjoy :) Yardbird Forge Touchmark 6in.pdf edit: further thought, if you want the lettering to be larger relative to everything to make it more legible there is plenty of space outside of the outlines to put characters. for instance, Y low and left of the anvil below the horn, B in the waist towards the face, F under the heel on the right. or perhaps Y above the horn, B in the chicken, and F just above the heel. food for thought.

baaahhhahaha omg are you sure you don't want a polish? XD that is the best bird-fro ever!

got a relative size in mind? you might have a cleaner image if you go for a stylized rooster rather than such a literal outline with so much detail. i can take a swing at it in autocad tomorrow during lunch if i remember/have time/nobody beats me to it. also do you have any preferences for how the anvil should look (IE thick heel like a brooks, narrow waisted farrier, etc) or just cartoon?

thanks francis, spike-tongs seems like a lot more exercise than i am prepared for at this stage! might have to hold off on that project for a while :)

Dustin's signature is the only one signed as gandhi that seems to be applicable “Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> Mainely,Bob quoted the following in a thread about unions, didnt read the rest of the topic but that seems like fertile ground for such a sentiment '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> "The truth is that man needs work even more than he needs a wage.Those who seek the welfare of the workers,should be less anxious to obtain good pay,good holidays and good pensions for them as good work,which is the first of their goods.For the object of work is not so much to make objects as it is to make men.A man makes himself by making something useful" Matahma Ghandi and i think i found it, courtesy of John Neeman '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> "It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God." Mahathma Ghandi gotta remember to check common misspellings when you want to exhaustively google something :)

see photo #2 in the first post for the storyboard procedure :) have to imply exactly whats going on, but its pretty comprehensive.

that alone is worth learning to drop tong forge weld to circumvent :)

Thanks Swede, do you draw the full 1" height down to the final dimension of the rein? do you do anything special or just frequently turn it onto the flat side for a few strikes to keep it from buckling/bending? I was working primarily on the horn with either my crosspein (pein side) or this way oversized diagonal pein (sucker is like 4.5lbs) and coming back to the face only to level out the fullering. they close pretty close to parallel, the very tip got too thin and burned a little so I will need to knock that down with a file, if after they are dressed it doesn't close cleanly then yes I will need to adjust the profile.