Chinobi

pretty nice owl you have already :) if you don't have one already go pick up a copy of The Iron Menagerie, its less than 20$ I think and it has something like 19 different faces and styles of faces, one of which IIRC is a pretty neat looking owl.

edit: you can actually see it on the middle left of the cover

http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Menagerie-Guild-Metalsmiths/dp/1931626294

I wonder if you could find a brand that could be turned inside out on the right hand to 'create' a sufficiently left handed glove?  the seams would be a mess of course, but if you are chewing them up that quickly I doubt looking nice is very far up the list of requirements.

I know a lefty smith who will be teaching a class this weekend that I am attending, ill check and see what his glove situation is.  but methinks shipping to and from CA is going to torpedo the exercise, unless you are willing to wait several months until I can ferry them into and out of Europe personally.

Smooth reins are definitely better.  An oval shape does give better control at times.
 
As a sidenote, I have noticed that some beginning smiths want to texture their hammer handles (grooves, dimples, checkerboard, etc.) to get a "better" grip.  They usually grind or sand them down smooth very quickly!!!!

Many thanks Alan, I will look into that company and see if the shipping is worth the hassle, or if that can lead me to a domestic source.

small world ;) where are you going to be (roughly) in town?  Visiting anyone/thing in particular?  is there some local smith up there that has eluded me?

Happy to hear that things are on track for recovery, she is fortunate to have someone like you who is willing to drop everything and come back to watch over her when she is in need :)

Much obliged :)

less so for the hobby smith, but id imagine that rag tag tools thrown together in a hurry to 'git-r-done' would reflect poorly on the reputation of a professional smith to any visiting customers as well.  thanks for bringing up the thought and those are some mighty fine tongs you are producing as well!

Iron Dwarf, do you have or know the brand name offhand?  I cant for the life of me get google to give me something that resembles a purchasable product :'(

Hey! you didn't mention you would be in Southern California before!  Hit me up if you are going to be in the Santa Barbara or Ventura areas and I would be happy to take you to dinner somewhere :)

Prayers for your girlfriend for a speedy recovery and safe travels to you on this epic adventure!

you might want to consider constructing your doors with a lip that is flush with the face of the insulation so it will be protected on the edges and restrained from fraying. that will also negate the need for the insulation to be recessed on the inside.

thats an awesome model too, looks like it will be a monster :)

Thanks Glenn, good to know :)

Congrats to you and your wife! And a fitting name as well, may it bring him the strength of its meaning through life :)

put that up on display somewhere where it will be visible only as a shadowy silhouette, and that's pretty much the stuff of nightmares right there!  awesome sculpture!

From Brian:

...The same concept is applied to forge a hammer. The fullering between the cheeks and the faces isolate material and allows you to work without hammering or gouging into the forging on the other side of the fuller line, and you can just forge the other side of the fullering or in between them in the case of a hammer.

source, post #10:

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slit and drift is the best way to put a 9/16" hole in a 9/16" bar ;)  you can also upset the slit location before or after to pick up some extra mass at the join.  have you already planned for how to keep the through piece from slipping out?

bear in mind that that solution is based on the temperature controlled electric kiln without an inert gas atmosphere approach. I believe it can also be done in a gas forge, but it might need a separate muffle (like a pipe) for a solid fuel forge.

Glad i got to handle it before it was moved on :) felt great in the hand, very lively. I hope it sees a lot of good hard use!

Bear in mind that when they are making those cuts they have already forged it WAY down. That's why they have that big slug of copper on the bottom, the mokume layers are much thinner than would be otherwise manageable without some extra meat behind them, so you can cut through almost all the layers with relatively shallow cuts.

very interesting WIP pictures.  thats a HUGE kiln to run relative to that set of billets!  some interesting concepts in use as well, they run two billets simultaneously with something as a bond breaker in between the two, and they knock the square corners off the billet before they start working it down.  i wonder if that was a technique developed to keep the sharp corners from splitting and being problematic or what.  its a great example of using a thick copper plate as an underlayer so you dont need to build up the full mass of the billet with layered material, but only get one patterned face.  awesome pattern they developed as well, and it really pops with the (presumably) rokusho patina.

great find teeny! :)

a cursory googling says that "ringing in the new year" was related to ringing bells at the passing of loved ones, in that the old year has passed and now onto the new one.  so thats kinda like ringing the anvil for the passing of other smiths...sort of..  though i cant imagine anyone ringing their anvil 2014 times in the middle of the night! O.o

Wishing you all a productive new year filled with good friends, family, and of course gratuitous amounts of forging :)

May we all continue learning and sharing knowledge with each other both in person and here on IFI.  Thank you Glenn and company for another year of an excellent community!

Sorry, terminology error on my part, Ian Ferguson describes basically the same phenomena you are describing both in terms of 'eutectic reactions' and diffusion, but i agree, diffusion is the more closely related mechanic.

'overheating' does not necessarily have to be so severe as to cause melting of layers, it only needs to be hotter than the bonding temperature in order for the billet to continue to undergo solid state diffusion.  also per Ferguson's tables the bonding range for copper/brass (no red brass specific entry, sorry =/) is 600-700 deg C, the copper/nickel silver bonding range is also 600-700 deg C, both over a period of 60 minutes. converting roughly to Fahrenheit that correlates to 1100-1290 F give or take.  bonding in an unregulated forge (vs temp controlled digi-kiln or what have you) knocks the time factor off severely by substituting a much higher temperature for a longer time duration.

as far as anyone can state from the information provided and no pictures, in my wholly unprofessional opinion, i dont think you are running into a problem actually melting your layers.  you would likely notice if your brass layers have melted or gone to slush either while you pull it out or as soon as you start working on it, and in order for the brass and copper BOTH to be melted your nickel silver will have melted as well, and thats your entire billet in a puddle :)

Look up Eric Fleming forge controls, he did a demo at the ABS hammer-in last October (2014) in Tulare, CA, and it was quite impressive. He had a controller box rigged up to a thermocouple (I forget if it was a type K or something more interesting) and a solenoid system such that once the forge was up to the target temp (which you can dial in to taste yourself) it would pulse on and off briefly and actually kept the temp within a few degrees. Jason Knight used it to forge out and heat treat a large Bowie fighter and dialed in the temps he wanted for each step, and Tom Ferry used it to weld up a large-ish Damascus billet with no flux, setting the initial weld in a hurry because the tank on the forge was running dry and the temp was measurably falling off.

Out of curiosity, could it be a time at temperature issue rather than straight overcooking? Excessive eutectic alloy formation between layers can happen by too much time in the fire as well as too much fire.

Touché Dodge ;) I should have asked if he used clay or just let it run wild?