Chinobi

lookin good dude! I made a mokume split cross some months ago that would also make good gifting for religious friends. I still haven't been able to circle back around to make the second version, but my theory is that if you twist the bar before cutting it just 90 degrees with the twist occurring where the cuts in the cross overlap you can then split both sets of arms parallel to the stack layers and get the wood grain look (as seen on the short arms) versus the striated 90 degree to stack look (base and top). might add a little more interest to the thin little sections that make up the center at the same time. what metals did you make that from?

keep a straight bar on hand immediate adjacent to the anvil IMO, slap it on the face (maybe with a hardy shank for stability, or pritchel shanked so you can spin it out of the way), check for straightness, drop the piece down to the face and hammer your adjustment, rinse/repeat

build yourself a set of rails, or some other kind of guided system that mimics the suns (general) path of travel, and maybe a less robust system to account for seasonal variation in the orbit. something like an arched rail slider with a spring clamp on it so you can grip, slide, release and keep forging throughout the day without needing to shuffle a whole bunch of structure around. definitely a cool idea, just make sure you respect the amount of energy you are harnessing :)

I tend to reach for a pair of offset jaw tongs for projects that involve a hook like that, lets you grip on the straight part without the hook curve trying to occupy the same volume of space as the boss, and generally allows for some maneuvering. they are typically V bit, but even with that its sometimes a pain to find a set that grips well enough and I too have spent a fair amount of time herding hot irons across the concrete :) so looking forward to the forthcoming professional advice from others here too!

notice also all the tinted eyewear and long sleeves, if there ever was a place for the use of all the heavily shaded/tinted safety glasses under discussion over in the safety thread, THIS is it! :) and yea, that's a pretty involved reflector array too XD

I think it would be immensely difficult to judge temperature by color if the interior of your forge chamber is blown out by all that concentrated sunlight. that said, it certainly seems like its possible, solar collectors are employed for power generation and waste disposal. its just a matter of a lot of logistics, you can choose to do the math on the optics, or just 'eyeball' it until something starts melting.

i have seen people recommend utilizing anvil swayback as an aid to straightening things, and it makes sense. the steel will deform(plastic deformation) under your hammer but will always spring back a little bit (elastic deformation). so if you are banging it flat into a flat surface you cannot bend it past straight to get it to spring back into a flat surface. i think the physics changes when the metal is at forging temps, but if you are trying to straighten with the tail end of your heat the behavior gets closer to the same as working cold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformation_(engineering) (don't even bring up the Wikipedia-ness, i want the cliff's notes version) as to your indexing over the specific spot in the face, make it a hardy shank and it will always sit in the same place, plus, if you are hammering into your nice flat piece with enough force to forge a piece of mild beneath it to contour to the anvils face, you are probably going to bang the bejesus out of your formerly nice flat surrogate face :) make yourself a nice solid flat hardie block with crisp and varying radii edges if you really want to make a good flat face that will behave more efficiently than a plate strapped to your anvil (IM inexperienced O), make it rectangular and longer on one side so you can lap the part you are working on farther over the waist(thanks rich), you can also weld arms that straddle the face to keep it from shifting if its not super tight at the hardie, and even mount your springs onto those if you make them J hooks. and get yourself a nice stout metal straight edge to eyeball for squareness as you go along. edit for clarity and second thought: you can straighten red hot steel against a flat face because you are forging it into that shape, and manually forcing the structure to conform to the flat face, at the same time you are spreading material and changing the shape with your hammer strikes, versus primarily bending, which just forces deformation along an axis without changing the cross section.

I agree, hammered texture on top of inherently patterned material gets really overworked and looks very distracting in most cases. at least to my eye at any rate.

great tip SmoothBore! my swap meet list is growing >.<

i have used spices and made colored chalk for tinting epoxy in the past, DEFINITELY run a test swatch first! turmeric, while a beautiful golden yellow in its raw form, made me almost blood orange color in epoxy :) now for the pins, if your vice is like mine (harbor freight) it has two large inset hex bolts in each jaw, which provide a huge negative space that will eat unevent bumps like that with no trouble (provided of course that they are spaced correctly, if not, the leather or some other suitably squishy material will conform to the surface of the scale and jaw faces and deliver a more uniform pressure distribution. you can also punch holes to match the pins in the leather layer that is in contact with the knife scale, or drill a set of holes in some flat bar and shim the knife on either side with that. if you dont want to/cant drill holes use 3 separate pieces of shim, left, in between, and right of the pins to give them enough space to not conflict. ill second bigfootnampa's recommendation to use the longest setting epoxy you can get ahold of, much better product

this might sound silly, but why did you go out of your way with extra clamps holding the blade vertically in your bench vice, when you could have turned it 90 degrees and lined up the blade parallel to the jaws of the vice and used them for even pressure down the entire length? (that is, of course, if the jaws are square) put a strip or two of soft leather, or something similarly squishy, to distribute the force of the jaws more evenly on either side of the blade if you are concerned about the aggressive teeth on the jaws, also will help mitigate over tightening and squeezing too much epoxy out.

prime material for mokume gane torque plates, drill a hole in each corner to receive bolts and weld a stud to the center of the short face on one of them for use as a tong grabbing point, then have at it! :) wander your way over to the tool (or was it tailgating) section or otherwise search up 'pocket hardy(ie?)' sounds like a promising blank for one of those. how many is 'some' anyway? wonder if you could go the adze route? or if you would be able to get enough cheek to have it sit well on the handle?

search for mustard etch here and elsewhere to find pics, doesn't turn the blade yellow, it just removes some of the existing patina thickness making it lighter colored where the mustard was. the viscosity of the mustard lets you get some neat splatter effects on the blade.

ok this is going to sound really blunt, but my list is www.google.com, and I remember them by repeatedly forgetting them and having to look them up again :) and then writing them down on a notepad or in reference books. what all metals are you melting?

theres not enough space to suspend from wire, but you can fit a firebrick in? :) if you have enough room to add clearance to the bottom could you make a thin trivet set or cradle of wire like a mini hammock to set the knife on, rather than hang from?

no thanks due to me, Mat shared it with us originally :) i just connected the dots very cyclical nature on this forum if you keep your eyes open :ph34r:

ha HA! I actually found what I was looking for this time :) a few good resources came up early this year RE file cutting, see this thread for some more info and some videos in retrospect its the same video :) but there are a few additional links including a second vid.

yea im reading that as if the shanks of your current tools are too loose for your new hardie hole, you can either shim the hole in some manner, or weld a piece of angle iron onto all of your shanks. save you the headache of having to remake all of them, and then what do you do with the old ones? I actually met a guy that adjusted his hardies just by running some weld bead down the length of the shank to add some thickness without needing to add a second piece of metal, that could work too if you are not gapped enough to warrant adding another piece of iron.

why not round the claws up a little and forge the gap a little wider, BAM bending fork!

the heel is much thinner and will have a tendency to flex (extremely minutely) and rebound, whereas the rebound from the center is strictly coming from the elastic deflection of the face and material immediately beneath it and within the bearing or hammerhead doing the bouncing. (extreme exaggerations of scale here to illustrate principle) think of it like comparing what would happen if you were to hold a ruler on the edge of your desk, with say 6" hanging off and twang the tip (your finger would be the bearing analog here), lot of bend lot of return, lot of vibration (noise) then think of dropping an underinflated water balloon (key being that it doesn't break) on a trampoline, balloon flattens briefly and returns to its original shape, dragging itself back up, trampoline sags minutely under the load and then returns to its original position, also forcing the balloon back up with it. (consider the hardness of the face similar to how taught the trampoline surface is, really really tight being very hard, really slack being very soft) (I was originally going to compare dropping something into Jell-O, which mimics the behavior of a shockwave propagating through a solid pretty graphically, but its pretty sticky so nothing would ever really bounce <_<, which kinda kills the visual) and compare the source of the forces propelling the 'bearing' back up. those may be a little too abstract... just trying to illustrate whats happening with things that people can readily see and mentally picture deforming under the impact.

Friend of mine cut the rail proper off from the web and flange and made a one handed double wide 6lb hammer from it, flat face on one side and diagonal pein on the other. bout 4 inches long face to face if my mental eye recalls correctly. other common rail mods include varying radii and depth fullers, hot cut's and swages ground/cut into the flange

knock your starting stock down to 1/4 or less and bang out a few at keychain size, feel them out at local bars or places where fans congregate and see if theres much interest, you could indeed make a killing off them. HOWEVER I would imagine that the icon is trademarked, so make it substantially different to keep their legal team off your tail for copyright infringement and licensing etc etc.

I like it :) did you leave the piece in the forge to cool after melting the marble or something similar to prevent it from cracking? or maybe nickel is more forgiving than iron when it comes to expanding in contact with glass?

i agree this is a discussion board for the purpose of discussing, my point was that you are discussing the wrong topic! :blink: if you reread kurgans original post you will see that the intent was expressly to avoid that topic, if anything it was phrased as a challenge to not forge. there was also no reference to the use of the tools limiting the scope to tools later intended to be used on hot iron. bear in mind that not everyone has access to the equipment (ok and skills <_<) to forge everything that could/would/should be forged, so what may be a shortcut for someone like yourself with sufficient equipment and mojo to make whatever you want from whatever you want whenever you want may be the only route accessible to a lesser equipped person. my first post stated that i had to grind out a punch from a brand new cold chisel and reprofile the edge on another brand new cold chisel to give it a smooth crown so i could cold cut sheet metal. i would have very much preferred to forge those out myself, and im pretty sure i could have done it too, but i dont have a proper forge or real anvil at home so i work out of a school 60 miles south of home at best 2 weekends a month, so bench and angle grinder to the rescue!