Chinobi

Gents, the whole point of the thread was merely to ask what items people had made without directly forging something themselves (yes the mill does it, but we all get our bar stock from something that has been refined and hammered at some point along the line, nobody is digging them up), not to start an argument over the merits of learning the fundamentals or how when you have practiced something for 20 years it goes faster, that goes without saying. there is no need for all the back and forth about which method to make said tool is superior, just that it has been made, period.

Dale, the links you posted refer to the 20 mule team home page, and the wiki page for straight borax, not boraxo. google interprets 'boraxo' as a misspelling of borax, you have to force it to search for boraxo (which you may have done, I don't know). but, you have sited two articles referring back to the same compound (straight borax) as your comparison of 20 mule team and your boraxo hand soap. the wiki page for 'boraxo' is laughably inadequate, but I googled around and I couldn't find anything anywhere else specifically stating WHAT was added to boraxo more specific than 'hand soap' either, and the MSDS for both the powdered for and liquid form don't have a full list of ingredients, only the ones deemed 'hazardous', of which there are a few. steve has a valid (though blunt) point, when I was in college we were expressly prohibited from sourcing directly from Wikipedia for exactly that reason. anybody can post whatever they want up there, and it is not guaranteed that the BS has been caught and edited out. however, like you, I use it very regularly as a springboard for getting my bearings on a new subject, for which is performs admirably (most of the time).

head to the nearest grocery store or drug store and find '20 mule team borax' thats probably one of the easiest to find fluxes. plus its dirt cheap and comes in a big box :) ill let people who have used other products chime in on their pro's and con's, i cant keep them all straight anymore.

thats the bed that goes in the shop for when you get kicked out of the house! :) pretty cool coffee table too, that is, until you need to move it!

is that really a tool, or more of an accessory...? :) regardless, there will be one lashed to my vice eventually! iv ground out a number of 4" steel masonry nails into chisels and punches, reground cold chisels into punches etc, made a miniature guillotine and dies for wire work ground/sawn from 5/8 tubing and 1/2 square bar my mokume gane torque plates are hacksawn and drilled (they get a beating in use, but they were built cold!) are we keeping the scope limited to metal based construction? im nearly done with my bowling ball engraving vice mount, sawn/cut/drilled the ball and a metal mounting plate. are you facing time without forging capabilities in the near future and looking for some filler projects? :)

I was excited to see a post from you on top of the recent threads list, and you have again delivered an outstanding piece(s)! i did not see in the description the final weight of the different lengths (id imagine the difference in poll style would be negligible). Are you making these available to civilian/casual consumers? can you share your pricing with us as well? (genuinely interested, not just trolling) as a side note, you should look into pairing your waterjet runs on the hawks with a similar volume of knives, lot of good blade stock left in between the hawk cutouts :) may also be potential to squeeze them together a little tighter with a different layout. (i do a lot of autocad, sorry for analyzing :P) question regarding the sheathing as well, if the customer were to put a paracord wrap on the 18" version to cover from the top of the micarta up to the bottom of the head would that interfere with the operation of the sheath? i look at the 18" and can envision myself adopting a high/low grip in some cases and grabbing a narrow bar of 1/4" sounds less than comfortable, so the wrapping provides some cushion and an excellent hardpoint for some emergency cordage. similarly, the 18" trainer looks like its got the full micarta handle thickness for the entire length, as opposed to the real one which does not, this could potentially change how the piece handles when graduating to the real deal. (i really did not want to put that line in, but i felt it would be more disservice to ignore a potential comment than to include it) thank you for sharing, truely excellent work! looking forward to a tough decision of size and style :D

from the gallery these guys apparently do good work, I recognize more than a few members touchmarks from there as well. http://www.incandescent-iron.com/toga.html I cant remember if there is another source that gets mentioned frequently or of they are one and the same. methinks with HF equipment you would be needing to remake or replace it pretty frequently, of course you could get lucky and get one that lasts forever.... :)

oh yea, cause that's not weird :) I do find myself having to get up on my tiptoes to get stock flat on the anvil face when I use the crotch tongs, sadly thats on an anvil thats otherwise at the right height for me hammerwise =/ I have a pretty long torso aparently

i had a thought on this but i have no idea if it would actually be effective. all pre-cleaning handled separately, would it work to prevent scale buildup within the cable during welding/forging to sleeve the unwelded end in a tube packed with coal or something else that will consume oxygen more readily than the steel? might have to neck down the ends to prevent the packing from spilling out.

haha, that looks like my anvil! record A55 cast iron? :) I brought it to the forge school to test how well/poorly it forged and it was terrible! put a couple of new dents in the face with some sloppy hits, pretty much only using it as a hardy hole at present. I find that working from a kneeling position lets you keep your body in a much more balanced stance and provides for a better swing than squatting. YMMV.

brass round headed brad or tack of some stripe. check micromark, looks like stuff they might carry, or you might be able to approximate it from there. http://www.micromark.com/mini-nails-1and4-inch-long-x-048-inch-dia-pkg-of-100,8631.html

Great video Josh! clear descriptions and well forged. to my eye the brightness level is just fine, the only time i thought it might be a bit dark was the first time you brought the punch up to the camera, at that point it seemed to leave the light and made it a little less clear to see the hex profile of the struck end. you can supplement that by putting a desk lamp somewhere that shines on that area without showing up on the anvil. as dave says you were enunciating what you were saying with your tong hand which was making it a little difficult to track the close up at the end. put up a long stock support just out of frame and use that to set the tongs against, always in the same place. that will let you control how you frame your closeup, keep it consistent, and keep it stable, plus allow you to focus a secondary light or a reflector panel on that exact place. otherwise, keep up the good work, eh :)

unless your bodily geometry is fairly unusual(or mine is) i think belly button high is going to be far too tall to be comfortable to work on (for instance, my belly button is around 10" higher than i prefer to have the anvil face), quick and dirty rule of thumb is stand with your hammer hand hanging at your side with a closed fist, your anvil face should be at or near the level of your knuckles. if you want to get really technical about it you should be able to place a piece of your most commonly used stock (1/4", 1/2" etc) on the face of your anvil and when you hold your hammer with your arm at your side and place the head of the hammer on top of that piece of stock, the handle should be parallel with the ground. (so much for trying to write that clearly...) if you have your anvil on a single sawhorse (for starters sawhorses are going to be waaaay too high) i would be VERY worried about the anvil falling off! unless NZ sawhorses are topped with something more substantial than a 2x4. apply rich's piece of wood test, as modified by frosty's correction, that will tell volumes about your setup and how you need to correct any errors in your swing. also, you say you are losing heat trying to find a comfortable way to stand, are you walking that time off (forge too far) or are you shuffling around your anvil in indecision of where to stand, where to place the metal, how to strike it? are you leaving the hot iron on the anvil face while you do said dance? the longer the iron is in contact with the anvil the more heat you will lose into the anvil face, less forging time and so on. in any case take a quick snapshot of your current layout, and maybe stand a meterstick against the anvil and read off what the face checks in at in case the resolution is too low to read it and we can offer much more concrete suggestions, rather than broad generalizations of every possible contribution to what could be improved on :)

no half measures when it comes to pink assault craft, they have to know you are serious. floats are good for me too, land it in the harbor and not have to deal with the airports :)

ill go halfsies on the Warthog with you Frosty! every other week swap it from CA to AK? :)

i think it comes up about every other thread in the gas forge section that one well tuned 3/4" burner will suffice for 300-350 cubic inches of interior forge volume, regardless of how you end up arranging your bricks to achieve said volume (within reason, no 350" long 1" cross sectional area tube etc) PSIg also comes up frequently, but my evening addled brain is remembering most prominently that everybody argues about what pressure to run their gauge at because nobody's gauge is the same and nobody can say if its actually calibrated, then it ultimately circles around to forget the numbers, tune the gauge and choke until you can actually see and hear that you have a proper flame. orifice geometry information is available here and elsewhere online, i haven't committed enough of it to memory to comment on it. google up zoeller forge for some solid guides for burner construction, youtube has a plethora as well. take a read through the gas forge section and you should be able to scare up enough information to produce a serviceable re-configurable firebrick forge. also, add your general location and there will probably be somebody within striking range that can perhaps shed some light on the local opportunities near you. good luck!

excellent! I like the fine scrolls on the points :) it looks like you ended up drawing a flat taper and chamfering the front face corners instead of going for the full triangle cross section, am I reading that correctly? is that collar actually brass/bronze, or did it just really soak up the brushing?

make a copper engraving of Picker's shop sign from post #5 here, been too distracted lately to finish mine =/ '?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>> maybe old anvil/hammer/vise/tool ad's can be had on ebay, I second the steel info charts. edge9001's poster from here would be fun in a shop as well:

this process is a monumental PITA! I got impatient and started swinging too hard and heavy at times so the coin ended up getting kind of warped into a slight saddle. didn't get to finish piercing the center out so still to be concluded. I have a couple of variations rattling around in my brain that I would like to commit to copper in the near future too :)

looks like its going to be a long evening :-D I still cant imagine going at it with a spoon O.o

hard to actually judge because you started with unknowns and subsequently mixed them, giving you some true mystery meat, but brass typically melts a few hundred degrees F sooner than copper (again alloy dependent). so i would expect the new brass-ish ingot to go before the copper tips do. this would also be a good time to employ one of those bricks or some other kind of liner to keep from messing up your forge floor in the process. good call thomas, that makes more sense, i forgot about zinc burnout =/

that top layer is probably a skin of oxidized copper, that or it didn't mix fully and some of the copper migrated to the top. from what I have read brass and bronze are tough to forge, I missed a class to learn how to forge bronze and I definitely regret not making that happen :( as for the mold. you can make a really simple ingot mold using two flat plates and bending a piece of square bar into an elongated U shape. prep the inside surfaces with some kind of antibond (acetylene soot, whiteout, forge scale, whatever) then sandwich the U bar between the plates and clamp the whole thing together very securely. and presto! you have a mold! then you can just pop the clamps and separate the ingot from the U bar. you can try going Japanese style with the pour as well, iv never tried it myself but its a pretty low tech way to get the job done, less of a controlled shape afterwards though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUVUYH_vvZE cool result too, thanks for sharing :)

glad to hear it worked and you are presumably unharmed :) looking forward to seeing the results!

it was shared with me so im glad I could keep it moving and share it with others :)

ok I found the set of youtube vids I was looking for :) this gentleman has provided a very elegant system of laying out scrolls and making jigs to match said scrolls in a few very easy to understand videos. check out his forge welding vids too, also very informative. http://www.youtube.com/user/theironworkshop?feature=watch best of luck with the project!