Chinobi

bah, my edit button has wandered away again... so to try and keep the orientations clear and consistent i drew in coordinate directions (X, Y, and Z) to help identify when the stock has been rotated or turned. places where it says "Z UP" means the Z axis is pointing up from the page towards your face, "Z DOWN" means pointing down into the page towards the floor. (A) so im planning to start with 1/2" square bar because i think it will let me parse up the mass a little better than starting with a 1.25x.25 flat bar and maybe cutting it in half to .75x.25 (J and B) i dont know how well all of this will work but the intent is to flatten out half or so of the bar down to the thickness of the main body of the skull, leaving a bulge at full thickness for use later in the jaw. i think if i just try to flatten it out directly im going to either cause a bulge as drawn that is going to be tricky to try and redistribute, or straight up cause it to roll/fold on itself because i would be trying to work closer than half the width to the edge. so i think if i break the corner beneath it (J) enough i can give the mass above a place to go without causing it to bulge too much. © im going to eventually need to cut through the thick part and im pretty sure if it isnt pre-cut from this direction its just going to stretch rather than cut (D) lightly nick grooves in with a chisel so later tools can be indexed rapidly and accurately on both sides without needing to eyeball it (E) bad, if i cut full depth all at once and later spread the jaw i think the jaws are going to end up too tight, need to try and force the individual skulls to separate a little more (H and I) (H) i wrote fuller, but i think a chisel or some other V shaped tool would be more accurate. cut halfway into the mass left for the jaw, leaving angled sides (these become the sides of the jaw) (I) set a triangular tool on the anvil face, secure with hold-down or similar, triangle should be the same size as the notch required, so the bar will sit flush against the anvil face when fully notched. use a somewhat narrow V tip or rounded tip chisel/fullering chisel in the grooves from the previous step, drive in until the groove reaches the edge where the extra mass blends back into the flat part of the bar and the opposing triangular notch has been fully developed. this should cause the metal to spread in the direction of the arrows shown, causing the skulls to separate a little. there may be potential for problems here if the force from the thin top tool doesnt transfer completely and the bottom triangle doesnt get notched all the way. (F) use crosspein or the corner of a crosspein to knock down the previously isolated mass for the jaws, much like fullering perpendicularly to the length of a bar to thin and increase length while minimally increasing the width. this will elongate the jaw to (hopefully) the right proportions, and redistributing the extra mass will (also hopefully) straighten out the angled sides. otherwise theres no good way to gain access to the sides of the jaws to try and dress them, perhaps if i sandwich it between a couple pieces of bar stock that stick out beyond the piece and try to hammer them together (G) home free here to punch and chisel in facial features. define lines between skulls first and deeply enough that the bulges from punching eyes have some place to go without becoming siamese, put something the correct thickness behind the jaws when chiseling in the jawline and teeth to provide support. the edge of the anvil could be used (also the vise) but trying to hold the stock at the edge and work on it without it moving around seems a lot more difficult than just laying it flat on the face. and as discussed earlier the vise is a heat-thief. (K) thought about isolating the mass for the jaws via directly fullering a groove down the center of the stock early on, but i couldnt reconcile a way to get such a thin lip to forge flat without first deeply breaking the corner beneath it, which then presents problems supporting for the fuller, and basically becomes a sloppy version of (J) anyway. well, if you made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read through. if you see anything that leaps out at you as being overtly boneheaded or wrong please feel free to call me out on it (nicely :) ) so i can adjust accordingly. Ill be forging on sunday (finally!), but there is a curriculum project, so if it is simple or one of the projects i have already completed thats more time available, otherwise ill try and prototype as much of this as i can with whatever time i have left. thanks for lookin!

always impressed with what people manage to rearrange rail spikes into! loving the cobra version! but then again, im partial to reptiles anyway :) if you want to check out more animal heads and good tutorials on how to forge them check out the book Iron Menagerie, by the Guild of Metalsmiths ok maybe not so much book...its a little spiral bound thing, but great pic's and step by step's to making a variety of animal heads and faces for use in whatever might happen to require some personality :) http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Menagerie-Guild-Metalsmiths/dp/1931626294

the mounties dont have jurisdiction in the US do they? :) your forge shovel secrets are safe with me! (its the rest of the internet that you might want to keep any eye on :ph34r: ) but thanks for the heads up on the canadian composition, i have a small dish of thems at home too :D

ok im putting this up here for the moment 'as is'. iv run out of lunch break so i cant explain the insanity it contains for another few hours. to keep you from going crosseyed the proposed order of operations would be: A J B C D H I F G B as diagrammed wont work and needs to be modified by J or somethign similar E and K wont work

i have Mokume Gane (Jewellery Handbooks), by author Ian Ferguson http://www.amazon.com/Mokume-Gane-Jewellery-Handbooks-Ferguson/dp/0713661569 i want (and yes i know i complain about this far too often, but this is one of very few things that REALLY bug me) Mokume Gane - A Comprehensive Study by author Steve Midgett http://www.amazon.com/Mokume-Gane-Comprehensive-Steve-Midgett/dp/0965165078/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367525125&sr=1-1&keywords=steve+midgett first time i have seen the used copy price below 300$! if you get really serious about it you can go the route that Ariel Salaverria (http://www.aescustomknives.com/) does with the box to contain it, but you can make it happen with simple torque plates as depicted elsewhere on this site and online. it has been done with as little as tie wire to keep the stack together as well. you will not be bored with the ammount of reading material you will find yourself covering trying to get the hang of it :)

its only defacing currency when you completely screw it up and are left with warped, half destroyed, burnt coins (not that i would know anything about that, nor do i have a small and growing mountain of the aforementioned developing in my scrap box...) :) totally indistinguishable as coinage if you do it right :ph34r:

Gundog if you are planning to make rings and jewelry and the like have you looked in the Mokume Gane section of the site? thats effectively the same process (i know somebody is going to pick a fight with that, but oh well) but instead of mixing different alloys of steel you can use brass, copper, nickel, sterling, gold....blah blah the list goes on. the softer metals work easier and look really great in a bodily accessory role. at least it sounds like thats the direction of product you are going for, rather than something that would need strength like a larger sculpture. i would scan an example of some of the photo pages from the Mokume book i have, but im sure that would ruffle some feathers WRT copyright and the like. El Google will set you straight :)

that looks awsome dude! i love the size relationship between the pebble and the caged volume of the twist, theres very little extra space so it looks really clean, almost like the pebble is growing within a cable and busting it up as it expands. that would probably look pretty awsome with a marble in the cage too :) (im getting kind of stir crazy because it feels like it takes forever to get back to the anvil for me :( )

what weight did you end up with on the modded HF crosspein? i have exactly the same hammer and i too find it to be a bit too heavy to comfortably make my primary hammer. i only softened up the crosspein though, i left the flat face pretty much stock except to reprofile it to remove an annoying hump across the middle. and i couldnt agree more about the handle!! the stock handle is such an anemic(sp?) little thing! i was bored at home a few weeks ago and decided it needed some personality too, so i ground off some of the paint :)

would there actually be a bench in the cell though? what if you went the other way and had the bars be too ductile instead of too brittle and have him use some kind of improvised cordage to bend a large enough gap to slip through?

cool, thanks for the step by step :) spent a good portion of my drive home meditating on what that process would entail too :) if i remember/take the time later i might throw together a sketch and some notes so i can test it out this weekend and ill put a copy up here too. i figured the horizontal set could make a decent belt buckle, or if you did a long enough set you could bend it into a ring and use it as a hot pot riser, or with the addition of a dished plate inside could be a nifty bowl or ash tray (valleys between skulls would work well for that actually). maybe give it a try on the anvil face for the punching, i find that the vice robs me of heat much faster than the anvil. you will still have to vice it up to open up the eyes and pop up the bridge of the nose though. could probably go on but i gotta get moving again, happy hunting :)

looks like some kind of canibal tiki flatware :) awsome styling on them too! those look pretty vertical to me, so im assuming you meant that you messed up the horizontal ones? if you want to make some oriented 90 degrees to the length of the bar you could start with a piece of flat bar (say 1/2 or 3/4 by 1/4) and fuller in a large-ish groove between where the jaws will be and a smaller groove opposite the large one to distinguish the top of the skulls. when you work those, do you do it assembly line style where you do the same step three times along the bar before moving to the next step, or do you finish out one skull before moving to the next?

very nice! but are you sure you meant to say 'cold pierced' and not 'put it downrange and shot it'? :D it does give a very interesting effect, and works very well to make it look like the leaves have broken through the bottom of the bowl!

kind of an aside, if the plan is to just leave the copper unfinished and let nature have at it, you are probably going to end up with a mottled brown tarnish that will propagate fingerprints and smudges, but can be fairly easily brightened up (to some extent) with a vigorous rubbing from sweaty fingers. works on brass too (probably alloy dependent though). dont expect the statue of liberty green patina from an indoor environment :) while im at it i should add WRT my earlier post that the colors i was referring to are heat patination from localized torchwork on copper, you can get some pretty sweet colors from that, however expect them to loose some vibrancy if you put a clearcoat on, or to fade/change if left uncoated. uncoated heat patinas will also take a beating from fingerprints and touching over time. @smoothbore: so long as the thing is kept from developing standing water on the surface (condensation, wet hands fresh from the shower, etc) there will be no electrolyte, so there shouldnt be any potential for electrolysis.

ball bearing rebound test, hammer ring and dent check, keep an ear out for anything that sounds like vibration or 'buzzing' which would indicate a separation of body and face, file test to verify hardness of face, scale of some sort to confirm weight i miss anything?

well you have certainly merged form and function here, very clean lines on all of it, looking forward to utterly screwing it up for myself in the near future :D

i thought of this thread last night watching TV and iron man 1 and 2 were on, im not surprised to see it re-surface :) however i have to disagree with stark being considered with the good smiths! unless i walked out of the room for a bit and missed something that i am also forgetting from seeing the movie multiple times, the only real smithing he attempts is when he is beating on the helmet of the Mk 1, which he is hammering on cold/at black heat, then quenches and calls it good. plus he casts a ring of palladium (which the internet tells me melts around 2825 F) from a non-glowing crucible that was just sitting on top of a pretty tame coal forge, no blower going, not nested in the coals, just set on top like he was warming a cup of coffee. then his assistant takes like 15 seconds to walk it over and pour it! if anything i think Ivan Vanko in ironman 2 has more blacksmithing cred than Stark, at least he hammers on hot iron, even if he pre-taps before his swing, and lets the hammer bounce on the piece afterwards.

love it :) what did you do to form the forks, split the parent bar and forge the tines round, or weld in a bit of rod? it looks so clean all around its tough to eyeball the method :)

guillotine would work just as well, being a square section would prevent the stamp from rotating, which was something i left off the original sketch, a visual index would work too if you want to align it before each use. you could also make some kind of spring fuller that you can screw the touchmark into. just make sure the spring action is pretty weak, just enough to keep the punch raised enough to get the piece under it. too much spring and you might end up chasing the mark all over the shop after you hit it and it goes flying :-D

approved! i have been drawing up something similar based on splitting the end of a piece of sucker rod into a Y and then bending it out after taper/shaping the forks. it would be considerably easier to just start with a bit of square and weld it onto a shank though....

at that point why dont you use one thick disk/grinding wheel? i would be concerned that if one of the disks blows apart the other might become loose and soon follow. i know i am repeatedly guilty of doing this with the little 3/4" diameter wheels for my dremel, and i have taken many a chunk to the face (with safety glass) when they disintegrate. but being so lightweight they have never broken skin and having developed an appreciation for their tolerances i have gotten pretty good at not destroying them. sometimes they are just cheap though, cant control everything. i also try to avoid if at all possible keeping important body parts in the plane of rotation of any high RPM tools in my shop. i was actually worried about using my 17$ HF angle grinder for just this reason, it sat in its box unused for 3 months before i finally put it to use just recently :P

could you make yourself a holder for the touchmark that just acts as a fixed guide (perhaps with a spring on it to make the default position raised). that way you can go straight from your last forging operation, keep the part in your tongs and your hammer in your other hand, place it underneath your touchmark, give it a whack and move on. i think theres a name for devices of this type, but i cant think of what it is. something conceptually similar to this converted arbor press to be a tap holder from micro-mark http://www.micromark.com/Drill-andTap-Holder-for-Press-It-and-Sensi-Press,8264.html

ill leave the questions regarding tempering to those with more knowledge, but it is entirely possible that the hammer has been through a fire and has been annealed, or was intentionally annealed to make it soft for use with struck tools. search up 'spark test' and apply that to get a ROUGH guestimate of what kind of steel you are dealing with. without knowing what kind of metal it is you may have a tough time trying to re-harden it, as you wont know exactlywhat the cycle needs to be.

should be independent of the softness of the wrought, its a watered down form of electroplating i believe. if you sand the surface it should remove the copper coloration. edit: thanks frosty, my chem is backwards then, thinking more along the lines of what happens when you pick up silver items from the pickle pot with steel tweezers instead of the copper tongs :)

that looks fantastic Basher! really makes me impatient to learn more because it makes me want to try it :) is the 19" correct from blade to back of the socket? or is that supposed to read 9"?