Chinobi
-
Posts
1,122 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Articles
Gallery
Downloads
Events
Everything posted by Chinobi
-
Prayers sent Frosty, hope all goes well and she mends swiftly!
-
Thanks Basher, you are on the list, just need a suitable opening in the calendar for travel :)
-
Cool fitting! The striping looks really neat with the mirrored blade! Looks like it might be copper oxidized black against unpatinated nickel, or oxidized nickel against clean silver? Unless you went nuts with it and brought some form of iron into the mix.
-
Looking good teeny :) Have you considered using at least 3 bolts on your setup? It is probably moot if you are running short stacks like you have pictured, but if you run stacks that are taller than they are wide and are only using two bolts you run the risk of the stack not being centered well enough between the bolts, which can cause the plates to rack and come out of parallel, which in turn can unbalance the stack and open up gaps on the side experiencing less compression. Which as you are already familiar with, will allow oxygen to penetrate the weld and then you are done :'( The masking tap trick I actually just learned in October from Bill Medel, and boy is THAT a step up from anything else!! He recommended using a scrap of angle iron as a rail to line the quarters up and make taping them up easier. I think his had a little tab welded onto the bottom that could be put in a vice and have the angle sit like a V so gravity will keep your coins in place without needing your hands.
-
I don't think there are rules against sharing published works, there is an entire subforum for it, 'book reviews' as well. And Mr. Mod, I think you are confusing this thread with Mad Rabit's thread asking for resources. This has been pretty cut and dried discussion of technical details and techniques, references have not come up yet.
-
It's a quick and dirty 'press' substitute. If you overcooked your billet you should wait for it to cool enough to re solidify as you need to have the stack on its side to put it in the vise (in a normal mounting configuration) and you don't want to watch your whole stack slide/drip out when you turn it :). Similarly it is possible to squeeze lower melting point alloys entirely out of your stack if they are liquid-y when you press it (sooo irritating...) Edit: curse this phone!
-
Any particular reason you went with two handles on your plates frozenforge? The earrings look fun :) just need the hardware and you are in business!
-
I think this is probably your best bet for website, but if you find something else do please share! Midgett's book is amazing but somewhat of a unicorn to find, Ferguson's book has more than quadrupled in price over the last two years since it went out of print, if you are serious about your interest do yourself a favor and snag that NOW before it gets any worse. Just checked, too late, it's worse, Amazon has it at almost 170$, practically 10 times sticker price from 2 years ago. James is a magician much like the others already mentioned, but I haven't seen any independent publications from him (please tell me if there are, cause I'd want a copy!), he does have a chapter in Midgett's book thought. You can also try to get ahold of Jay Burnham-Kidwell, he has two published research papers on the subject that are difficult to find online, but conceivably available through the publusher (university press..? I forget). You might be able to raise him from the CBA website or the Arizona blacksmith association site. Don't bother with the blurb in 'the complete metalsmith' though, it's pretty schematic... (Though it did lead me here originally, so maybe it was good for something after all) I have a couple of other generic silversmithing and jewelry books that give it a tip of the hat, but not worth chasing. edited to uncorrect the autocorrect...
-
Looks like Ike (if it's a copper core visible on the edge) is the same composition as the quarter and halves. Last few times to Vegas over the last 5 or so years has shown that most of the places have switched to those E ticket machines, you might be able to find hard currency in play towards state line (buffalo bills maybe?) though. I bought a bunch of precut disks in silver, red bronze(I think), regular brass, and nickel so I could try some 'real' metals without all the overhead of cutting and cleaning. Have yet to put them in the fire though = they are 1" diameter I think, so still small billet size unfortunately, but larger precut sheet metal blanks have eluded me so far, especially in rectangle or square. If anything I think using clean new real sheet metal stock is actually easier to bond than the quarters, but the quarters are cheaper per unit mass (last time I did the math anyway), uniformly cut to size, and don't really require much in the way of prep, so you could probably get off 3 billets of QSOkume in the same time it would take to do one traditional mokume stack. And if you can skill up on a more difficult weld then the easier one is a breeze :) I need to make a run to the bank in the near future myself, must remember to bring several rolls of quarters and try to horse trade my way into halves or fulls :-D Edit: beaten by frosty! I AM getting old ;) A mokume shovel from coin stock diameter?? Tiny shovel or humongous starting stack?! Or multiple stacks re-welded together?
-
my intent has always been to kind of revive this section, but I keep letting work and life get in the way of my hobbies :'(
-
its a typo, to be exact ;) Langet's are the little pointed 'ears' on the sides of the axe eye that basically point up and down the handle. also defined as a strap of sorts springing from the same location to fix a larger head like a halberd to the pole with rivets.
-
polished hammer and polished anvil, just planish it down and try not to catch too much thumb :D grinding will indeed knock off most of the nickel, certainly anywhere there is a raised design, and will negate any layer distinction at those locations.
-
interesting concept, thanks! iv read about planishing off the ridges, and the one I attempted like that (after planishing my thumb quite generously as well) was nothing spectacular and certainly not worth the effort, but every other one has a lot of potential without severely affecting the stability of the whole thing in the plates.
-
Dave ill split the airfare with you! only problem is going to be finding a shop that is so well equipped with enough stations for multiple people. I wonder if Tony Swatton could host? :-D
-
Fewer layers of weld for the size, less surface area of weld to go bad, but at the same time you have to grind off more to get to any bad sections that do appear = Teeny, you in a propane forge or solid fuel? it would be pretty nice to have a digital kiln, but a propane forge gets it done with a minimum of fuss per dollar :)
-
I have not, but it has been recommended to me by several others, and chemically/metallurgically they are the same, but bigger. so on paper its all good :) kudos for getting stack and re-weld to hold! I haven't mustered up the mojo to try my hand at that just yet, but there is great potential there for cool designs!
-
goose up your billet mass without making a huge unwieldy tower by switching from quarters to half dollars. same clad composition, give or take 20% more diameter, and better than double the mass. added bonus of not overloading your layer count by the time you get down to working size/thickness.
-
quarters are a sandwich of two outer layers of a cupronickel alloy that is 25% nickel and 75% copper, on either side of a pure copper core. On the whole it is listed as 91.67% copper and 8.33% nickel, which is kind of misleading because it reads like a homogenous alloy, instead of the actual clad composition. its surprising to me how many people I have talked to that have grown up their entire lives with the clad coinage and still have no idea that quarters are not silver colored on the inside, and still think that there is actual silver in the coin. that's a lot of activity for just being one-and-a-bit of twist, but I know what you mean with the grinding and clean up, that would explain the 'extra' patterns :)
-
Thank you :) I have neither the tooling nor experience to do any serious refacing, so for now it will just be a good massage with a series of sandpapers to get the surface rust and superficial pitting under control. Theres enough edge left around the heel for my purposes for the time being. I'll ping my friend that has a MIG to see if his kit can do the job though, im not current on face repairs, been too long since I have read through one of the how to threads hereon. I will get pics up when shes more presentable. Thank you for the input, I have been searching on and off for the last two years to find a shop sized fisher to use and your posts and wisdom have been the source of much education and lust on my end :)
-
Thats really clean! Great form and layering! How many twists you put in that?
-
Wanted to share a recent acquisition with the group and get some opinions. I picked up a Fisher Number 2 20 pound anvil at the ABS hammer-in in Tulare last month on impulse, its a little torn up on the edges but for 20$ i couldnt just keep walking, so without further ado here are some pics :) The only markings i have been able to discern so far are the FISHER logo and big numeral 2 under the horn, and the letter A towards the base under the heel. there is a visible circle in the casting on the underside of the base, presumably where a sprue was cut off. Anyway, i picked it up to be a bench anvil for light indoor cold work on non-ferrous metals. to which ends, i need to clean up the horn and face and polish them. im not going to remove a lot of material, just shine them up, but i wanted to ask if there might be any significance or meaning (to the museum for instance) attached to it that might be larger than pressing it back into service. Thanks for looking!
-
Please do not read this as any form of slight against you, your technique, or experience. I will say that that particular symptom looks "familiar" to me, and from what I have learned at the anvil, and from a few other threads discussing similar afflictions MY situation was/is more than likely caused by taking way too many heats to perform a given task, letting iron sit in the gas forge after it has already come up to temp, working well beyond when I should have stopped, and not keeping the work flat with the anvil face. so every hammer blow both forges AND bends the stock just behind the hammer, then roll 90, and the next swing bends the other axis, now you have to unbend both of those to get back to straight, and all of that is happening in an area that is colder than it should be for such an operation. Most of this experience has been on mild steel from several sources. I can't recall if iv done it to sucker rod, I think I police my temperature more vigilantly on tool steel. So again, I am just saying that's what I have attributed to be causing similar symptoms in MY work, YMMV :)
-
Procrastination, what excuse works best for you?
Chinobi replied to Glenn's topic in Blacksmithing, General Discussion
For me it's having to clean off the bench before I can start to work. Always seems like it takes longer to get my workspace and tools(if I actually have what I need and don't have to make something else 'work') in order than it does to actually do the work, and by the time I have gotten myself set up I'm practically out of workable time or its too late to be making so much noise :'( -
Not my idea originally, but a 20 ton hydraulic bottle jack (harbor freight or similar, like you would use to lift a car) built into an H-ish frame makes a dandy press substitute for small work. It's as slow as you think it is, but it works quite nicely for setting welds on Mokume stacks. You might need to create something like the armature on a screw press to get enough leverage on that pipe vise, hopefully the screw can support the load :)
-
Thank you for the info Geoff, I recently picked up some (presumably L6) bandsaw blade chunks from iron in the hat and that will come in quite handy in the future :) though I may have to rerun the test with the same parameters on my stock as it is significantly thinner!