Buzzkill

Welcome to the forum. First, if you'll take the time to update your location in your profile you may find someone close by who can help you get started on your journey. For your 2 inch thick plate, it will work best as an anvil if you place it on edge with the 18 inches vertical. The more steel directly under your hammer blows, the better it will help you move metal. 2 inches is a little thin, but it only needs to be as wide as your hammer face to get full effect. Sometimes for knife making a narrower anvil is better anyway. The hydraulic hammer bit sounds like a sweet item for a post anvil. Your pipe for a propane forge is overkill by an order of magnitude at least. 18 inches in diameter at 3/4 inch thick and 26 inches long is quite heavy to begin with. Next you'll need to calculate your volume after lining it to figure out how many burners of which diameter you'll need to heat that monster. It's pretty hard to work on more than 6 inches or so of metal at a time before it cools to the point where it needs to be put back into the fire. Your proposed forge will use a LOT of propane to keep it hot and the reality is most of it will be completely wasted. Your enthusiasm to get started beating on hot metal is understandable and it is addictive for most of us here. However, you seem to be falling into the trap that a lot of us did when starting up. It's easy to get caught up wanting to go big and best before we even really know what will work for us. I hope you'll take some time to pull up a chair, some snacks, and a cold beverage and read at least the pinned and sticky posts at the top of the sections that apply to your interests. Based on your post I'd recommend hitting the gas forge section and the intro to knife making/knife making classes for a start. You'll find that a fair amount of material on here may contradict what you've seen on YouTube and some other sources. The main difference is a lot of the regular posters on here are experienced smiths whose work speaks for itself, some have written books on their areas of interest, and the community here will usually quickly correct erroneous information.

Lighten up, Francis! (Sorry for the "Stripes" reference). The OP didn't fly way off the rails here. He said what he was planning to use and asked if anyone else had done this and if so what their experience was. IIRC the inside diameter of 5 gallon buckets tends to be around 10.5 to 11 inches for most of them. A couple layers of 1 inch thick kaowool brings the ID down to 6.5 to 7 inches. That's probably still larger than needed, especially for a first forge, but it's not crazy big. One more layer would yield an inside diameter around 4.5 to 5 inches. Sure the amount of insulation is overkill, but it will be that much easier to re-line later when needed. Oberu, if you're set on using that pail then just use extra kaowool layers to bring the diameter down and try to keep your total inside volume under 350 cubic inches. That way you can heat it with a single 3/4 inch diameter NA burner (or a couple smaller burners). As already mentioned, there is a wealth of information on here about good gas forge design and construction. It would be a good use of your time to make sure you have a decent handle on as many of the specifics as possible before moving forward. I'm guessing that you can find a smaller option fairly easily, but your pail will also fit the bill if you handle it correctly.

You only gave us one picture, but from what I can see ..... it's hard to offer critique on something that appears darn near perfect to me. Proportions and craftsmanship are spot on. That beauty would be welcome in my home I can tell you.

This is the type of thing that will make me jump on a soap box for a good 10 minutes or so. It's easy to cross the line into political topics on this one, but I'll just leave a few short thoughts: The right to speak your mind cannot coexist with a right to be free from offense, Words only have the power over you that you allow them to have, and You cannot control how other people behave or speak. You can only control what comes out of your own mouth (unless you grab hot metal and then all bets are off).

You chose wisely when you kept the forge running. I like 'em both, but that wheat twist takes the cake. Very nice!

Every treadmill I've seen so far uses a DC motor. However, since you plug them into an AC circuit and they pretty much all have a speed control built into them, they already have what you need for variable speed tool repurposing. You may have to build some enclosures to keep the dust and such out of the electronics though.

Is that 12 minutes 36 seconds from the time you lit the forge, or the measured time after you felt the forge was up to temperature and added the wrench? That seems like a long time if it's the second option and a wrench which I will assume was 3/8 or less thick and probably less than 3/4 inch wide in the shaft part. However, even that doesn't give you a good idea of the maximum temperature you are reaching with your fire unless you left in there much longer and it never ended up higher in the color spectrum. If you have your fire pot constructed correctly and you have fuel for your fire, the determining factor on the temperature you will achieve is the air flow. Either way too much or too little air can make your fire cooler. In between that, more air = hotter fire.

Hopefully Mikey or Frosty will join in here, but I'll get it started. The diameter and length of the jet and the burner tube as well as the air inlet openings are "matched" fairly well in a good design. The result is that, once tuned, the NA burner will pull very close to the "right" amount of air in with the propane anywhere in the functional operating range of the burner. So, if you tune your burner to be a little on the rich side (slightly less air than the amount for complete combustion in the forge), then raising or lowering the propane pressure a little should affect the heat output, but not the relative ratio of air to fuel - you'll stay with a slightly rich flame at 3 psi or 12 psi. The bottom line is guys like Frosty and Mikey have already done the hard work for us. They've figured out the correct diameters, lengths, and general design so that all we have to do is initial tuning and then raise or lower the propane pressure to get the desired temperature.

If you like that shape you may want to look for a non-functional oiless or "pancake" compressor that has a tank you can repurpose. They are fairly cheap compressors and therefore people tend to toss them out and buy a new one rather than repair them when something goes wrong. Since all you need is a shell to hold insulation and refractory it doesn't even matter if the tank still holds air.

Ultimately I got something that works well. Used it yesterday and it makes the chips fly effortlessly. Looking back now I would have formed it differently. I took 3 sections of leaf spring from a semi trailer (each 3/4 inch thick) and made a blacksmith's helper so I could do the project solo. I placed 2 pieces of the leaf spring I was using for the gouge between the 3 pieces of trailer spring then welded the 2 outer pieces in place with some flat straps between them. Using a smaller leaf spring, I bent a U shape that fit through my hardy hole, welded one end to the previously mentioned contraption so it sits on the anvil's sweet spot, and then bent the other end around so I could weld the 3rd piece in place hovering above and between the other two. All of these are in the on edge arrangement, and they are rounded on the edges already so I didn't have to do much more than clean them up to use them. After welding a couple guides to keep the piece centered I heated my stock, slid it into place and used an 8 pound sledge to get things started. It worked fairly well (although it took more heats than I anticipated) until the flute was more than halfway to where I wanted to be and then the piece started turning sideways and slipping down between the 2 pieces rather than continuing to wrap around and form a good U shape, so I had to finish that up by hand. It's a little over a quarter inch thick, so it's plenty sturdy and it worked better than I had anticipated. If I had to do it again, or if I do it again, I will probably try to get the flute started with the step of the anvil and a straight peen hammer. I think once the middle starts to flex I can get the rest of it where it needs to be with just hammer and anvil. I may keep one of those pieces around so I can have the 3/4 inch thick rounded edge to use for straightening and getting a uniform flute shape though. That's probably somewhat confusing and a lot more info than you wanted, but you did ask. If it wasn't such a PITA to get pics from my "dumb phone" to the computer I'd snap a few shots to help explain, but....

In my experience there are 3 main factors that will bring people to you, whether you are selling widgets or providing a service: 1. Quality 2. Price 3. Marketing They are all important. You've probably seen crappy products that are overpriced sell well due to a good marketing strategy. Conversely there are high quality products that are reasonably priced which hardly get any sales. For most of us a decent balance of the three will be most beneficial in the long run. There are people I've done business with for more than 20 years and I know they are not the least expensive option around, BUT every time I need them they are there to fill the need. As that relates to selling your forged items your customers need to be happy with whatever you make for them. If they are they will come back and probably bring more people to you. If they are not they probably won't tell you. You just won't hear from them again. Personally I'd rather sell a few items of a quality that I'm proud to put my name on and charge a little more than a bunch of quickly made stuff of poor quality at a cheap price. That doesn't mean you can't sell quickly made and relatively inexpensive items, but you should be comfortable and/or proud of every piece you sell.

Nice job. I like Game of Thrones, but I think your friend got the better end of the exchange.

All I know is that no matter how much room I have it's never enough. To be fair though, a lot of that is due to tool migration. Any time I have open space some destitute tool in need of a home shows up on my doorstep with puppy dog eyes and I just can't turn them away. I swore i would always make room for my truck in the garage, but it hasn't been inside for a year or more now. I don't know what the minimum working area is; I just know the correct size is always more.

JPH, I have got to learn the secret of your puttering technique. My puttering never turns out so well or so much. If it did I'd become a full-time putterer. Fantastic work as always and I'm also looking forward to the next book.

Thanks for the additional replies. bigfootnampa, I'm not sure how much I'll get into turning wood, since so far I enjoy hitting hot steel a bit more, but if I do move forward with it I'll definitely check out the Nova lathe. Jspool, thanks for the link. I was forging some of the tools when you posted, but the info regarding shaping the bowl gouge is helpful for grinding the cutting edge and possibly for future gouges as well. Now I need to turn some handles for the tools I made and see how they work out. The tools I made from coil spring still have a long enough "handle" portion that I can use them to turn their own wooden handles and then cut them off at the end of the drawn down tang areas for inserting into the wooden handles. I just need to see if I have some suitable pieces of wood, a day when sweat will actually evaporate, and a little time. Thanks again for all the responses.

I don't have as much experience smithing or teaching as a lot of you, but a technique that works in some situations is to put the disruptive person "in charge" of something. For some people if they are given a responsibility which makes them feel important they will start to focus on their task and slow down or stop the disruptions. I'm not sure what would work in your situation. Maybe he could be the monitor making sure everyone has their proper safety gear in place before forging begins or something of that nature. Having said that, there are some people that you just can't seem to reach and at that point it's better for everyone to part ways as quickly as possible.

Hmm. So that indicates there would probably be some benefit to cleaning them up and running the colors out again - at least more than a soak at deep straw temperature.

Today I finished forging and hardened several woodworking tools. Immediately after quenching I cleaned them up a bit on the belt grinder and then used the dragon's breath of the forge to bring most of the tool length up to a nice blue, with a deep straw color at the cutting edge. These were made from leaf spring and coil spring. The question is once tempering has been done that way is there any real benefit to a "soak" type of temper for a couple hours? For knives I normally do 2 temper cycles for 2 hours each one day apart at a specific temperature. Everything I've read indicates that time at temperature is important or at least desirable, but if this question has been asked before I didn't find it in my search.

Gorgeous work! I realize these aren't likely to see a lot of impact, but do you have any concern about delamination/cracking starting along the top of the spine and spreading down into the blades? I find the visual effect striking though.

This will be a one man operation, but I should be able to make a hardy hole mounted spring fuller to do that part of the job. I'm just trying to figure out what to do for the bottom swage. I considered trying to use wood since this will probably be a one-off item, but I don't think that would work well on the anvil and I don't have a good size stump I can modify. I will figure something out though.

Sounds interesting. I look forward to seeing it completed. Just make sure you don't create something on the end that will disembowel you when you are using the knife

The tang is whatever you fasten the handle material to in simplest terms. You have a short portion that could be used for a hidden tang and a portion that could have slabs of material (scales) fastened to both sides to create the handle. Neither of them is fully developed and I'm not sure which way you plan to go with the handle. If you are going for a hidden tang then you'll need to draw out some of the wider stock in the area near your index and middle fingers in order to get enough length for a decent handle to be put on. If you are planning to add scales to complete your handle then you'd probably want to remove the "spike" part, possibly reshape it some near your little finger, and drill/punch some holes to help with alignment and security of the handle slabs. Generally with a chopping blade it's good to have the tang end furthest from the cutting edge flared out or wider than the part closest to the cutting edge. This helps keep the knife from slipping out of your hand during chopping. If you're planning on doing any piercing or thrusting then you will probably want some form of finger guard that prevents your hand from slipping forward onto the cutting edge during use. Bowie style knives typically have both features for instance. Right now the area of the tang nearest the cutting edge has a gradual taper as it gets closer to the cutting edge. There's not much to keep your fingers from slipping forward during thrusting or piercing use, especially if you have a lubricant such as sweat or blood on your hands at the time.

The best advice I can give you right now is to spend several hours on this site reading through the copious quantities of posts that deal with every single one of the questions you have asked here. Once you have a basic understanding of what you are trying to accomplish you won't need to ask some of the questions and can be more specific about some of the others. I'm not trying to discourage you at all. Quite the opposite, but the information you are requesting has already been typed out here - some of it numerous times. All you have to do is look for it and read it. Even if you do as Latticino suggests, it will benefit you to have read and understood some of the basics before heading into a class.

Before you are beset on all sides by the curmudgeons let me give you a little advice. First of all welcome to the forums and the world of blacksmithing/bladesmithing. Secondly, resist the urge to rush into some of these areas. You posted this in the knife making section, so hopefully you noticed the stickies at the top. Take some time to read through the knife making classes 101 for starters. There is a dedicated heat treating section. If you want to use solid fuels like coal then head to the solid fuel forges section. The bottom line is you have a fair amount of material to read on this site that already addresses the questions you've asked in detail. You're asking for advice on how to swim in the ocean before learning how to tread water in a fairly shallow pool. It's a satisfying hobby, but if you don't take the time to absorb the information available on this site and learn some basics you are setting yourself up for failure. Spend a few hours on here reading about the topics that interest you the most and if at all possible find someone in your area that already does what you want to learn to do. If you will go to your profile and add your location you may find someone on this forum who is within a reasonable distance to you who can help.

Thanks for the responses and the tip. The back side should be no problem to clean up well.