MattBower

Most commercial drill rod is O1 or W1, which both have about 1% carbon. That makes heat treating trickier, and reduces toughness somewhat. Stick with something a little lower in C, as suggested above.

Small grinders bog down if you bear down on them, so you need to use a light touch -- which generates heat. Overheating is a problem when you're grinding blades, so you have to go slow and cool the blade frequently. This is why I said using a small one like this is S - L - O - W.

Well I re-squared my press table as close as I could get it, set the spindle speed as high as it can go, and tried some test cuts on scrap sheet steel, just gently pecking away in tiny little bites. 0.04-something" went OK. 0.01-something" broke almost immediately. (That one was so tiny I was having a hard time telling when it was making contact.) I'm not sure I'm up for rigging up the air tool to try tonight.

There's a guy out there who cleans and fluxes steel cable, then dips it in molten brass and brazes it solid. He calls it bronze cable damascus. Very similar to BGD's wire idea. It looks nice cut into slabs, with the steel blued. And I have an acquaintance who has poured molten bronze over BBs and blued it. THere are lots of possibilities to explore. What about cutting up a bunch of random lengths and sizes of (very clean) copper wire and/or shot (if you can get some), mixing them all up in a crucible, and pouring your pewter over that? Cutting it would expose all kinds of different surfaces. The tricky part would be eliminating trapped air spaces. There's some potential for dangerous events here, so proceed with caution.

Funny, Frosty. I work on the top floor of our building, and my first thought when it started was, "what the heck are they doing on the roof?" But after a few seconds it became pretty obvious it was something considerably bigger than that. :)

White stuff. Comes out of the sky sometimes when it's cold? ;)

I do not know exactly what it is, but you can see more of it here: http://vimeo.com/3518488 http://vimeo.com/3518689

Oh, and here's a tip that could be useful for some of you: it turns out the scrap pile can be very handy when you're weighting down stuff in the yard. So the next time SWMBO complains about the scrap pile, you can say, "but honey, what'll we do the next time there's a hurricane?" :P

I actually thought about a pin vise, but I've never used one and I didn't know how well it'd work on, say, ~1/4" of brass. BGD, I don't know the source of the run-out. I probably ought to track that down. I just need to pick up a dial indicator.(I assume that'd be the right tool for the job? In addition to being very thin on the precision measurement tool front, I'm very far from a machinist.)

I bet you guys would carry on a little if you got a couple inches of snow, too. It's all about what you're used to, and prepared for. (Well, actually, out here they carry on a bit about snow, too. The stuff that closes school here wouldn't have gotten us a two hour delay in Indiana -- but that's because we were used to it, and prepared for it. This part of the mid-Atlantic is one of those places where nature is generally pretty tame -- most of the time.)

I did that after the earthquake earlier this week. :lol:

Only a couple, hopefully. I might do a little better with HSS bits. I just happened to see a set of the carbide bits at HF and grabbed them. I'll play with this and see what I can come up with.

They're great for sharpening. As far as using the slack belt, it's there for a purpose. It's not bad to use it as long as you don't expect to get a flat surface out of it. It'll round off grind lines and the like. But it has its uses.

Kind offer, Ken. If I were closer, I'd take you up on it.

Brass. The bits are carbide. The high speed thing is what got me thinking about the flex shaft. MIne's air powered. Spins pretty fast. They make drill presses for Dremels, but I don't have a Dremel and my air powered version wouldn't fit. (Plus I'd rather not spend the money if I don't have to.)

I found a great write-up about blister steel grain and judging quality from the color of the broken steel, in a 19th century book on Google books. Now I can't find it. D'oh.

Do any of you have any tips for drilling tiny holes -- like .032"? I don't have a micro drill press or a lathe, and my regular drill press has too much run-out for the tiny bits. Best idea I've had so far is to put the bit in my flex shaft tool, mount it on my drill press table with the bit vertical, mount the work in the drill press chuck, and lower it -- with the press turned off, of course -- onto the spinning bit. I don't know if the flex shaft is precise enough, but maybe. Any better ideas?

Just to be clear, that's my interpretation of what he described. I might have it wrong!

I have a suspicion that all else equal, gas forges may cause a little more decarb because you generally heat the entire blade during each heat, despite the fact that (depending on the size of the blade) you're probably not actually working the entire blade after each heat. In a solid fuel forge, at least the way I use one, you generally only heat the portion of the blade that you intend to work during your next trip to the anvil. So I think that in gas forges the entire blade spends more time at elevated temps, on average, than in a properly managed solid fuel forge. With that said, yes, atmosphere is a critical factor. Even if you do have decarb, it shouldn't be very thick. Take a few strokes with the file and see if you get down to hard steel. If so, decarb is likely your culprit. If not, there's probably something else going on.

Is it supposed to be like one of these? (Black = depression in the work.)

I can't see the pic either, FWIW.

Mark, I'm counting on you Carolina folks to suck all the energy out of this thing before it gets up here. I've been through a few of these -- two of 'em down your way, Bertha and Fran back in '96, one of which turned North Topsail Beach into six beaches, plus another in Georgia around 2000 -- and I was hoping that I was done with them. Earthquakes and a hurricane all in one week. If it starts raining toads I'm gonna be perturbed. Good luck to you.

This doesn't sound like a job for forging as much as it does carving the design into the end of a piece of round stock using chisels, a rotary tool (Dremel, etc.), and so on. You could also start with a piece of pipe of the appropriate diameter, then braze or weld flat stock into the opening to form your design. Pipe cap on the other end as a struck surface. You'll be using this on leather, so it doesn't have to be built as solidly as a tool for use on metal.

I think the construction of our coins -- quarters, in particular -- is a little unusual.

You're going to grow grain at ~2000 F, no doubt about it, but then your blister steel will be cut, stacked, welded and rolled out -- perhaps more than once -- then forged down to usable sizes. Plenty of opportunity to fix any grain issues. The one guy I know who has done some real experimentation with blister steel uses thin-walled tubing for the container, thinner than the stock he's carburizing (~1/4"), and runs at near-welding temps to keep the time down. (Like many metallurgical processes, carburizing is much more sensitive to temperature than time.) The tubing is the canary in the coal mine. If it converts to cast iron and starts to melt, it's time to stop. I believe he learned this tip from Ric. I may be wrong, but I had the impression that the blistering in blister steel had to do with the carbon reacting with silica slag in wrought iron to form carbon monoxide, which wants to get out of the billet somehow. Thus blisters. The only time I've seen such a blister was when I was heat treating a wrought iron hawk with a 1095 bit. A blister popped up out of nowhere, ~1/4"-3/8" behind the seam, where the WI was thin.