MattBower

Seems like you're making your life a great deal harder than it needs to be by making the ball hollow, especially if it's just a wall hanger. Do you have a reference that says originals were hollow? Solid seems far preferable for that sort of duty. If it's too heavy, just use a smaller ball. (Also note that many flails didn't use a ball as the basis of the head, and not all the heads were solid metal.) On the legality issue (not relevant to the original question): in Virginia it's perfectly legal to own a slung shot. You simply can't carry it concealed on or about your person. (And note: the ninnies in the Virginia General Assembly outsmarted themselves when they were copying someone other state's law, and called it a "slingshot" (child's toy) rather than a slung shot. So there's actually an excellent argument that that provision wouldn't apply to a slung shot -- but there's another provision that applies to "flailing instrument(s).")

A thorough scrub with alcohol or hot, soapy water is really all you need. But toothpaste contains fine abrasives, including DE. Some guys use it on blades.

Dale, you can read all about it here:

Is it crucial to maintain the current outer dimensions? If not, then what Steve said. If so, then you might consider squaring it out by filing.

Have you ever forged on a 100+ pound anvil?

I'll PM you, Larry.

I'm sort of with Mr. Martin. I understand that you're probably trying to make do with minimal materials, but I think you're going to find that design rather constraining -- hard to work in, can't see the fuel or work easily, no place to pile spare fuel while it cokes up -- and the chimney not very effective. Insulation isn't really necessary with solid fuel forges; the fuel doubles as insulation. In fact insulation may actually be counterproductive as far as the life of your firepot. I'm sure it'll heat metal, but I suspect if you try a more conventional forge you'll soon want to make major modifications to that one. (I'm assuming you haven't done any forging in a more conventional solid fuel forge. If I'm mistaken, I apologize.) Sorry not to be more positive. I can see you put some work into it. If it were me I'd think about taking that firepot, setting it in a hole in a metal table or an empty 55 gallon drum, and burning coke or charcoal in it (to avoid the need for a chimney). Outdoors, of course.

That's not how I do it. I use what amounts to a very simple top lit updraft gasifier. (TLUD. Google it for more. There are a lot of people interested in making charcoal for various reasons these days, and with lots of ideas about how to do it.) Punch four or five ~1" holes around the circumference of your drum, a couple inches from the bottom. Fill it to the top with wood, but leave a little space for heat to circulate freely around and among the pieces. (I cut the pallets across the thin slats, right next to the thicker, internal braces. This gives pieces that fit into the drum fairly compactly.) Cut maybe 25% more and leave it aside. Both hardwoods and softwoods have been used for forging charcoal. They behave a little differently, but both work. With the lid off, light a fire at the top of the drum. As the fire spreads and burns down below the top of the drum, the rising heat and combustion byproducts prevent air from entering the fire from above. All the oxygen has to come from the holes at the bottom. As the fire continues burning downward, the oxygen coming up from the bottom is consumed near the flame front. The fuel above the flame front doesn't get exposed to much oxygen so it doesn't get consumed (much). You'll know you're on the right track when you see a lazy blue flame that starts at just about the top of the drum. It looks like it's almost rolling over the edge. If you have too much air going in the bottom, you'll burn up a lot of your newly made charcoal and you may not see the blue flame. Too little air and the fire will starve. There won't be much heat, and you may not get a blue flame because there won't be much charring going on and the gases won't be preheated enough to burn when they hit air. It will take a little experimentation to tune your process. As the fire starts to settle, I add some fresh wood. Might as well get maximum use out of the heat I'm making. When you judge that the fire is near the bottom of the drum -- the steel around my air holes starts to glow, and the blue flame may start to die down -- seal off the holes in the bottom with sticky mud/clay, then put the lid on. If it has an open bung hole, plug that. (I set a firebrick on top of it.) Be warned that the drum will be producing a lot of radiant heat at his point. The interior will be a mass of glowing orange coals. You might throw in a couple more pieces of wood before you close it up, but don't overdo it. If the drum is reasonably well sealed you'll smother the fire, but it'll remain hot for a long time. It may continue to produce smoke for a while, especially if you added fresh wood at the end. (Some will leak out around the lid and the bung hole.) Let the drum cool to ambient before you open it. Remove your charcoal and store it someplace dry. Water is not its friend. Recycle any pieces that seem incompletely charred and include them in the next go-round. When you've made good charcoal the individual pieces will have structural integrity. They'll look like wood, but matte black. They'll be firm, and they'll break rathern than crumble. When you throw the pieces in a container (or pour them out) they'll make an almost metallic tinkling sound. If your charcoal is very soft, friable and crumbly, covered in ash, and/or doesn't look much like wood anymore (like the remains in the center of a campfire), you overcharred it. Ease up on the air next time, or kill the fire sooner. If a lot of it is still tough and makes a "thunk" sound, you undercharred it. More air next time, or let it burn longer. You can buy lump charcoal in the grilling section at a big box store. Pick up a bag for comparison. The commercial guys usually do a good job. That's what you want most of your end result to look like. You can control air flow to your fire by blocking off some of the ventilation holes with clay/mud during the burn. Of course the way to add air is to make more holes. A crude way to make charcoal is to make an open fire, let it burn a while, then douse it with water. It's very inefficient, and the product isn't very good. (Geez, I sound like a character on Breaking Bad.) That's probably what you read about. This way is much better. If you've made good charcoal it'll be matte black with very little white or gray ash on it. If you're seeing a lot of ash on your charcoal, you overcooked it. (Of course there's bound to be some ash at the bottom of the drum. Some of the wood has to burn in order for the process to work.) For further reference, here's a good thread on charcoal making: http://forums.dfoggknives.com/index.php?showtopic=17918&st=0

I realize I'm getting ahead of where you are right now, but I'll throw out a few things to consider on the subject of fuel. I have forged with coal, charcoal, propane and oil. They all have advantages and disadvantages. I currently do almost all my forging with coal, and I like it very much. It makes a very hot, very flexible fire that you can easily tune to your specific purpose. It's cheap if you don't have to pay for shipping by the bag, and building a functional coal forge can be fairly simple. You can buy good smithing coal from BGCM -- I don't know all the details, but a friend who is a member there has done it -- which would be very convenient for you. But coal smoke is acrid, irritating to the eyes and lungs, and genuinely bad for you. So a chimney is a really good idea, and even that may not be good enough if you have neighbors nearby. Propane is clean, simple to handle, and very readily available. It probably won't bother the neighbors. But it costs more than coal (again, perhaps depending on what you pay for shipping), and it requires a more complicated, expensive forge. Some people struggle to reach welding heat with it. (It absolutely can be done, and it's not that hard, but some people have a little trouble with it.) With coal or charcoal in a proper forge for that fuel, and an adequate air supply, achieving welding heat is never really a question. I've made a few hundred pounds of charcoal and can tell you how to do it fairly painlessly with a simple setup -- nothing more than 55 gallon drum with a lid, and a few holes punched in the sides. It's far less complicated than the retorts you'll see around the Internet, although it's probably a less efficient and it does produce some smoke. Whether you can get away with it will depend on your living arrangements. Cut-up pallets (untreated -- I don't use anything that looks oddly colored or otherwise gives me reason to believe it contains nasty chemicals) are a good source of free wood, and they have the advantage of uniform, relatively thin cross-sections. Thinner cross-sections char faster, and disuniform cross-sections create problems. If you let the burn go long enough to completely char the thick pieces, the thin ones tend to burn up. If you stop when the thin ones are charred, the process is incomplete in the thick ones. Uniformity makes for a much better, more efficient end result. Waste oil was an interesting experiment, but ultimately just way too much trouble in my view. The fact that I used a fairly crude, homemade burner probably made matters worse. Oil did unleash godawful amounts of heat, though.

If all you need is sort of a light golden patina, the brass brush should work well. It'll be a very thin coating. Try it out. If it's not the effect you want, you should be able to braze over it.

For horseshoe nails, yeah, I suspect it'll work fine. Might take a bit. Grant's right that an insulating brick underneath would make it easier.

I'm a little surprised. Most of the reports I've found by guys who've tried them are very positive. If you want to send one out to Virginia for troubleshooting, I promise to give it a thorough workout! :P

I searched the archives and I know a few folks here, at least, are familiar with the Cole drill, a.k.a. a ratchet drill or old man. (The estimable Mr. Powers apparently owns one that he got for $10 at a flea market -- lucky dog!) But for those who aren't, here are a couple links: http://cochraneareahomeshopmetalworkers.webs.com/unusualorantique.htm http://www.rustyiron.com/engines/coledrill/ I recently discovered these things, and I'm fascinated with them. Frankly, for drilling larger holes they look much more more fun than my POS Chinese drill press. (You know it's bad when they're too ashamed to put their name on the thing. But the price was right.) And in the process of looking at them I've come to realize that the same basic principle was used in a lot of old drills. In fact after looking at this thing I finally understand how post drills work: it's basically a Cole drill with a pivoting arm that engages a ratchet mechanism to advance the feed screw automatically, and the the drill ratchet moved to the side of the drill and replaced with a wheel and gears. Now I have a hankerin' to try out the post drill at the shop. Anyway, I thought some of you might find these things as neat as I do.

I'd add a reducing atmosphere to Francis's list, especially if you're going fluxless. Flux will help prevent oxidation, and will remove any oxides that do form (up to a point). If you go without flux, atmosphere becomes even more crucial. By the way, I don't really recommend going without flux as a beginner. It can be done, but flux makes the process somewhat more forgiving. This skill is hard enough to self-teach; there's no need to make it harder until you have a good handle on it.

What they said. If the forge is properly insulated, the shell makes little difference. And thin stuff like a small propane cylinder can be a pain to weld to, at least for a hack welder like me.

I second this. 20 Mule Team is pretty much the standard. The main ingredient of the commercial fluxes is borax. They may have a few other ingredients, like boric acid and/or iron filings. And they may use anhydrous borax, which is basically dehydrated 20 Mule Team. It has some advantages. But for most things plain old borax it just fine. And it's dirt cheap. (Literally. They dig it out of huge, open pits in the ground.)

Welcome. I'm glad to see that Dave Hammer already mentioned BGOP as an alternative; it may actually be slightly closer to you than BGCM, although with traffic it may not be a shorter drive. BGOP generally has two meetings per month, on the first and third Fridays, unless there's some sort of special event going on. Check the website calendar for details. There's typically some open forge time before and after the meetings, although it tends to be crowded. Members are also free to use the shop at other times, and are permitted bring guests. (There is a two-person rule on shop use, for safety reasons.) So if you might like to come down on a weekend, send me a PM. I don't make many of the formal meetings, but there are five or ten of us who get together at the shop pretty regularly on weekends, and occasionally weeknights. So while it's a long haul for you, there are definitely lots of opportunities for forge time. That way you don't have to buy (or make) tools and build forges just to get a taste of smithing. At least one of the members also teaches classes fairly regularly. They usually meet on Thursday nights for something like six or eight weeks (I forget), for around three hours at a time. The cost is pretty reasonable; if you break it down to an hourly fee I think it comes out to something like $10/hour, and that includes tools and material. Again, check the website.

Yes. Edge angles of something like 70-85 degrees seem to be common. Some people make them a sharper than that, but think lathe bit, or at most drawknife, rather than regular knife blade.

Sure. But the spine would've been relatively soft either way, since the spike wouldn't harden much regardless of what you quenched in. I was just curious if it hardened at all.

Sounds like he did. I'm just wondering whether it was fast enough to harden the spike at all.

Nice, although I'd personally like to see the softer steel run a bit closer to the edge. Did the spike harden at all? 1095 needs a very fast oil, but even that may not be enough for a HC spike.

I think Grant is right. I suspect these guys want written standards and engineering calculations -- and then maybe some empirics.

Don't just look at the sites. Call them! I can almost guarantee you there is someone at one of those places who knows a lot more about this subject than what's on the website, and that person may be much more willing to have a conversation with you about it than to than commit to it in writing on a website for the whole world to see, forever. What you need is someone who has gone through the process and can tell you not what the answers are in your specific case, but where he found (at least some of) them. Of course the answer may turn out to be, "we had an HVAC engineer figure it out."

This is why I suggested talking to big-time commercial forge makers and/or forge shops, like the ones I linked above. ADDED: Make-up air recommendations for various types of rooms. The recommendation 6-7 l/s per square meter of floor area for smithies. 1000 square feet is 93 square meters. 93*6.5=604.5 l/s. Google says that's 21.3 cubic feet per second, or 1278 cubic feet per minute. Again, that's per 1000 square feet of floor. That's a lot of air. Use at your own risk.

I suspect someone at the museum doesn't know the difference between wrought and cast iron. That's not very surprising; to most people, "wrought iron" refers to certain architectural and landscaping items made of metal (by just about any process whatsoever), not a material.