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I Forge Iron

Mark Aspery

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Everything posted by Mark Aspery

  1. Have you considered punching the eye by hand and foregoing the jig and press? If you are going to use a press, make sure that the plate that the jig/tooling is welded to is VERY sturdy - I'm thinking 2 inches plus. I know that 1 1/4 inch plate will flex. I recently tooled up a friend of mine who has symptoms resembling Parkinson's - trembles! He wanted to make hammers so we mounted a slot punch into his #5 Fly press. The receiver/stripper combo was welded to a 1 1/4 inch thick plate. and secured to the base of the press. We were going through 1 inch stock from a gas forge in 7 bumps. I was surprised at how much the base plate flexed. Also, the tool carrier at the bottom of the screw thread moved too much. It was too far out of the ways or guides. We moved up to 3 inch thick material to do two things 1. Reduce the flex AND 2. Place the tool carrier up into the guides to prevent sideways movement.
  2. I have enjoyed a little success twisting square tubing. I tried to have the corners take more of a supportive role in the twist. To do this I 'gently' tapped the flat sides in to make them slightly concave and the corners proud. I do not try to draw the corners to a point, just make the sides concave. This should twist a little better than stock tubing. Twin convex rollers - one set top and bottom the next set side to side should do this on a large scale.
  3. Just fine Frosty. I have other PDF articles if you ever need them.
  4. I do a little B&W photography for my articles and book. I am by no means an accomplished photographer. The picture attached below gives a rough idea on how I set up the area. I used (in the past) flood light bulds (not spot light) inside of brood lamp reflectors with light diffusers from the kitchen florescent lights in front of them. Some very light white nylon material in front of that diffuses the light even more. The broadest, diffused lighting that you can get will be your best bet. The whole lot was done for under $100. I now use a more professional lighting system -Interfit Super 5 cool lamps. But they cost $400 a pair. I get my background from watching how special effects are done in the movies with a Chroma Key background. This is nothing more that a green or blue background. This Youtube video will give you an idea. YouTube - How to make awesome green screen (Chroma key)!! part 1 DVD I have a PDF article that goes into this in a lot more detail but it exceeds the limit for IFORGE. You can E-mail me and I'll send you the document if you wish. Good luck.
  5. I use a 1/8 inch wall 10 inch diameter pipe that sits on the forge table. I have a 14 inch tall 8 inch (across the chord) opening. Of that I close 2 inches at the bottom with a piece of 2x2x1/4 angle iron. This helps the flue's stability. PDF document attached Blackmiths flue article.pdf
  6. I see that you list Denver as your home. I take it that you are a member of the Rocky Mountain Smiths. I think that I agree with earlier postings -that blacksmithing is more of a calling than a career. As far as retiring is concerned, I personally don't want to retire from this craft -BUT that doesn't mean that I'm not prepared. Accidents and illnesses can re-shape a plan pretty quickly. I think most smiths aim to retire by selling their building. This can be hard to do if you rent shop space. Unless there is a manager between you and the product, then when you are all done, all you have to sell is your tools - not a business. I think developing a product line is a good starting point. It will smooth out the highs and lows of self employment. The blacksmith shop -owned by Joe Koches- buys your wares outright. Cherry Creek Mall seems like a place to get into - high end galleries. Contact Rod Picket of Durango and have a chat with him (Rocky Mtn Smiths) he feeds his family from his forge. 970-769-1020 Ditto Craig May of Pine Co. 303-838-2619 I have heard it said that you should do what you want and the money will follow. I think that's a load of balony. Do what you want and live within the means that it provides is more like it. If you have good design skills you will get on - if not then you are pretty much relegated to the also-rans. Poorly designed but well made will not compete with well designed but poorly made. Look at impressionist art. The physical hard skills can be purchased at a school or hired with an employee. Good luck with your decision.
  7. One more thought with anvil orientation. If you plan to punch holes in bars (and you probably do) orient the anvil so that the ambient light falls evenly on either side of the punch as you hold the steel. If you end up with a strong light source on one side of the bar, you will tend to punch your holes off-center and that can lead to much gnashing of teeth and sharp intakes of breath!
  8. I like to have the bick or horn of the anvil pointed away from the forge. This allows for a blacksmith to work completely around the bick (such as chamfering an eye) without the tongs or the steel interfering with the forge. Otherwise I'm with the triangle theory - actually more of a pentagon with power hammer and swage block added to the mix.
  9. I swing a hammer with my right hand and have the bick or horn of the anvil oriented to my left. This allows me to chamfer eyes and do bevelled scroll work -where I have to move completely around the bick - without interfering with my hammer hand. I would prefer the hardy to be to my left over the mass of the anvil. This is not a safety concern as I rarely use a hardy cut off - favoring a hot-cut chisel, but a pragmatic want to get more return to my hammer blows. Alas I have a London Pattern anvil and the hardy hole is in the heel and so to my right.
  10. Think of hot metal as fresh cow poop! If you jump into it with both feet, it will spread everywhere - This is the same as hitting the hot steel with the flat face of the hammer on the anvil face. If, however, you throw a branch into the cow poop, it spreads 180 degrees - either side of the stick. The stick is like the horn on your anvil or the cross peen of your hammer. In blacksmithing terminology, we call this division of material fullering. A chisel is a fuller - all-be-it a sharp one. The cross peen in your picture is too sharp - by a lot! I consider my cross peen reasonably sharp and it measures 3/8 inch across the peen. My peen is slightly crowned with the corners relieved. All this can be achieved with an angle grinder and a flap disc - just be careful not to pull any color (effect the temper of the hammer).
  11. I like your approach to installing a vice for filing. I have found filing (for the blacksmith application) can be a bit awkward given the angle of the vice jaws. You might try knocking yourself up a filing vice insert to change the angle a little.
  12. There is such a thing as an umbrella policy that covers you for liability as you volunteer for non-profit organizations as well as other situations. I think I pay a little over $100 a year for mine. Talk to your insurance agent. I am a member of the California Blacksmiths Assn. A few years ago we had a good look at our liability insurance. It seems to cover everyone EXCEPT the members. That is, if I hit a chisel and it ricocheted over the fence and killed the neighbors dog, the dog is covered. But if the same chisel hit a CBA member - the member was not covered as we are all named under the policy. We, the CBA, had to go out and get accident insurance to cover our instructional workshops. At the time it was a little over $2.50 per person per year. I hope this helps.
  13. Yep! It has to look wet on the outside when you go to weld. The scale has to be in liquid form to exit the weld area. look at your flux and make sure that it is dry (earlier entry - this thread). Make sure your forge is not oxygen rich - Make sure your forge is hot enough - otherwise your will spend too long getting to a welding heat and destroy the flux.
  14. Don't worry about the scarf at the moment. All you need to do is get the weld. When you are happy with the weld, then start scarfing the ends as in the flux spoon. Spreading the material will prove the weld. Use solid blows when you spread the weld or you may shear the weld.
  15. I don't do the bee-hive thing. A deep open fire works best for me. A nice bright yellow fire. The older smiths used to say that you heat the bar until it disappears in the fire. I'm going to say the same thing in a slightly different way. The bright yellow fire is at the upper end of the welding heats for steel. When you place your steel into the fire, it will chill the coals around it. When those coals come back to yellow and envelops your piece [it disappears in the fire] you are at an appropriate heat to weld.
  16. In the extreme, the bar will feel and sound like you are hitting solid putty when it is welding. The bar will feel and sound a lot more like the normal forging sound when it isn't going to weld. Get a 20 ft length of 3/8 bar and cut it into 2 foot sections. Bend all the ends over so that you have a 3/4 inch long staple at the ends. Don't try to weld until you have all the ends prep'ed - all 20 of them. Now start to weld the ends together - one right after the other. Start at a low temp and increase the temp with every end. Use flux. At some point the bar ends will start to weld. I hope that because you are doing so many in such a short period of time that you will feel and hear the difference when you start to weld. Get a couple of welds under your belt and then slowly start to drop the temp until you start to fail at the weld. Then go back up in temp. You'll know when the bars will weld after the first blow. You could almost close your eyes.
  17. Hello Metal muncher, I think we have communicated before. Flux does three things; 1.) Borax, being slightly basic, will dissolve the scale into a liquid form at a temperature lower than the scale usually becomes liquid at. 2.) It covers the metal like a glass preventing the 'super heated' free oxygen in the fire from formiong more scale 3.) it is a physiological crutch It is quite possible to weld without flux. The problem is to heat the steel to a temperature at which the scale will become liquid. The scale needs to be in a liquid form so that it will exit the weld area, leaving two clean surfaces in close enough proximity that they will weld under your hammer blows. The trick is to heat the bar to the point where the scale becomes liquid without burning the bar. Flux is an easier way to go. Do you live in a humid environment? I'm thinking that you probably do. When you apply the Borax, does it flow into a nice glassy paste (dry borax) or does if look like its fizz-ing and make a grey colored ball when you apply it (wet borax). If it makes a ball, you might consider drying out your flux before using it. If you want to go all out, spread it on a baking sheet and melt it in your kitchen oven. Then grind it into a salt like consistency. If you are using re-bar, I am presuming that it has a higher carbon content that your local mild steel. As such, it should weld at a lower heat. If when you hit the bar it crumbles or falls apart, then you got it too hot. Try this... With no expectation of welding, put the biggest re-bar that you have into the fire and slowly heat it free of flux. Turn the bar often as you do this to prevent any one spot from burning in the fire. Pull it out often and look at it...I mean really look at it! At some point the surface of the bar will look wet. After a few seconds out of the fire, the wet surface will start to look crusty. It will not weld when it looks crusty. If you never get to the wet looking stage, then I might suggest that you have too much air (O2) coming into the fire or your fire is not hot enough. The same is true when you weld with flux. The bar must look wet or it will not weld. If you had a successful test with the 'heating the bar until the surface ran without flux, then you have a guide as to the upper welding limit of the steel. Heat the bar to near that heat and apply your dry flux. The reason you flux at a near welding heat is that the flux will degrade in the forge environment. Keep the bar moving in the fire. The more practice you get welding the less you will have to turn the bar. It takes 1,000 trys to become a proficient forge welder and even then you can get stumped. After each failure (and yes they will happen with amazing regularity) just knock off one unit of your 1,000 trys. Light blows at first until you FEEL and HEAR the weld take and then start putting the spurs to it. Don't bring the hammer from West Hell until you are sure of the weld. Good luck and after the next try you will be down to 999 - we've all been there and all done our 1,000!
  18. The size of your monkey tool can depend upon the size of your tenon and how you go about making it. If you are using Top and bottom tooling to make your tenon (or a similar thing under the power hammer) then the tenon may come out a certain size. Your monkey tool should be about the same size as the HOT (expanded) tenon or slightly larger. If you wait for the tenon to cool then you will have to add a little to your drill hole measurements to compensate. For me, I keep monkey tools around by the 1/16 for small sizes of tenons and by the 1/8 for larger ones. 1/4, 5/16, 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 5/8, 3/4, and so on. I like to slot punch and drift to form the eye as this aids in my skill development that can be used later to make hammers. I like to make my monkey tools out of square stock as it will stay put on the face of the anvil and not require an appropriately sized half round bottom swage to capture it. I like the face of the monkey tool (generally) to be convex. This will produce a slightly concave tenon shoulder. This allows for the edge of the shoulder to grip before the root of the tenon is seated. As previously stated, make sure that the drill hole has a slight chamfer to it in order to produce a slight shoulder at the root of the tenon. This will prevent the tenon from cracking during cooling after riveting.
  19. If you look at the photographs attached you will see some bars assembled ready for a proposed weld. The arrows indicate the direction of the hammer blow. It (I hope) can be seen that some hammer blows are not coming from the right direction. I am going to draw a conclusion to this, that the force applied (your hammer blow) should come at about 90 degrees to the welding surfaces. If the welding surface and the hammer blow are in the same plane they will not weld. That being the case, if the ends of a scarf are not tapered, then they are still in line with the hammer blow and not in a welding plane. This will cause what appears to be a crack at the end of the weld as seen in the drawing. Forgeweld copy.psd
  20. I agree with Holister. The toe of the scarf should be narrower than the bar to which it will be welded. This is to counter the 'Anvil effect' of the two pieces. If you had a 4 x 4 solid bar 12 inches long, all hot, as hot as you like. Hold the bar on end and upset it to form a cube with your hand hammer. How much effect do you think you would have on the bottom of the bar? Nil! At some point a bar, even though it is all hot, can act as its own anvil. The light blows used when uniting two pieces during a forge weld will not fully penetrate to the lower bar. The top bar (toe of the scarf) will spread on top of the lower bar. If the toe of the scarf is the same size or bigger than the bar to which it will be welded - well you get those little wings creeping out at the side of the weld, and they are a bit pesky to get to weld.
  21. If there is a secret to forge welding, I think that it is how the two scarfs (SP?) fit together. I know that the hammer blows need to be light initially so that I don't blow the weld. If there is a gap between the scarfs then the light blows won't close the gap or unite the pieces. The scarf on the video is a beginners scarf in that the step is not very deep and that the end has a lot of mass to carry the heat from the forge to the anvil. With practice, the step can be a little deeper - making the weld finish quicker. The two pictures attached show the scarfs going into the weld and the initial weld. The weld has taken without the two ends being deformed overly - I hope that this shows the importance of the scarf fit.
  22. Here is a picture of a forged collar with square corners and butt end joints.
  23. The formulas are a place to start and none will ever take the place of a test piece or two. The general formula is the perimeter of the stock to be collared plus 2.5 - 3 times the thickness of the collaring material. This varies depending upon the collar thickness and shape, and the dimensions of the collared material. I cut mine a little short and forge them on a mandril or collaring tongs to produce the correct length and get square corners to the collar. I like the ends of my collars to butt up next to each other. The other style is to draw a taper to both ends which overlap when applied. The latter is a little more forgiving. The joint should be away from the viewer and on the long surface of the collared stock if it is a rectangle.
  24. There are some free downloadable books from the Countryside Agency. The Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas (CoSIRA) which became the Rural Development Agency and now the Countryside Agency put out and gave apprentice training. Type in 'The Blacksmiths Craft' into your search engine and it should get you there. The training still exist and is run out of the UK National School of Blacksmithing (Hereford Center for Technology - HCT) You can get 1, 2 or 4 year degree courses out of Hereford. There is a very (7 acres piled high) good second hand and army surplus center out of Hampshire. Piles of anvils, tongs, vices and fly presses. I can't remember the name of it now but you can contact Richard Bent via his web site and ask him for the address he may give it to you. You may have to promise beer and your first born to get the name but it's worth it. I hope this helps. BABA is a great resource, and I recommend joining
  25. Nicely stated! I have heard the shouts of the 'blue streak' at various hammer-ins and conferences across the land. In fact, nothing but the ill fitting or poorly designed tongs extracted such vituperation from the smith. If I make it to Texas, I'll call ahead!
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