GNJC

Quite right Glenn, that is the case, I guess any hammer-quenching is a incidental. Nonetheless, it is a new thing for me and I still can't say it looks like there is notably less scale than otherwise. I'll give it go and find out.

There is a good book by Sturt called the 'Wheelwright's Shop', it is about work in England but the same would have been done by your relative. There was an alternative to a tyre, strakes. Instead of a continouous unbroken circle there would be a number of pieces (usually coinciding with the number of fellows / sections that go to make up the circumference) each covering the joins in the wheel's circumference and pulling the sections tighter as the hot iron contracted. I don't know much about the availability of iron at that time and place, but if it was scarce straking may have been more common than tyring.

Thanks for that Dogsoldat. It's pure ignorance on my part then; I have never heard of that technique before. Looking at the video again I see that the anvil is wet, but I can't say that I see any scale flying off or that the metal looks any cleaner than would otherwise be the case. Is this just an Eastern / Japanese thing?

I've just been trawling the web during a free half hour and came across this video of a Japanese bladesmith.

Ratel, as the law currently stands - not just in the UK but in all EU member states - any citizen from one EU state must be treated by another EU state as it would its own citizens; there are some derogations regarding matters such as national security and service in the armed forces and police. Consequently, those developed Western European states such as Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK that have generous social policies have become popular with people from the poorer Eastern and Southern states, since as soon as they come to them they are entitled to everything from medical care to housing and unemployment payments. I make no political comment either way as to whether this is good or bad, I merely state a fact. However, and this is where it has relevance to Bruin's question, the large numbers that have already come from poorer countries have filled up a large number of lower paid / manual jobs and begun to create resentment among the natives. These facts have to be taken into consideration by the domestic government who - of course - want to get re-elected and so want to look like they are doing something. One of the things they are currently keen to be seen doing is 'protecting British jobs for British workers'... this is entirely possible with regard to non-EU people, but for the time being is legally impossible with regard to EU citizens while the UK is a member of the EU. Hence non-EU citizens, including Russians, bear the brunt of our government's efforts to 'protect' British jobs.

Dwarf, it certainly isn't impossible, just very difficult. If an employer can't find the right person for a job within the UK (including foreign nationals here with work permits such as Aussies or Kiwis), there is in fact an obligation to look within the EU before going further afield, i.e. Russia. This obligation has been imposed upon the UK, and other members of the EU, by the EU Commission. Without getting political (because IFI quite rightly avoids religion, politics and other such matters), I can tell you that this situation may change in the next few years, there is a growing legal concensus that our - the UK's - sovereignty is being infringed. In any case, and even if we leave the EU altogether, I think the situation for Bruin will remain pretty much the same. The simple fact is that unless Bruin and his potential employer can factually - or at least plausibly - demonstrate to a now fairly sceptical immigration service that he has a specific skill that nobody within the UK or EU has, he will not get a work permit. If any claims made by either an employer or Bruin himself later prove to have been false, the claimant will have committed a criminal offence. An employer would face prosecution and at least a fine, Bruin would face prosecution, maybe confiscation of funds 'earned', deportation and a lifetime ban from entering the UK. Bruin, please don't misunderstand what I have written, it is in no way meant to infer that you are or would be thinking of acting in such a manner I have no reason to believe you are anything but a decent fellow; I merely write to give an example of the probable results of a given course of action. As for marriage as a way in... that seems a bit extreme and, I can tell you from personal experience, it is far more closely examined!

I was given a Cole Drill! Not a surprise, because I had to find it, order it and get is shipped over here from the US... but it was nice to be asked if there was a special tool I really wanted. Owen, how effective are those headphones? I've read some good reviews, but the only chance I've had to try a pair was in a shop without much 'real' noise around.

Bruin, I am an amateur smith, a professional lawyer and have a foreign (and non-EU) wife, so I am familiar with the subjects of work permits and immigration law here in the UK. I think that you are probably going to find it very, very difficult to get a legitimate UK work permit. This is because we already have plenty of smiths of our own, plus from January 1st any smith in the whole of the EU can come and work here without a visa and we also have a lot of our own nationals unemployed... many, perhaps most, people are not happy about foreign nationals being given jobs when British people need them. If you try to obtain a work permit for another job or come without a work permit and then go and work as a smith, you will be breaking the terms of your visa; that is a criminal offence and would mean that you would be deported from the UK and not be allowed to return, so be careful if anyone suggests doing that. I'll be interested to read about your progress.

I haven't bought any of K G Smith's coke for a long time, it was causing a foul sticky, spongey clinker that made working very difficult. Is that problem now solved?

I have just fitted some shock absorbers / vibration dampers between my treadle hammer and the main upright beam it is attached to at its back, as well as putting some rubber sheet between the wood at its base and the floor. The rubber sheet is actually from a big industrial conveyer belt, and is about 5/8" thick; the dampers were intended for isolating a large air-compressor from the floor. I have only used the hammer once since installing these things and there was a big difference to the noise made and to the shock transmitted to the building. Should have done it long ago...

I'm an amateur, but remember the smith in the next village when I was a child. A few instructions to his apprentice stick in my mind: rapid taps on the anvil to call him; shouting 'left' or 'right', meaning clockwise /anticlockwise - but I have no idea from who's perspective that would have been; 'back' and 'forward', the latter meaning toward the smith; 'tight' and 'loose', I have no idea what they meant; 'stop' which happened a lot and I think was accompanied by a single hit on the anvil and keeping the hammer down. I'm not sure if it is my imagination, but I think he sometimes used to put on a bit of a show for us...

Yes, nicely done. There are few things better than making something useful that you can use every day and get pleasure from every time.

I've just had a look at the smithing section in Moxon's 'Mechanick Exercises' - mine is the 1703 edition. Several types of hammer are mentioned but no specific weights are given, merely helpful advice such as that the hammer is '...sometimes bigger, or less, according to the strength of the work-man...' So no luck there. You won't get exact figures but you could take a squint at photographs going back to the mid 19th century and then decent quality illustrations from before then. If you can make a good estimate of the size of a hammer's head you can calculate the mass of it, probably to within half a pound.

This thread is amusing and depressing at the same time. I don't blame any child who asks me any question and always answer them as best I can; but I don't have a lot of times for the adults who only need to use common sense to answer 99% of their questions. Sadly the overplayed 'health and safety' mentality is endemic here in the UK too. I think that H & S is fine in principal, but when local education authorities ban classes because 'hot metal is dangerous' it makes me question their whole being. Earlier this year I paid £120 for a batch of tools (some blacksmith's and some tinsmith's) that were mostly unused, their cost new would be about £1600, this was from a school in Wolverhampton and the reason the local authority was closing the school's metalwork department... 'hot metal is dangerous.' Wrong, people mis-handling hot metal is dangerous! As for shows, several times I have just had an old person come and stand near the forge; I found this a bit odd at first, but they have all explained that they were enjoying the smell of the coke burning and that it brought back many memories. Some were the children of smiths, some just remembered the smithy of their childhood. The best question I have been asked - and which I think showed some good thinking - came from a little boy, maybe seven or eight years old, at Oxfordshire County Show this summer: 'how do you make your first hammer?'. I'm a lawyer by profession and not bad at thinking on my feet, but I'll admit that this made me smile for a few seconds before I could think of an answer. I told him I had borrowed one to make mine... he seemed satisfied.

This suggestion is just something I have via hearsay, I haven't seen it done nor tried it myself yet... I have heard this from a couple of old local smiths (Hertfordshire UK), that it was done as part of the unnofficial 'tests' before becoming journeymen and was supposed to be done in half an hour; which I think is going at a pretty fair rate. Take 4" of half inch square stock, upset it to a 1" cube and then draw that down to a yard of wire. I have a suspicion it would be amusing to see if you could get someone to try it the other way round, i.e. draw down to a yard of wire and then upset to a cube...

Small things... I have made a lot of tiny stuff in gold but only practical things in steel. I guess the smallest thing so far is a tiny crooked knife / twca cam for carving out tiny wooden or bone spoons for mustard and the like. Off topic, but I must agree that it is a fine moustache; if you still have it why not join the Handlebar Club? You'll get a decent and unique tie; I was a member myself until I shaved, marriage...

Hello, I've been smithing for about six years. I started with a knackered old anvil and a hairdryer-powered (?) forge and taught myself for a while. I then did a three-day course which was a very good thing, it corrected some fundamental mistakes I was making and made me more aware of safety matters. Following that I've been teaching myself for the most part by practising a lot, with a few tutorials about things I was finding hard from the likes of John B. IFI has proven invaluable; as some of the more senior members write, if you do your homework and research here, there is probably an answer to every question a learner will ask. I have a fairly esoteric interest in smithing, almost entirely producing replicas of old cooking equipment, but I have a fair number of commissions from the public due to doing demo's at shows with the Blacksmiths' Guild (take a look at the Guild's section on IFI). The Guild is fairly collegiate in nature and worth joining since it will allow you to attend shows for free and get a discount on tuition. Whatever you decide to do, when you start out don't spend a fortune on kit. Other than an anvil and your first hammer, you can make pretty much everything you need for yourself, certainly hand tools, but a small hearth is not too hard. If you do buy tools, buy them second-hand, ebay is good. You can get ideas of how to make tools from many sources, not least IFI. You can download 'Basic Blacksmithing' by Harries in a PDF form from the web, it shows how to make the basic stuff. Good luck.

Very glad that this has come together after all your prep' John. I will most definitely be there, will it be possible to camp within the grounds or is now a good time to book hotel rooms?

In re' the hole being a little 'off', no need to worry at all, just adjust for that when you put the handle on - if you really feel it is necessary. It's a good tool.

Rockstar, the show is the sort of thing I am keen on, it's just the man presenting it that doesn't work for me. There are differing tastes on each side of the Atlantic, someone more like 'Grandpa Walton' would work for me. Thanks for that Dan, I'm in the Chilterns so we have ash all over the place, for now... a couple of decades might change that; I have a horrible feeling that we may see a loss on the scale of the elms. I'd not heard of oak being used, but the use of oak when all you have is oak makes sense, like the Scandinavian use of birch for just about everything. That written, welded handles on set tools - or any tools - doesn't appeal to me although I'm willing to admit it has a practical side to it. Some time sooner or later - it's been a long search - we'll be moving and when we do I intend to plant some hickory trees as an experiment. I assume they can be coppiced like ash, hopefullly perfect for handles in a few years.

Thanks for that, you mis-remembered (?); he mentions ash from the start. An interesting show, but the chap presenting it is a a bit too much of a ham for me. He also chose as an example a European axe that is huge, I can't speak with authority for those on the continent but British axes were significantly smaller than that. Not as small as the later American axe, which we have more or less adopted, but much shorter than the one he shows. An interesting point to remember is that ash is a lighter wood than hickory (hence its use, I believe, for baseball bats nowadays) so that although the American axe-head was lighter than an old English one, the English ash handle would have been lighter. For myself, I like hickory, but ash grows all over my land so I use ash when I need a handle. It's good to see old crafts and tools being shown on television in the US too, there has been ssomething of a revival over here and the publicity helps.

rockstar.esq (?) I've not heard of an oak shaft on an axe anywhere in Europe or here in the UK either, please let me know if you have any ref's for that. As far as I'm aware from the Bronze Age onwards, and maybe before, ash has always been the wood of choice for tool handles and impact resistance over here.

Hmm, interesting; In ZImbabwe I've seen larger axes than that with handles of about the same length and some flexibility but not as much as that, nowhere near. They were European style axe-heads with a socket for the handle rather than the usual African type where the axe-head fits into the end of the haft. Hazel and willow wands were wrapped around set tools here (in the UK) in the past, these formed a very shock-absorbing handle, but not very long lasting. I have used both, just for the experience, and found them alright but not as comfortable or convenient to use as an ash handle fitted in the tool's socket. Of course they are not used for striking... Thinking about the opposite to the thread title, I saw a smith near Dunstable who had welded steel tube handles to some of his set tools and a couple of his hammers, I didn't use them so can't say how they feel to use, but I don't much like the idea of that, the impact must be jarring. But he was an old fellow and still working, so iI guess it can't have been that bad. Frank, I have asked my wife about that wood you mentioned, she hasn't heard of anything like it. Are you sure it's an accurate translation?

I started out with precious metals and moved 'up' to iron and steel much later. I've made similar designs in steel and silver and it's the feel and look of the metal not the mass (silver is much heavier per unit) that makes the difference to a given piece, it sounds different too. Iron once had a value greater than gold and was used for jewellery back then... the start of the iron age. Take a squint at some of pieces from that era, a few have survived, and a look at their predecessors in bronze and copper - those were the 'fashionable' designs copied in iron. There were iron items made to compensate Germans who donated gold to their First World War effort, but I think they were cast rather than forged.

I started out with a hand cranked forge, it was pretty hard work with coke, not so bad with coal, well easier to keep alight but far more smokey. Dave Budd and John B are both pretty close to you and should be able to advise about the best suppliers in your area. If you have access to hardwood and can get a whole oil drum you could make your own charcoal... once you've done it a few times you should be able to produce decent stuff.