bois d'arc

I had no idea, my French is limited to wood and matters concerning la dette de Lafayette. There is a price sheet that would often have accompanied this book. Bound separately, the two rarely remain together across the years. The price sheet has more nomenclature and, obviously, cost data on each item. One can logically assume that a pattern book (or books) must have existed in Sheffield that would have accompanied the manufacture of these items - that would a boon to locate and scan.

You are welcome, my lunch hour vanished completely looking at those pictures.

I am new to the site and the craft, and I don't have much to contribute around here yet but I hope this is helpful to some. "Joseph Smith's Key to Manufactories of Sheffield" is a book full of engravings and names of tools. I came across the following link at Lost Art Press via Jeff Burks, via Chris Schwarz: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8529037p/f1.planchecontact# I can see this being useful to a good smith as a reference if someone asked for a "Barbados" pattern grub hoe, or a "lathing" hammer. You might want to download this to PDF just in case the link vanishes. I am given to understand that print copies of this book are rare expensive. Note: Alibris has a few copies from US $70-$140 I debated whether to put this in books or tools, but if you click on the link you will see that it is less of a book and more of a "pictorial directory of various tools" (mostly iron and steel) so I opted to put this in Tools. Mods - feel free to move if I have chosen unwisely.

Thank you, $2 a pound is about where I am at with it. One shoulder is messed up - but that just makes it like me.

I am looking at a 126lb SISCO Superior and I have some questions. 1. This anvil has a rough body with lots of pits, etc (complete with a void in the bottom). I read that the SISCOs are steel and for some reason I expected a nicer body. Should I be worried about it being a fake? 2. The top is obviously a lamination welded on to the body - but a thin lamination (less than 1/2). Is this normal for a smaller anvil? 3. The hardie is a good square, but that square is not square with the sides of the anvil. It is not "straight". Again, does this seem fishy at all? We don't get many non-farrier anvils down my way and I am open to imperfection - I just don't want to pay for prime rib and eat chuck. (I will post pictures as I get them)

Update: The Johnson forge sits under a tarp still. We have been reading books and cleaning/handling rusty old hammers.. "A blacksmith Craft" by George Dixon is a great book indeed - pictures are fair but the drawings and diagrams are wonderful. I located a rivet forge at my local antique store as a "planter". I left them the pot and we will fire that up with some charcoal to practice our fire making one of these days (it had in-tack turning blower underneath that was simply missing the 1" leather belt and the ratchet/rocker setup. I read the Mike Porter gas burner book once - I need to read it again (like the intro says) to let it soak in some. We are going to move slow on building/buying a gas setup. e send off our membership in the Saltfork Craftsmen. Thank you all again.

tig13, Your work is an inspiration. I am putting a list of "good looking" forge ideas together and you just made my list. Keep us posted as you progress.

Thanks for the welcome, Denis. I hope you all missed the freeze last night. We had sleet here and it dipped into the 30s. If I wanted sleet in May I would have stayed in the Midwest!

Devon is my name. I live near Tulsa, OK. I am not any kind of blacksmith - but my youngest son (just turned 12) really, really wants to try his hand at it. I do make the odd tool for woodworking - I have a MGAW setup and I am fair at that (so much nicer than the stick rigs I learned on 30 years ago). I have a nice shop with an old Van Norman 12 mill, a Clausing lathe, a DeeBlast 50 cabinet, decent compressed air, etc. My father is a retired mechanist and my grandfather was a Tool and Die Maker who tinkered with wood in his retirement. I have inherited both of their tools, tooling, etc. I have an ASO that was in the clearance area of Wholesale Tool some years ago. I have beat some black locust trunnels down the hardie on it and that is about all. I traded an old friend for a 16" chunk of railroad track last year (it cost me 10 good 7ft T-posts). If I setup a forge for my son the track will probably be our anvil. I have 2 Osage Orange stumps from wind-blown trees that are around 40" tall and 30" around and I plan on carving an anvil stand out of one of them. We have a Johnson 122 Double Wide forge that was converted to propane at some point. I have a question post over in ForgesGas soliciting advice on refurbishing that or scrapping it to build something smaller - feel free to pop over if you have an opinion that. My son and I have learned a lot from reading your posts here - I appreciate the candor and the real world experience shared on this forum. I am attending Handworks 2013 in a few weeks. Its a free conference focused on woodworking (but not strictly limited to) held in the Amana Colonies, IA May 24, 25. Anyone from Dubuque to Mt Pleasant, IA, from Des Moines to Moline, IL should think about coming over one day if you have any passing interest in hand tool woodworking. http://handworks.co/

Mine is for sure a Johnson 122b DW made in Cedar Rapids, IA (My son and I will be in Cedar Rapids in a few week for Handworks 2013, BTW (http://handworks.co/)) I may keep it tucked away (just in case) and setup a small, efficient forge for now. I can weld and grind (the way I weld grinding is very important...) so I am undaunted by most of the builds structurally - but the burners I would be buying. I looked at a SISCO anvil in AR - a rough little 126 ponder with one messed up shoulder and bumpy horn..

Thank you all for the welcomes and the suggestions - I was hoping to get some experienced opinions just like the above. I looked at some sample forges and two things in my "recycling pile" struck me. One was a 20gal air tank off a junked compressor, the other was our old giant iron double sink. Frosty, I will look at the exact model next time I am in the shop (its old enough to be green, not the new blue or the old, old blue). I still has the plate. My son would probably love it here but I have some old-fashioned rules about internet usage and such. In a few years, you will see him on here. Until then, he and I can co-post (he's at basketball practice at them moment).

This group was not on my radar, thanks. http://saltforkcraftsmen.org/Calendar.shtm We will try to make a meetup. I am working in Arkansas this week and I heard stories at lunch this week about an Arkansas knife maker who builds some tight but sweet small forges on the side. I am going to try and take a look at one of those via a friend of a friend. I always move the books and guns myself. The movers get the rest.

Suggestion 1: Updated, thank you. And, my bad, the library in question is a room in my house. We only have about five thousand volumes focusing mostly on ancient wood crafts. The nearby Tulsa City-County Library System has untold blacksmithing volumes available via Inter Library Loan. #2 - Yes. I noticed the specs on the .PDF I obtained from the Johnson website. At first I thought they had added a zero to those numbers! This is actually what started me thinking about a conversion and/our rebuild.

THE STORY Last year I was buying a band saw from a closing machine shop. This was an old-time, shop: the saw in question was made in the early 1900s and had been in this shop since the 1940s. The old machinist was in poor health (I had not met him yet) and his son and I were negotiating and alternately discussing how to move the 800lb behemoth on to my trailer. My rigging and strap helper on this trip was my 11 year old son. After a while I heard my son whispering in a dark (dirt-floor) corner of the shop with and older gentleman. I wandered over (ever concerned even in small town Oklahoma). I noticed them looking at a gas forge and I hear the old man say; “I sold the anvil yesterday”. I correctly surmised that they were discussing the forge. My youngest son had been wanting to take up blacksmithing. I have nothing against blacksmithing, mind you, but I have been encouraging my son to pursue certain other interests. I provided programmable micro controllers to encourage him to tinker with the intersection of hardware and software. I bought him a decent second-hand lefty guitar in case he wants to follow his older brother in to music as a hobby. Be he has stubbornly maintained an interest in blacksmithing – reading the only two books in our library about the subject at least twice – asking questions about the melting point of metals, the possibility of recycling aluminum cans - asking about the Anvil Shaped Object (scratch and dent special from Wholesale Tool a few years back) in my shop. Finally I realized that my son was bargaining for the forge. The old man was obviously delighted to see a young fellow interested in mashing metal. With no room on the trailer (some other odd bits followed me home as well), the forge got loaded on to the pickup flatbed. /END STORY Now that it is warm again, it is time to make some decisions. The Forge is a Johnson Forge Furnace model 122 Double Wide (I think – I wrote this down and then left the paper at home). It seems to be plumped for propane and has a spark plug ignition situation (not kidding). The forge is in OK condition. Rust around the edges, a few chips on firebricks, and that’s about all I see wrong. I know little about gas gorges but I have spent some time near a coal forge before. My shop has neither natural gas nor propane service today. I would like to ask for comment on, and evaluation of our options: Fix it up and use it as designed with propane. I live outside of city limits and I could have a propane tank situated shop adjacent. Fix it up and convert it to Natural gas. I have gas service at the house (about 100 feet away from the shop under a lot of cement driveway. This seems expensive to plumb. Scrap it for salvage and build another forge with the components. It looks to have a nice blower, lots of firebrick, some low-tech burners (they look a lot like holes in metal), a solenoid, a sturdy stand. This could go coal or gas. For my fix up options I was considering coating the bricks with ITC-100 HT, maybe filling in some cracks, maybe building up the top table to get a better seal against on the swinging cover. Probably fitting a hanging hood over the forge to take away heat also. I have only a vague idea what we will do with it. The nice old machinist sent my son home with lots of steel (some giant old truck springs, etc). We will probably forge up some knives and maybe a chisel or gouge, maybe even a froe (I could really use a big froe). We are working toward an anvil and I ordered a $6 pair of tongs from a late night ending ebay auction. Hammers, we have. I buy the odd tool lot and I have a number of hammer heads that are cross peen smith type. I can spokeshave out some handles this weekend. My has modern metal and wood fab cabilbiites. I am open to suggestions.