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I Forge Iron

small potatoes

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  1. I cast silicon bronze, and pour the excess into steel ingot molds, but the mold is at room temp. the bronze is shrinking while the mold is expanding, so there is no problem sticking. If the mold was large, the bronze would stay molten long enough to heat the mold, then braze to it as they both cool together though. Dripping molten bronze into an iron or steel mold gradually heats the mold, and gives the bronze the chance to braze to the mold. Silicon bronze is hot short below it's melting/freezing point. That means that although it is solid, the crystals are not well bonded with each other yet. During cooling, if a casting can't shrink evenly, or feed more molten metal, there is the risk of it seperating to a greater or lesser degree during the hot short phase. As Timothy said, if you heat it into hot short temps and try to forge it, it will crumble under your hammer. If you do overheat a piece and have it crumble though, don't throw it away. you have spoiled your piece, but not the alloy. just melt it down and reuse it. Little or no chemical change happens to the alloy at forging or casting temps. Do be careful not to mix plumbing bronze or brass with your good silicon bronze though. Many of them contain lead, and you don't want that in your silicon bronze. Cheers, Carl
  2. Some info for those of you within driving range, Hay Gulch Coal Company here in southwest Colorado sells stoker coal for $70 per ton. They are about 40 minutes north of Farmington NM. on the La Plata highway. They sell on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It is loose, they load with a little front end loader, so you need a pickup or a trailer. They have a recording on their phone telling current status as sometimes they run out. They also have lump coal for $90 per ton. Lots of folks around here still heat with it. I don't know it it is OK to post phone numbers or not, so if anyone wants more info, let me know. On a related note, a cousin by marriage stopped heating with coal, so he is giving me his stock, about 4 tons. I have to load it, but I'm not complaining. got the first ton today and going back tomorrow for another.
  3. Sorry Frosty, didn't realize I hadn't put in my location, just outside Durango Colorado. I imagine you are accustomed to finding fleece stashed in odd corners. My wife is a spinner also so I understand. She is raising angora goats to feed her habit. My stepsister is up your way in Palmer, so I hope to get up there some time for a visit. Bigfootnampa, I will pass your complements on. A friend or my wife's had to design a website for a class, and my wife needed a website, so it worked out well for everyone.
  4. Gentlemen, I find it very interesting, and a little spooky at times how these coincidences happen. My wife is in the tannin business. A little background is in order I suppose. My wife and I spent almost eight years in Japan. For the last two years my wife was studying a traditional tannin dye called kakishibu This is the produced by fermenting the juice of unripe persimmons. Traditionally, kakishibu was used as a preservative, adhesive, and waterproofing, the burnt pumpkin color of the finished product was strictly secondary. However, there are modifiers that change the base color, and one of them is iron solutions. Iron changes it to black, or if you hold your tongue just right, the moon is full, and a butterfly flaps in the Amazon, you sometimes get a blue black. Straight kakishibu is almost pure tannin. The liquid is viscous, and has a shelf life. It begins gelling after a while, and will eventually go solid. my wife has some pieces of solidified kakisibu that were skimmed off the top of a fermentation tank, they strongly resemble clinkers. It is seldom used straight, but usually diluted with water before applying. It had a large number of uses in Japan, waterproofing umbrellas and rain coats, preserving fishing nets, as an adhesive and wood preservative, and is very important in making sake. Sake making is the major industrial use for it to day as a mater of fact, it binds with proteins and clarifies the sake. In her classes and research though, my wife says she had never heard of it being used on metal in Japan,so I found Chris' comment about tsuba very interesting. Not the biggest industry in modern Japan though, so it could be information that slipped through the cracks, (her teachers were textile artists rather than smiths) or there might have been a different source that the tsuba makers used. Sorry I'm not writing very concisely, I spent all day pulling the front end of the tractor apart out in the snow and wind, so my brain is not at its best this evening, but now you have me interested in trying kakishibu on iron. This is the website for my wife's business if anyone is interested in learning more about it: http://kakishibui.com/ My wife is a better writer than I am. If anyone has questions, I can take a stab at them, I learned quite a bit when she was studying, or she has her contact info on the website. Anyway, more grist for the mill. Cheers.
  5. This reminded me of some pictures my dad took when he was in the Navy in the early 50s. His ship had put into a shipyard in Sasabo, Japan. he happened into the shops when they were forging the crank shaft for ship engine. Big steam hammer, huge chain hoist, huge piece of glowing steel, and lots of man power. I would love to see something like that first hand. Just doesn't seem likely these days though.
  6. Using zinc as a non-toxic substitute for lead has been mentioned, and would work very well in a dry climate. In a salt air environment though, you could see your zinc collars being dissolved as they will act as the more reactive anode to the iron or steel.
  7. My Friend showed me picture he took out the train window in China. They were stopped in a rail yard, and there were two guys cutting rail with a hack saw and a can of water. He guessed the guy holding the water can had seniority.
  8. I was really surprised to find this thread here. I got into metal work through casting, and a couple of years ago I went down the microwave road. It quite interesting, and I was getting some pretty good results. Unfortunately, everything is on the back burner right now as I am in the process of moving. I do plan to pick it up again when things settle down, and this article looks to be very helpful for the next step, great find Arbalist! If anyone has questions about my experiments feel free. I did document things pretty well in some foundry threads listed below however, so you might want to read through them first. here are the threads at Alloyavenue; http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showthread.php?3767-Microwave-casting&highlight=Microwave http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showthread.php?3817-Microwave-casting&highlight=microwave http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showthread.php?4044-Microwave-casting-is-a-reality!&highlight=Microwave
  9. One other coating to be aware of is zinc chromate. It has a yellow-green flat primer look to it. Great for rust inhibiting, but quite nasty to breathe, or ingest.
  10. An interesting aside on the nail topic, those of you who got through Moby Dick might recall that Ahab had the ship's smith forge him a harpoon out of horse shoe nail clippings. They both agreed that this was the very best iron. From my very limited experience in shoeing a horse, unless they were using much longer nails in the 1850s, the clippings are pretty small bits to be forging together into a harpoon head. Sounds like one very patient smith. I assume, though I might be wrong, that horse shoe nails by that date were cut nails. For my two cents on the subject, though I wouldn't wager more than a donut on it, I'm going with the WI speculation for your nails. WI manufacturing was still going strong at that point in time, and industry tends to stick with the tried and true. Could be totally wrong though.
  11. I think one thing that is very critical to blacksmithing has been touched on in this discussion, but has not yet had the focus it deserves. That is the fact that it requires a great deal of physical training. By training I don't mean building muscles, though that is useful, but making skills into muscle memory and spinal reflex. In this way, blacksmithing is much like boxing, ski racing, playing a musical instrument or base ball to name a few. The way it differs however, is to the untrained eye, they just see you hitting hot metal with a hammer. It would be hard to find someone today who has not used a hammer at some point, so when they see a smith at work, it is a familiar activity to them, and they think "I can do that." In this way, the highly trained nature of the craft is concealed from the observer, unlike the other examples I cited. They wouldn't ask Franz Klamer how to win an Olympic downhill, or Wynton Marsalis how to play Bugler's Holiday, it's just too far from their experience. But they assume they know how to use a hammer, and if they just memorize the recipes for making the blade, plow, helmet, etc, that they want to make, then they are a blacksmith. Their experience with the hammer is akin to them using Franz Klamer's skis to keep their feet dry crossing a puddle, or using Wynton Marsalis' trumpet to scare the neighbor's cat out of the yard. As has been said several times already, "they don't know what they don't know." What I am getting at with all this is, if they ask you how to forge a complex item, and you give a detailed explanation, you have given them nothing. They don't have the training to do it. An interesting parallel is learning a foreign language. Now you may think, "language isn't a physical skill" but try telling that to anyone recovering from a stroke. And it is similar to blacksmithing in that the physical training part is hidden from the casual eye. I spent 8 years teaching English in Japan. In that time I worked with Japanese English teachers who had great vocabulary, and knew more about English grammar that I ever would. But they could not carry on the simplest conversation with me in English. All my communication with these "English teachers" had to happen in my basic Japanese. They knew all the recipes, but had never learned the physical training to speak English. It was much like the person who has pounded a a few nails and thinks he knows how to use a hammer. The teachers knew how to speak, they thought all they had to do was memorize the recipes. They never realized that speaking in Japanese is a different skill from speaking in English. With my students I emphasized the need to practice speaking, and those who did, progressed quickly, as you might expect. But the Japanese culture is so focused on memorizing, that many would just stick to that, and progress for them was less than productive. I had two students come to me wanting help to prepare for an English Speech competition. They were very good friends and had both chosen Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. One gal was crazy about all things English and loved speaking and singing in English. She had the skills needed, and I was able to work with her so that she was able to deliver a very good speech. Her friend was a memorizer, but insisted on the same speech as her friend. I did all I could with her, but her idea of practice was to silently memorize, and you can guess the result. The beginning smith wanting to make a very difficult piece as their first project will have much the same result as my poor memorizer. But if we encourage them to start with the basics, do lots of reading, and I would argue, practicing in conjunction with their reading, they should make good progress. It is my feeling that the physical practice is critical for two reasons. Reading and then doing is a very strong reinforcement, and it gives them the chance to get the feel for how the metal moves, and just as important, get started on their mistakes. One of the best, and most overlooked learning tools are mistakes. I think any experienced blacksmith would agree, though maybe I am starting a new debate. To sum up, I would argue that when someone asks for information they are not ready to use, give it, or not, as you are inclined, but far more important, encourage them to get to work on their reading, practice, and mistakes. Some of that encouragement will fall on deaf ears, but some will also nurture future smiths. anyway, just my two cents. Sorry for being so long winded.
  12. I have been a member for almost 4 years, but this is my first post on the forum. I come to metal work through the foundry side rather than the smithing side, but the two fields seem to be slowly converging for me. I have been slowly learning blacksmithing for about 4 years now. I belong to a few foundry forums also, and I find the different personalities of various forums quite interesting. I would describe this forum as a little bristly compared to my main foundry forum, but the issues people on this forum bristle about, are quite similar to what bothers folks on the foundry forum, the group's reaction is just a bit different. Mind you, I am not criticizing in any way, I just find the comparison interesting. On the foundry forum there is the same situation, the same beginner's questions asked over and over, but for some reason we are more prone there just to answer again, though occasionally someone will suggest searching the archives first. I guess on my part, I have spent most of my life teaching one thing or another, so my first reflex is to answer a question. I do however wish people would put in some basic research before posting questions, but I imagine in my case, my reflex will continue to override. Part of this discussion put me in mind of the translations for one of the Japanese terms for apprentice as "one who steals secrets". In many of the traditional Japanese trades, it very often happened that the apprentice was sent on some errand just as a critical process was to be done. The apprentice quite literally had to find ways to steal the secrets that the master jealously guarded. I have never liked that approach, I am always happy to share knowledge, but when I teach something, I expect the student to put out the effort, both in physical work and the study and research needed. That said, some of my most enjoyable times have been teaching foundry classes. And I guess my approach will be to probably just keep answering questions as they come. Anyway, just my two cents worth, and I hope folks will not be too harsh if I come up with a question that I maybe should have been able to find the answer on my own. Cheers, Carl
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