ahil925

These type of forges look interesting and I was doodling a variation of a trench style one.  Do you all mind looking over it and pointing out any glaring issues that I might be missing?  The basic idea is to have the front and back of the trench open in case I need to heat a long piece of material.  The tuyer would be a capped piece of black pipe with either holes drilled or a slit cut into it.

Hello all,

Just started blacksmithing and so far have a simple firerake/prod finished and a pair of tongs mostly finished (going to add some bends to the reigns and grip to the mouth tomorrow). I'm using a very ghetto set-up at the moment, consisting of a brakedrum & castiron-sewage-pipetee forge and converted-vacuum-blower, but it seems to work well enough (getting to yellow-orange glow so far).

I understand that RR spikes generally make inferior blades even with superquenching, but a project I had in mind since starting with smithing was to make a soil knife or "hori hori" like tool with one.  It'd basically be a modified garden trowl, used to dig up small plants, plant bulbs, and possibly cut a few roots or stems.  Do you all think a "HC" marked spike would be decent for this purpose?

Also, I have another spike marked only with "C" (Copper?).  Would this spike be useful for makeing a hotcut tool or a punch?

Thank you all for your time.