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I sometimes wonder if the London pattern anvil is the swiss army knife of the blacksmith world, handy for little fiddly jobs to get you out of a tight spot but I wouldn't want to skin a cow with one! ( I meant the knife, BTW who would skin a cow with an anvil? ) I remember spending a day forging with a fellow years ago (when I was fit) he had the big coal forge ticking over preheating pieces, then gas forge on a trolley he would wheel close where we were working at the time. We would heat and forge two or three items at a time so that as soon as one piece got cold the next one was ready to go. It wasn't till after I got home that I realised we never touched the anvil the whole day. We hammered and bent over jigs in the vice and the swage block and when we needed a breather we wheeled the forge across to the power hammer and big hydraulic press and worked a different job. Every two hours we stopped for 30 minutes for a cuppa and a snack and to set the jigs up for the next 2 hour run. The thing that stuck in my mind from that day is that nothing moved, everything we worked on took a solid blow or moved with very little effort. I see videos of guys chasing a piece rattling all over an anvil trying to remove a punch or a drift that is stuck and it looks like really hard work.

I can read a 1 and a 9 on the front,cant read the middle number it will be 0,1,2 or 3 My guess its an 0 so that's 121# (minus the tail) changed my mind perhaps its a 1, so 149# ? The back edge and corner looks nice and straight. Perfect anvil for a left hander. It is a keeper, if your nice they might find you some more stuff!

Troubleshooting MIG I know you are not using a mig but there are some good weld photos on this page. http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/arc-welding-faults.htm these are for an arc welder, they explain things like how arc length changes voltage but the photos dont show the subtle variation you should be looking for. Personally I need to see the swirling molten puddle to make a top notch weld. That means good lighting directed on the weld site and a helmet where I can actually see something through the lens. (I change the lens inner and outer covers pretty often) A comfy armrest so I can hold er steady and long gloves without holes to keep the smell of burning flesh to a minimum. if you are a bit unsure of you setup and angles you can jig or tack it up and do a dry run of the weld with the earth clamp off to see how it all looks, then burn a half a rod on a practice piece of metal (keep the other half for the next practice). knock the slag off and asses your technique or if the rods are not dry enough and maybe tweak the power. Now its ready to weld ( tap tap tap Oh... earth clamp back on :rolleyes: ) NOW its ready!

the thing that makes burning steel so hard to deal with is the stickyness of the molten oxide, scale formed a lower temperatures will flake off in very thin layers before oxidizing the next layer underneath letting gasses like co2 escape. this stuff is like baking bread or hot syrup and bicarb, the gasses are trapped by the molten layer and form part of the expanding hardening mass. The other problem is chemists like nice neat little balanced equations, while they are focusing on the molecule interaction between iron and oxygen there are hundreds of chemical reactions happening in the burning fuel that are ignored for the sake of simplicity because in theory they are not part of the reaction, I am not entirely convinced that is correct 100% of the time. I have some leftover argon in the shop at the moment, I was going to try blowing some gas over a piece of burning steel while holding it in a bucket to see if it stopped the reaction dead but I keep forgetting.

When I learned oxy/acet cutting there was a lot of talk about the kindling point or auto-ignition temperature. this is the temperature of metal where oxygen will directly bond and oxidize. the kindling point is not fixed in stone it varies depending on the surface area exposed to oxygen (dust and powder will kindle at a very low temperature). There is a couple of things happening in a forge. firstly burning is exothermic, it releases energy, this extra heat speeds up the burning process. Secondly the metal surface increases in roughness exposing more molecules to oxygen and lowering the auto-ignition temperature further. thirdly the large amounts of iron oxide starts to act as a flux and assists other contaminants in the fuel to initiate further side reactions forming things like metal salts. As the burning metal is pulled from the forge there is a few moments where the cooling of the now ruined masterpiece is perfectly balanced by the increased oxygen levels and just to spite us, the burn continues on for a few seconds longer.

I would be willing to put an imaginary $AU five bucks ($4.47 US) on it :D if I can get that spider out of my wallet! . I reckon on the end and the corners it will curl towards the plate. In my mind I see a shape like half a mushroom.

I suspect you will find all the controllers in a range will be the roughly the same price, just with slightly different software for each application unless you are looking at something that has a custom user interface or a fancy data logger. A ramp/soak controller is a must for me, I have to leave myself large notes and alarm clocks to remember start times ETC, I have a shocking memory for times. Plus you can pack a heap of stuff in a tray of sand and temper it overnight if you get cheap power after midnight or while the solar panels are producing power in the afternoon. A 50 step controller should hold 2-4 programs in its memory so you can choose the cycle and press start, no need to program it every time. Should really download the user manual and check before buying one as they are not all the same.

A PID controller is designed to stop temperature overshoot, as it gets close to the target temperature it uses data from a calibration setup heat to pulse the heating elements. this is usually through a relay for slow pulsing or SSR (solid state relay) for fast pulsing. Not much call for slow ramping with heat treating metals, unless you are using something with a lot of grunt and the PID function gets less useful as the temperature rises. it is possible to overshoot while tempering, not likely at a red heat. A ramp soak controller lets you program an oven from start to finish so that you dont have to hang around while it is doing its thing. I had a browse on the internet. A ramp soak 50 step controller with ceramic K type thermocouple and SSR + heatsink is about $150 All correctly wired up in an enclosure with breakers is about $100 extra. That seems like good value to me.

I have seen it a couple of places, Ron Reil talks about it on his design page http://ronreil.abana.org/design2.shtml and puts it down to soot and fine scale dust sticking to the surface and absorbing radiation rather than reflecting it back into the forge.

I was wondering if packing some leaves, twigs, pine needles or hay against a patch of the flue would make enough smoke to get the flue temp high enough to start to gas the timber sooner.

The pessimist in me thinks that it is unlikely that the crack is straight across the anvil, the curve down towards the corners makes me think the plate was not cast cleanly to the base and the crack will be running up to the plate as it goes in. My guess is the plate has a good union on one half and around the edges but not in the middle of the other side. It looks like an expansion/ contraction crack to me. Hope I am wrong!

machining magnetic material brings its own challenges. as well as magnetizing tools and chucks, rare earth magnets can catch fire and release some toxins from the dust while machining. need to be a little bit choosey about what gets ground or milled.

These two are saying you have made the chandelier to look a bit like a wagon wheel. Forged chandeliers, wagon wheel style Forged chandeliers, stylized wagon wheel This is saying you have used an existing wagon wheel and made a chandelier from it Chandeliers made from wagon wheels Forged chandeliers, made from wagon wheels Chandeliers forged from wagon wheels This is saying they are a recognized category of the chandelier making craft. Forged wagon wheel chandeliers (i would be happy with this one) Wagon wheel chandeliers

tennis racquet grip size Is this any help? I just measured my hand and a couple of handles I like and mine are bang on the money. 4-7/8" dia 1-1/2" height 1-3/16" wide octagonal shape

parts of the edges are fairly chewed up. Makes me wonder what else the paint is hiding.

Thanks for the photos John, that explains the set up quite well.

Hi EricS, cant wait to hear how it went. Did you lean the retort back like Ian does to get a hot patch on the flue and get the wood gassing a little sooner?

I am going to have a go at a regional monster version of the serfuette. It looks like a double pronged pick with a long skinny blade (like an axe) on the other end. My french is not good, the only thing i have heard it called is "the big one". dibble sticks fruit buckets seed winnowing forks measuring chains daisy lifters celery hooks grafting knives sickles and hedging tools these are things I dont see a lot of at museums There is was a lot of oddball tools made for specific crops or jobs that are just gone.

Well... that's two of us that would weld it up, both Aussies I notice! Our reputation of being too tight to throw anything away if it can be fixed refurbished is still well and truly justified :rolleyes: .... :lol:

Am I the only person in the world who would fabricate a new end and weld it on?

Its called a finger notch, so you can hold the axe or hatchet with your hand behind the beard for fine trimming and shaping work.

In my world, trolling results in delicately smoked fresh snook for the evening meal. There's not much better than that.

I thought white coal had been banned

As long as you understand the limitations of the logsplitter design it should be OK. Once things start to wear, if the slide is grabbing as the load builds up, more energy goes into damaging the splitter than pressing the object. Once the backbone flexes down the slide is not running on a flat surface anymore which makes it very easy to bind and stop sliding under pressure.

I have heard some good things about aluminium impregnated urethane for sealing boat trailers, I would love to try it but its hard to get here. Apparently it is difficult to store once the lid has been opened once. Even spraying some argon or butane in the can may not be good enough to let the lid come off a second time. Best to use the whole lot in one hit. AFAIK nothing will chemically remove it, so its old clothes, gloves and brushes to work with it. Nice matt grey/silver finish.