Avadon

I found these tongs to be worth the money:

eBay Store - Poor Boy Blacksmith Tools: Category 1

He sells other things, what I found is that if it is welded and you hit it with a hammer, it will break (fullers, guilotine tool) but I do not hit my tongs with a hammer, so they work fine.

Doug

lol @ a blacksmith outfitter who weld-fabricates his tongs...

You gotta see the humor in this!! lol... well I guess whatever works right? Maybe it's just more cost productive for him to cut pieces and weld them. Still I wonder what kind of audience he thinks he has that fabbed tongs are going to be better then smithed.

Beginning Blacksmith Tongs Starter Set Round Square Odd - eBay (item 380174050465 end time Nov-12-09 14:38:45 PST)

Second thought I think i'll replace the bearings in the bench grinder but when I take all the screws out the motor halves will not come apart. Anyone know how I can get these cups on the ends to come off? Do they have some kind of retaining pin inside them. They almost seems like something inside it is holding it together but i've taken out every screw. What up?

Just dug out a second bench grinder i had mothballed in the garage. Thought I might just sell it but then I thought maybe i should just set it up and use it.

I already have

1 Jet Bench Grinder with course and medium stone
1 KMG Belt Grinder
1 Jet 2HP Buffer/sander with buffer on one side and wire wheel on the other

So if I set up this second Jet Bench Grinder what kind of wheels might be good for it?

My primary work is bladesmithing and blacksmithing/fabrication so should i put like a fine stone and maybe a really fine stone? What are good wheel options? Questions, comments, advice welcome..

Experts also have told me also to really watch it in the fire. So never turn your back on it or it will be gone. It work hardens really quickly so you have to constantly anneal it. Even when hardened it has limitations.

Drawing out some heavy billets recently I realized just how nice some of those fullers and special shapes would come in handy but i'm glad to have made my first anvil with a nice large flat working surface. So what does this mean? Well it means another Brazeal anvil will most likely be in my future. This time though I think i'll make a longer 2" or 3" and cut several different shapes for working over. I don't know if I'll hard face them but I certainly could. This design is really impressive and the fact that you can turn out one really heavy anvil that's totally solid and has a hard face and doesn't have a deafening ring or really any ring at all and is cheap is really worth the small cost of investment in the steel.

The anvil sign is pretty iconic but also pretty common. I kinda like the crossed hammers or hammer with the anvil or even just a huge boquet of flower and vines with the letter "blacksmith" underneath. I definitely agree that the more artistic and ornate it is the more confidence your customers will have in your abilities.

But also simple things like having the front of your business clean and inviting, free of scrap or debris, goes a long way. You have to ask yourself "if I had never been to a blacksmith would this make me feel invited or feel intimidated or unwelcome" because I think the average person feels intimidated or at the very least outmatched in understanding this process. For them it's just loud and dangerous even if they do admire the end result.

I think you learn a lot more about heat and how to manipulate fire by starting with the coal forge. From there you also appreciate how gas forges work. Coal forge is easier to build and operate and you never run out of propane. Coal forge probably costs a great deal less, especially when I use a lot of wood coals to keep it going. They work great when you don't need the heat of forge welding. Thus my advice is to start with coal and then later invest in gas if it seems like something the novice wants to stick with. You can spend several hundreds up into a thousand dollars + on a gas forge. I probably spent less then $50 on my coal forge.

The Great thing about an anvil like this is if you miss with the hammer your not going to start crying. For what it is you will get great use out of it. Why not just use it as is without touching it at all and see what you think. Then later you can decide if you want to spend time cleaning it up, and if so what you intend to do with it. Remember a lot of people don't have any anvil or ASO when they start. They are literally beating on a piece of scrap steel from a junkyard and the fact that your ASO is 200lb+ is nothing to gauk at. A lot of people start with those russian harbor freight 90lb ASO's.

Build or borrow a forge and try it out. You might like smithing so much that this anvil becomes the anvil you started learning on.

/ my 2 cents.

I got an 8LB sledge today at the Depot. Seems like a good weight as the 10LB just seemed to heavy to swing for very long. After i've contoured the face slightly convex what hammer technique do I use to push the metal away from the handle?

This guy seems to work from the tip toward the handle?
YouTube - Pattern Welding Tutorial - Part 4 - Drawing out the Billet

is this the apropriate way?

Cool, okay thanks for the info.. so the convex face is enough to aid in drawing it out. So you don't angle the sledge slightly in each blow toward the drawing direction? is not necessary?

yah thats what I do on all my hammers. THey still have a flat face but all the sharp edges are removed so the flat area blends perfectly into the rest of the hammer.

Sounds like a good idea. So with that slight convex edge do I try to hammer straight level when i'm drawing out or do I hammer with the sledge slightly tilted? Then I imagine your hammering from the handle down to the end before you turn to edge and do the same thing. Is that right :confused:

Most store-bought hammers are crowned on the hammer face with sharp edges.

When I buy a hammer I round off the crown with my large belt sander, keep water close to quench....Don't let the hammer face get hot.

Also, I belt sand the hammer face to a SLIGHT convex curve.

yah thats what I do on all my hammers. THey still have a flat face but all the sharp edges are removed so the flat area blends perfectly into the rest of the hammer.

I believe he means make it like a very slight fuller.

and that would look like??:confused:

(sorry for being so dense.. i just can't picture it)

My advice is to check this website as often as you check your email. There is a ton of experts on here who can steer you in the right direction when books, reading, and courses may leave you with some additional questions.

There is a decent learning curve, but don't be discouraged, stick with it and it will all make much more sense the more time that passes.

Forge welding billets can humble a smith pretty quick; especially in a coal forge.

In general if I am doing a billet I am doing *NOTHING* *ELSE* not even answering questions!

Sledge: just get one with a nicely dressed face; you may want to rocker it if you only want to draw with it.

Thanks Thomas,
By "Rockering" do you mean angle the face so it pushes the metal with each blow?

I run my brake drum forge with a hair dryer and I know others throughout the world most likely do the same. Did a little googling because I was worried it might be costly. If these estimates are correct, then for how much work the hair dryer does it's actually well worth the price!!



How Much Does It Cost To Run A 1500 W Hair Dryer For 43 Minutes Each Day For One Month (30 Days) At A Cost Of 5 Per KWh?

First you convert Watts to Kilowatts, which would equal 1.5 kW, then you find out what portion 43 minutes is of an hour, which would be 43/60, which then equals 0.716666667. Next you multiply 1.5 by 0.716666667 by 30 by .05, which equals 1.61.

Here was another answer


How much does it cost to run a 1400 W hair dryer 80 minutes each day for one month (30 days) at a cost of 8 ce

Well it works out to 40 hours, so it uses 1400w (1.4Kw) then
40 x 1.4KW x 0.08 = $4.48


And another



You have an 1800 watt hair dryer used 10 minutes a day at 9 cents per kilowatt hour of energy. cost per year?

1800 watts = 1.8 Kilowatts
10 minutes = 1/6 hour
9 垄 = $0.09
1 year = 365 days
1.8 Kw X 1/6 h X $0.09 = $0.027/day (2.7垄/day)
$0.027/d X 365 d =$9.855/year



Pretty cheap when you consider how much air it actually pushes and how handy it is.



(Edited to add: Remember that these values are also for running the heating coils which I'd imagine has quite a bit more power draw then just running the fan of your hair dryer, thus electricity cost should even be significantly less)

I dose a good bit of my coal forge with the shower setting on the hose, then let the residual heat dry it out. I don't know if it's because the way I made my brake drum forge, but I hardly ever clean it out and it hardly ever gets clogged. Though I only use wood and blacksmithing coal from Aubuchon hardware (yah it's dirt cheap).

My brake drum has a plate in the bottom of it with about 8 holes in it and then I welded up a thick grate that sits ontop of the plate. The grate has some feet so it actually allows all the air coming up through the plate to circulate under all the coals. I never really find the need to clean it out much unless i'm burning up some pallettes that have nails in them or some such thing.

Now yall made me worried about cleaning it out more. But in the past cleaning and not cleaning seemed to produce the same result lol :rolleyes:

I do not believe that adding a magnet decreases the ring by increasing the mass. I believe that it acts as a damper by having an incomplete interface with the steel of the anvil and so resonate soundwaves get damped out. Why a fairly light bolt in the pritchel also works.

Well said, the resonant wave being distributed through the anvil is changed or upset by being distributed into an attached piece which cannot make the same harmonic given that it is not secured. So the end effect is dampening, that being the anvil losing it's harmonic because the magnet is acting like an acoustic parasite. I guess if you hooked up a lot of acoustic equipment you could actually see exactly how it works. It is kind of odd and interesting that it does actually work at all. I guess at first glance, to the layman, attaching things like chains and magnets would make one think that you will make the overall sound that much noisier.

However I do think sand in the legs does indeed decrease some of the ring/sound by increasing the mass. But of course it also acts as a dampener because sand cannot match the same harmonic that the anvil/stand structure can produce.

Can't you also heat things by transferring sounds harmonics through them? I wonder if the anvil ring generates any heat through harmonic friction, even if it's extremely negligible?

****UPDATE**** 11/04/2009

I got to use it for about 4 hours and well i'm really quite impressed with the design. It's ~377#'s so it doesn't move a bit. The way the design is that Brian made it makes it really one piece, and not an anvil on a stand. The fact that there are through bolts through the anvil holding it as well as bolts on the ends makes it one giant mass.

It does not have a ring, so if your looking for that I wouldn't suggest this style. But it also doesn't have a thwack that you might get off of just working on some railroad rail. It actually just has a really good deep low sound. I can tell you though that TIG welding the S-7 shock resistant rod onto the top of the steel really is a nice touch. Couple times I missed with a 5lb sledge today and no damage at all. Plus it's not the worlds most expensive finish so you can always take a sander/grinder to the top and your not messing up an expensive name brand anvil. Like wise you can always weld in the dings if if they get bad over time.

Really happy I built this anvil and I think my neighbors are probably impressed that it's fairly quiet. Glad I went with the special order 4" plate though. That really gives some mass underneath. of course there is also about 50lb of sand in the legs or so which helps soak up some ring and vibration.

I think you can't go wrong building one of these. Great starter anvil. I think mine was about 400-500$ though out the door. Of course you could drastically cheapen that perhaps even by half by going with 2" or 3" plate and not hard facing the top.

I'll have to get a video soon of it for youtubers. :D

**** UPDATE*****

Well I fired up the coal forge and started working two items separately of course. Boy it didn't take long to realize that forge welding welded up steel like this and drawing it out is not only a ton of work but also requires baby sitting the piece. The first one I worked was a bunch of hacksaws welded up to about 5/8's x 5/8's by 10" and I wasn't watching it close enough and the brake drum forge melted it into two. I only have one tong right now so I didn't even bother tryinig to forge weld it back together. The second one was out of 1" bandsaw blades and the same darn thing happened to that one, it got too hot during the forge welding and I lost about 1/3rd of it.

I continued to work that piece though and I was able to forge weld it all the way through and also cut it in half, forge weld it together and then start drawing it out. But boy what a lot of work just to do one fold. I can see why power hammers were invented. Even with a 5lb sledge it just was a lot of metal to move even with bright orange/yellowish heat.

One question I had is what would be a good two hand sledge to use on one of the bigger drawing-out jobs. Can I just use any old hardware store two hand sledge?

I felt kinda foolish that I made so many of these at first, but in hindsight i'm really glad i'm practicing with freebies I got from strapping, bandsaw blades, etc. and not with expensive toolsteels. I would have been really miffed if I just wasted a bunch of steel that I thought I was going to draw into pattern welded damascus.

Thanks Fe-wood,

I should have said i'm looking at 110V, 10"/12" table saw with a full base.

I kinda like this grizzly Grizzly G0478 2 HP Hybrid Cabinet Saw but i'd like to know what Delta or other saw is out there.

What is a good table saw in the 500$-1000$ range?

Pretty anvils that's for sure. Is there a link to their prices? What does the 460# look like. I'm just curious how it stacks against the nimba gladiator.

Looks really good. Looks really wide, or is that just the camera angle. How come you opted to make an anvil? Just for practice? It almost looks like a Nimba Titan from the side.

I would not add a step if it was me. Use it first and then decide if it's something your missing. I'd prefer not to take away from the face. A+ Job.... why don't you post the specs when you get it all up and mounted and finished.

Thanks all.. now i got them on handles..



I'm not saying these are going to be pretty but just a learning experience. And no they are not damascus, they are equal types of steel welded up so I can practice getting good forge welds and working billets. Thought it would be cheaper this way then playing around with expensive steels before I felt comfortable working them. If I make anything cool out of them i'll definitely post some pics Thanks all for the help.