Chris Pook

The new one also looks to be alot easier to make. less precision needed for the ram and the hammer guides The ram is attached to the underside of a leaf spring, which is at one end attached to the main upright hammer tube via a shackle and to the hammer head at the other end. kinda like helve hammer. heres a bad picture I took from the article...my scanner isn't hooked up right now so I used my camera Edit: the hammer head is hollow tube... 60lbs 4x4 thickwalled tube with no added weight. slid into a 5"x5" tube with uhmw-pe guides.

I'd make square bundles and weld all of them together at one end, and feed the other end into a bandsaw. My dad's fab shop has a automated feed bandsaw which I use for jobs like that, but even if I just have a 50 or 60 pieces I do the same thing with my little bandsaw. with the right feed rates and force, cutting stainless with a bandsaw is no problem.

wow that heats up pretty quick, 10kg is about 22lbs, was that a big block of steel or a smaller round stock chunk. My propane forge does well on round stock but on big blocks I really need to leave it in long soaking for the first heat. yep 1 kilowatt is about 3414btu so your burner is around 34200 btu's

BTU, I guess it would be the heat rating.... maybe you guys go by kilowatts? size of the burner?

Whats the benefits of oil burning over propane/natural gas? did you need to do anything to the burner besides hook it up? whats the BTU rating on the burner? Thanks chris

the horn works good, or use a piece of round stock as a fuller and go at it, it'll be ugly at first but once you go back and smooth it all will be good. a smithing magician or gillitine (SP?) tool works real good for this if you want to build one.

in a pinch a piece of emt (electrical conduit) flatten'd a touch works good.

pottery places sell it too. thats were i get mine from here in Canada

I've been saying that up here about our politicians for some time...they feel no fear when it comes to stealing our money or giving it to there friends cuz theres no consequences....maybe it'd be differenet if they thought someone might take them out.

I'll agree with actauly forging it all..... but the customer with the $ usually has the last say and for some reason a great deal of them like that hammered texture. I have in the past hot chiseled a border all around a piece and only textured the center, this makes it look more like it was meant to be a textured finish. One rule I have and I feel its a good one is that none of my work is allowed to have factory stock edges, it cannot have that grabbed off the shelf barstock look.

There are alot of blacksmiths in WA state, Dozens in the Seattle area...and lots more spread through out. I'm in BC just north of Lynden WA. check out the NWBA site, blacksmith.org theres a conference coming up in October just south of the WA border in Oregon. good place to meet other smiths that are from WA.

and remember its alot easier to move a piece of hot metal than a cold one....no shame in taking another heat.

texturing by hand is alot of fun. getting a cheap hammer and texturing the face works good, I've taken them and welded different weld blobs one them then softened any sharp edges with a sanding disk on a grinder and have had good results quickly, I normally texture the stock before any other forging is done. I've made similar texturing dies for my powerhammers, makes quick work of it. Another option that works well is finding some really rusted pitted metal and using it as sort of a flater or placing it on the anvil and hammering the heated stock into it.

Thanks those pictures help. It looks like you have the piece hanging in a chain thats just a single loop that goes around a pulley at the top just to keep it spread wider and help you turn the piece over. which is then connected to the hook. Is that right?

Kallsme'n I was asking if you could take pictures of how you use chain and cranes to move big material for forging and the best ways to do it. Explain how you use the crane to hold long material for forging on the big hammers. How to hook up the chain. were to put it, best ways to do it. and any saftey concerns that a person should be aware of when forging with heavy material this way.

Ed, I'd love too at least for a little while, its not easy for a Canadian to move to the US, especially to take a job that could go to an American. I can't even move down there with my small business, unless I'm able to provide jobs for at least 10 Americans. Your goverment try's and protects your jobs from us Canadians. I'll just need to work on some rigging and a crane for my shop, according to the literature my Nazel will work 4" solid effeciently , biggest I've worked on it so far is 2" square and that got heavy quickly. Maybe thats a better for question for Kallsme´n Could you post some pictures of your various methods of rigging material? maybe some of the dangerous and safe ways of doing it

Big forgings get me all excited I wish being an industrial smith around here was still a carear path one could take.

for material you could also try a fab shop... theres always a scrap bin, and a case of beer on a friday gets you alot of steel.

if at all possible try and take a beginer class even just for an afternoon, it will save you alot of headaches a give you a good foundation to build on.

I have a coal forge too , its just not setup in the new shop. Hopefully I'll get some time to get it up and running.

if you got the land, post and beam is the way to go. big spans, high ceilings and goes up real quick.

fun stuff. What do you use for a forge? can you post some pics? I have a trough style johnson forge and a home made pipe style forge but that size of stuff is still awkward to heat up... I need to build something new.

my guess is its the "guardian" of the stair case....standing guard at the bottom of the staircase. the last rung in the railing.

pictures would be great.

Thanks guys. Tyler, you pretty much got it I tenoned the U shaped piece, and drilled and countersunk the backing plate, headed the tenons (whats the proper name for that anyways?) , but since they'll be a bunch of teenagers coming and going through this gate I then decided to give it alittle extra insurance and gave them a bit of mig weld just to stop it form ever wigglying loose (you'll never see it ) I thought about something in the picture to scale it too, but my wife allready finished taking the pictures and sizing them for me. I plan on doing alot of forge work now that my shop is up and going so, I'll make sure I take lot of photo's.