Rich Waugh

Drat! Now I have to make a traveler. I can forego owning the anvil/vise, (everyone can be forgiven one little shortcoming, right?), but if I also don't have a traveler I may have to quit calling myself a blacksmith. I don't suppose you'd consider a tape measure an acceptable substitute? (grin) I use my flatter once in a while. I used to use my big shears pretty regularly when I was doing silver work, but the Beverly pretty much relegated the big shears to the status of wallflower.

"hapless" merely means unfortunate or unlucky. Which is what you would be if you tried to do any actual balcksmithing on that thing. Nothing pejorative was intended toward any person, only toward the pseudo-tool.

If you go buy refractory flue tiles, you'll find that they are square. It works. No, you won't get laminar flow with square, but you won't get it with round, either. That's because you live in the real world, not the theoretical world. (grin)

Ah yes; the one-tool-does-it-all vise/anvil unit. Sold to thousands of hapless farmers and homeowners who knew no better, or didn't really need either a real anvil or a real vise. Ron "Ronco" Popeil is probably sorry he didn't think of it. The "anvil" is hollow cast iron, the vise uses fine pitch threads just about guaranteed to sieze or strip, and they are made with all the precision of a die-cast toy car. I'd personally rather have the toy car. At least with it, I could roll it around and make motor noises with my lips.

I forgot to mention one other thing: think inside the box. Square duct is just as good as round at removing smoke. Why, ,you could even make your own if need be. 12" square duct will move about 35% more air than 12" round, and is sometimes easier to make flanges, roofjacks and standoffs for, too.

Forget the big box joints and the internet. What you want to find is an HVAC shop that does commercial kitchens. Don't know one? Just ask your local greasy spoon who did their hood. Don't worry about galvanized duct, either. It works just ducky, if you have a proper side-draft hood; the flue temperature shouldn't ever get hot enough to burn the zinc. If it does, you have bigger problems, like burning down your building. If you build a good side draft hood and use 10 or 12 inch flue and a proper roof penetration, you should be just fine. If you're in a frame building, don't get cheap on the penetration, though. get a section of triple wall flue for that bit, or make your own. By the way, if you want 12" flue pipe and can only find smaller, just get twice as much of the 6" size. Open them up, (they usually come that way) and lock the seams of two piees together. Now roll it around and lock it together to make a pipe. Voila! Instant larger pipe. Available most anywhere. That wasn't hard, was it? Guess how many years it was until I learned this bit of simple advice. (grin)

As long as it doesn't have any lacquer finish on it, I'd try a soak in WD-40 fort a few hours. That stuff will pretty much dissolve most things like ink if left on it for a while. After the soak, a couple of rinses with some mineral spirits and then let it air dry. Should work. I would definitely not use the oven. You may find that there was a plastic retractor piece inside it thatr didn't like the heat too much. :-(

Ironscot, I went through the explanation of metal galling in another response, but I'm sorry I didn't hink to include your aluminum example. That is one of the clearest examples most metal workers will likely see. Good one!

First, what irnsrgn said: these vises usually bend at the stress concentrators, the slit/drifted holes for the screw. To fix it, disassemble the vise completely, then heat the eye and forge it flat again on an anvil or flat plate. This is a wrought iron vise, so you have to get it to very near a welding heat (white) to forge it safely. Too low a heat and it will separate the wrought. Most of these post vises that I've seen, from the hinge area to the top of the screw holes should describe a straight line. YMMV Second, what Fred said: your spring is in backwards. If you moved the bracket a lot, you may have to modify the spring curve a very little bit to get a good fit/operation, but only a little. This you can do cold, as these usually aren't high-carbon steel. Nor do they need to be. Don't grind the jaw faces to get them parallel; they usually only have a 3/8" thick hard face on them and you don't want to gobble up any of that if you can avoid it, which you can.

You can get the spherical washer sets at places like MSC Industrial Supply, Grainger, McMaster-Carr, if you don't have one. Try: http://www.mcmaster.com catalog page #3060

Strine, in fact, all you 'strines: I dunno just who it is who might be running down you folks from Oz, but it would never be me, nor is it likely to be much of any blacksmiths. As a gereral rule, smiths tend to be and appreciate, the sort of independent, hard-headedly individualistic sort that I think typifies the population of your fair country. Of course, I'm a westerner, a country boy, as far as US heritage goes; we're pretty much the same lot as you in many respects. A bunch of hard-headed cowboys. (grin) By all means, post those pictures of your work so we can all learn something, mate! I'd love to just drop on down there for a few months and check out the work first-hand, but my state of general near-poverty prohibits such fanciful excursions. I'm depending on your generosity in posting some pics to prevent me from remaining forever ignorant.

Answered with respect to metal, in a reply to your multi-question post. Also with respect to gall ink, a form of iron compound. (Gall ink can be removed by the use of oxalic acid, by the way. Just in case you ever get any on your best Sunday-go-to-meeting shirt.) Also, if you are talking about horses, a gall is a sore spot or granulating wound on the hide, usually on the withers, from a poorly-fitting harness strap or saddle. Not a nice thing at all, eh? Plant galls are sort of cyst-like tumors caused by insects, often wasps, laying eggs in them. Plain old gall is an archaic term for stomach bile, excreted from the gall bladder, located on the common bile duct. Not a problem to me, as I no longer have a gall bladder. You didn't need to know that, did you? (grin)

What the heck, I guess I don't really care if it is homework. As long as you actually learn something. 1. Burns: In forging, this refers to overheating the metal, resulting in anything from loss of carbon at the very surface to loss of material at and even below the surface due to excessive oxidation of the metal. Too much heat and/or too oxidizing a fire causes this. 2. See my post above. 3. Cracking: The result of improper forging. Too many light blows to the surface of a dense cross-section piece will deliver only shallow penetration of the forces, resulting in the surface moving (stretching) more than the core. When the stretching exceeds the elasticity and crystalline strength of the steel, the surface will crack. Conversely, it is possible to over forge a piece, usually with really heavy blows alternating in opposing axes (axises?) to the point that the core becomes disrupted and cracks. Tough to do with a hand hammer, but easy to do on a powerhammer. Not to mention that hammering on cold steel will result in cracking because the metal is not hot enough to be in a plastic state, and is .therefore, unable to maintain the integrityof its crystalline structure. 4. What you see is what you get. Mis-hits, scale hammered into the work, etc. 5. Coldshuts: When forging a tight corner, it is easy to over forge the inside of the corner, resulting in a small flap of metal getting folded over. This creates a stress-riser that will eventually lead to failure through crack propagation. Sometimes, it looks okay until you stress it. What you see is *not* necessarily what you get, in other words. Also, a "cold join", or one in which the entire mating surface (scarfs) did not weld. 6. Self explanatory, I would think. You can get too much of a good thing, just as you can get too little. 7. Nitrogen bubbles dissolved in the tissues of the joints expand when rising too quickly to the surface from a deep dive causing “the bends”. Sorry, I should know better. This too, seems self-explanatory, but I suppose the answer has to do with developing bending in a piece other than at the point of forging, due to inertial forces exerted on and expressed in, unsupported long bars. Maybe. 8. I’ll not discuss my kinks in an open forum, thank you. SUrely you can describe a kink. 9. ‘Zactly what Jr. said: cruddy work on fabrication and fit up of a join. 10. Here again, what you see is what you get. 11. Self-explanatory to even the uninitiated. If it ain’t like the blueprint, then it isn’t right. Out of specification. Old machinist I worked for used to tell me, “Follow the blasted blueprint…even if it flies out the blasted window!” (Okay, I cleaned up his language a bit.)

This sounds a lot like a homework question, to me. That said, I'm not sure exactly what is meant by "galls", with respect to blacksmithing. "Galling" is a phenomenon of two metal parts rubbing, where one part pull metal from the other part, resulting in a rough surface. This is not friction wear (abrading); it is either displacement of the metal, as in gouging, or it is solid-state bonding of the two surfaces under pressure, resulting in the displacement of metal from one surface to the other. It usually happens when you have two metal surfaces with very nearly identical coefficients of friction and surface finish/hardness rubbing on each other. The mild steel shaft rotating in a mild steel bushing, for example. If one metal is softer than the other, it will wear through friction abrasion. That is a really clumsy explanation of the galling process, I'm afraid, but I don't seem to be able to do any better right now.

As of 2004, the Yellin shop was in business at the address shown on the site. It is actually Pete Renzetti's shop, I believe. He and Claire Yellin are working together to keep the Yellin tradition alive, and there is a young smith working with Pete who is really terrifically good. I saw some truly amazing work there.

Hollis, Au contraire, mon ami. The executive summary is, "DO miss the anvil!" (big grin) Hit the hot stuff and all is well; hit the cold anvil and all goes awry. From time to time, I wind up doing a bit of quick forging using the O/A torch for heat and my welding table (mild steel plate, 3/4" thick) as an anvil. Never marks it as long as I keep the hot iron between the hammer and the table. I'm not advocating mild steel anvils though, don't get me wrong. I love my 250# Fisher. It has pretty much the mass required to just sit there, even when I'm using the 8# hand sledge for upsetting. I sure can't say that about the 112# Peter Wright. One other thing that comes to mind is hammer hardness. There isn't any real need for a hammer face to be harder than a hardened anvil face. Hammers are much easier to dress than anvils. A slightly softer face will spall less and is less likely to skate off the striking end of a chisel or top tool.

A couple of things that were brought out in the anvil/hammer discussion on Anvilfire weren't mentioned here, and are definitely cogent. In making a wrought iron/tool steel anvil, the rate of heat abstraction is definitely affected by the mass of the anvil. That is obvious. As mentioned, anvil makers used a water stream flowing over the anvil face to quench it. I have seen no mention anywhere that any anvil manufacturer had several differing volumes/flows of water for different sizes of anvils, and it stands to reason that they didn't. Just not that easy to do when you're dealing with diverting flow from a millrace into or near a forge area. They probably just worked with what was reasonable to do, and it was a bit much for a very small anvil and a bit too little for the really big ones. The cube/square law appolies in anvils, meaning that there's a vast difference in mass for not a lot of difference in surface area. That mass is what necessitates more and faster ehat abstraction if you're goin gto get effective quenching. Most importantly though, a factor that *was* in the discussion on Anvilfire that hasn't been raised here, is that you expect a big anvil to used with strikers using big sledges. Big sledges mean big forces when a blow is missed. That means that if your big anvil has a really hard face, one missed blow with a sledge will knock a really big chunk out of the anvil's edge. That gives anvil makers a bad reputation if it happens more than once, I would think. Seems reasonable to me that bigger anvils, destined to be used by strikers, would have be made with a more forgiving face hardness. ON the matter of anvil v hammer mass, you can't can't ignore physics. If you want to resist the hammer's *force*, you need sufficient mass, since the anvil has no velocity.

When you say "gig", I thinkn of a three-tined, barbed trident sort of thing, using 1/8" diameter tines. Long handle like a rake, used to spear frogs and fish. The only things I've seen that used 1/4" rod were gaffs, basically a giant fish hook mounted on a handle. Used to yank a fish out of the water and into the boat. For a gig, irnsrgn has a great idea with the upholstery springs. Work cold, no further heat treating required. For a gaff, use a high-carbon stainless steel such as the 400 series, if used in salt water. For fresh water, the stainless is stil a good idea, as gaffs get left in the boat all the time. Heat treat according to manufacturer's spec for the particular alloy.

Here's a picture Sally took of a young iguana that tried to sneak in when she opened the screen gate on the kitchen one day. Fortunately Sally saw it before she shut that heavy gate all the way, or it would have done in the poor little critter. They sure are a bright green when they're young, aren't they? The other picture is of a more mature one in the calabash tree in the front yard. The round things are calabash "gourds", about the size of, and as hard as, a croquet ball. We have lots of lizards!

What Fred says is absolutely true. Get a belt moving as fast as you want and make it stay where you want, and you have a grinder. Doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to work. Now me, I'm a junky for icing when it comes to making tools. Heck, I can't even make a forge and keep it simple.

Hollis, Here at the house, I use Henckels 4-stars, but they're as much for braggin's rights as for using. Without a diamond lap they're a pain in the tail to get really sharp, and they don't hold an edge nearly as well as my really old Henckels high-carbon blades. I *do* use a diamond lap, so sharpening is pretty quick. When I owned the bar/restaurant, I bought Dexter-Russell knives for the kitchen staff. They hold up really well, take and hold an edge just fine and are about one fourth the price of Henckels cheapest models. You can find them, and a bunch of other good brands, at Superior Products, a restaurant supply I dealt with. If you feel that you just have to spend more, R. H. Forschner and Wusthof-Trident are good knives, too. (grin) http://www.superprod.com

If you have a copy of Machinrery's Handbook, you can look up the deflection for various standard beam sections. You don't want more than 1/4" deflection under designed loading if you're going to use a trolley on it, or the thing will roll to center and stop. For 28' foot clear span, at 2 tons I would take a WAG and say you'll need something on the order of W16-80 I beam. That's 16" web, wide flange, weighing 80 pounds per running foot in standard beam nomenclature. Check Machinery's, it will have the exact figures. You're gonna be unpleasantly surprised though, I'm afraid.

You can work small stock just fine on a big anvil, but you can't work big stock too efficiently on a small anvil. I have a 100# PW for demos, and a 200# side-face London pattern anvil and a 250# Fisher. 90% of my work gets done on the Fisher, because it is both lively and quiet. It has the appropriate mass to get the most out of every hammer blow. The 200# I use when I need the slight sway it has in the face - handy for straightening or cupping stock. The little PW I almost never use in the shop, as it is too small to be very effective on larger stock and it is the noisiest anvil I've ever used. Absolutely ear-splitting ring, even well-anchored. Draws a crowd at demos, though. One disadvantage to the bigger anvils is the wide face, sometimes. That's where the double-horned European style anvil really shines, as the square heel tapers, giving you a wide range of face widths. Since I don't have one of those anvils (yet), I have a couple of bridge hardies that I use when I need either a narrower or thinner heel. The bridge hardies are easy to make form a scrap of 1/2" or thicker leaf spring material, and you can give them an undercut edge for stuff like fork tines and the like.

I used caster wheels for the drive wheel and the contact wheel. Both from Surplus Center. I had to turn an adapter for the drive wheel to go to the shaft, but that was no problem. I have a tiny little lathe, really more of a hobby toy, but it was enough to turn an aluminum sleeve to replace th bearing in the one caster to make it fit the drive shaft.

I just finished building myself a grinder. No reason you couldn't do the same. Mine is made from stock structural steel shapes and salvaged parts, though you could buy contact wheels, drive wheels, etc. and still save some money over buying a high-dollar machine. The Grizzly is a good machine; I recommended it to Ellen as she didn't want to build one.