mcraigl

Welcome aboard Dave.

Torin,
Count me among those that've been hit by the shrapnel. When I was younger I was driving a geologist's hammer into a tree with a 3lb engineer's hammer when the head of the geologists hammer exploded sending about a 1/4" chunk through my coveralls, jeans, and about an inch into my thigh. Wasn't any fun having pops pull that thing out of there with hemostats and needle nose pliers. Anyway, another thing that I saw wrong with their test is that their "apparatus" struck the faces together too perfectly centered. The average joe out there isn't going to hit them that perfect. Also as to the comment that they had "measured the force a human can hit with"... I remember watching those jokers swinging wildly trying to drive a 16 penny nail in one blow. Are you kidding me? I framed for a living for some time and my hammer only touched each nail twice. Once to set it, once to drive it. They should've measured the "force" while they were visiting Scott Thomas and seen the force from someone who is used to manual labor... Anyway, that's my .02 cents.
McL

JWB,
Would love to see pix of your trailer. Did you design/build it yourself? I've been contemplating building one because the ones at the trailer dealer seem kind of cheesy for the price you pay.

Mother in Law?

I have a friend who wants to cast some 50cal. balls for a muzzle-loader using silver. The worry we have is that the Lee mold has aluminum mold blocks. Melting point for aluminum is 1200ish, while silver is 1700ish. Will we destroy the mold, or will the aluminum sink the heat out of the molten silver before it melts deforms? Additionally, he'd like to NOT destroy the mold, he'd like to be able to use it for casting useable balls in the future. He's not afraid of werewolves and vampires. Its for a going-away gift for a colleague.

THX,
McL

Tom
My 204lb Peter Wright looked about like yours when I got it. Except some moron used it as a cutting table at one time and pitted the center of the face a bit. I too wanted to immediately repair it, but my mentor encouraged me to just radius the chipped edges with an angle grinder and use it. He predicted I'd find a use for most of the different radii created from smoothing the chipped out sections. He was right. I'd still like to have at least one small section of the near edge and the far edge that is square, and fill the gouge in the center of the face. But I do in fact use most of the radius for different things. I'd say use it as is for now.

Yea, Mike-hr and I built a new handle for it. The handle that was on it when I got it wasn't original and did work very well. Good luck with it.
McR

Ron,
I can't remember if I "had" to take the fan off or not. My unit was pretty crusty with old congealed oil etc. and I wanted to wire brush every inch of the outside and degrease the entire inside so I took 'er down to the smallest part. No ball bearings in mine, just brass bushing type bearings. Here's a couple of pix of mine. Sorry they're not the best, it's dark and cold.

ML

Mine was real easy to take apart. However, I've been told that the bolts are "special"... In other words take great pains not to damage them 'cause if you break one off, you will end up drilling and tapping for new bolts. The only other gotcha is to make sure you don't have any nasty burrs on the input shaft so that you don't bugger up the case or brass bearing that it goes through when you pull the shaft. It required a puller to get the fan off mine, but it was simple to make one. Drilled a 3/4" hole through a piece of 1/4" x 2" x 4" plate, then cut out the web on one side so it is "c" shaped and I could slip it behind the fan. I then drilled a couple of appropriately spaced holes and tapped for 3/8" bolts and voila, fan puller. I did a little looking into it, and your is either a slightly older or newer vintage than mine. Mine has little brass caps on the end of where the fan and gear shafts come through the housing whereas yours has plugs. I think the one Mike-hr has/had looked like yours. One of ours had a patent date somewhere, and one of ours has "pat. app'd for" or something like that one we were thinking the "pat. app'd for" one was probably a little bit older. When I re-assembled, I coated the shaft ends with moly grease, then just the non-detergent 30. I think 90 is way overkill since I intentionally NEVER apply more than slight torque. I don't think the oil film is under much pressure as opposed to the rear end in your truck or something. Plus it's colder'n a well digger's @$$ here right now and you'd never be able to turn the thing. YMMV. I'll pose up a pic when I get home of my Western Cheif.

Ron,
After looking at your picture I can tell you one problem you have right now. The gear housing is not correctly mated to the fan housing. The input shaft should not be at the bottom of the oil sump. It needs to be rotated 1/3 turn clockwise. That gets the input shaft above the oil level. The gears get lubricated by splash action. When I re-did mine, I was having issues with the oil coming out of all the shafts. I, like whoever last reassembled yours tried to align it so the lettering was upright. Mike-hr told me he didn't think it was right, then on further inspection we found a small lubrication port where the input shaft goes into the housing and it was pointed at about 7 o-clock (which I'm guessing yours is to?). Anyway, once I turned it 1/3 clockwise the leakiness went way down. It's still leaking a very small amount at the lowest bolt hole that joins the two half's, but it's minimal. Is there also a plug at 6 o-clock in addition to the one we see in the pic? Mine had two, so there's now one at the top, and one at about 7 or 8 o-clock that has a little petcock still in it. I open the petcock and dump non-detergent 30w in the top until it starts to come out of the petcock and that's where I leave it. I must say I'm still pretty much in love with my blower. It's a good one, and I think the Royal Cheif is pretty much the cadillac of the bunch.

Ron,
Where's it leaking? Bolt holes on the case? Shaft holes? Split in the case? I took mine appart and cleaned it up last fall/summer and I wouldn't say the gears are made of paper. I bought a package of o-rings that fit in the groove around the case. It still leaks around the lowest bolt hole a little bit, but not enought to be annoying, and if it does start to annoy me, I'm sure a rubber washer would fix it right up. I had to buy a package of 10 of the o-rings, and I'd be happy to mail you one if you want it and it's leaking around the case. Mine had the original packing material in there that resembled valve packing for an old faucet that had dried up and cracked. Let me know.

Yesteryear,
I keep mine stacked on a pallet on the north side of the shop covered with a tarp. The tarp/north side thing are really just to keep the UV off the sacks so they don't dissolve in the sunlight. I doubt sticks, leaves, and acorns would hurt it much though.

Ted,
Duchesne don't get THAT cold. I grew up in Randolph, I'm sure you've heard of randolph if you catch the weather on KSL. That's were the real cold is. All my kin are in Evanston and Rocksprings now. Got a very good buddy from down your way by the name of Gary Jewett. 'Course he lives in Washington now and was a bit of a hermit when he lived in Duchesne. Welcome aboard (belatedly). We'll have to hook up on the chat some time, it's always nice to talk to folks from behind the zion curtain.

McL

Glenn,
I think it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I couldn't point to a single BP and say "that's the one that's influenced me the most", having pretty much just started this process around the beginning of '06 I've found all the BP's to be usefull, especially the ability to go back through all the past ones and search for something related to whatever I'm working on at the moment. I've only directly used BP301 (thanks again JW) to make gifts for the women folk in my family, and Mike-hr's "spinning bolster wheel". Having said that I'm pretty sure I've applied many of the principals from numerous BP's to my general work and have grown just from seeing multiple different perspectives on how stuff can be done.
Peace,
McL

I've used your flower/vase BP three times now. First time was last Sept. for my Mom's birthday. I made a "rustic" wood box nailed together with handmade nails in which I shipped a vase with three of the tulipy type flowers in. I then made one for my wife to put on her desk, just a single flower stuck in a nice Curl-Leaf Mt. Mahogany disk, then last week I made one that's stuck in an odd chunk of Walnut I had laying around with my son for his girlfriend. It's the only one I can find a pic of right at the moment, but here it is.


Thanks for that one JW, I like it.

McL

You're my hero Sam.

Archie,
My reasons echo many others here. It is more about the journey, and the learning for me. I've been in a stale job for a while, but the pay and benefits keep me here. Forging gives me a creative and emotional outlet. If I get frustrated at work (daily occurence), getting something hot and beating the daylights out of it makes me feel better. Take a break if you need one. Most of my stuff comes out looking pretty rough also, but every now and then I have a breakthrough. many "simple" little projects are really good practice. For instance, I built 3 sets of tongs one weekend quite a while ago (my first three sets). They're functional, but not pretty. Then last week while visiting Mike-hr, I got a wild hair to build another pair. Even though it'd been 6 months since my first attempt, this set came out real nice. The simpler things I'd made in the mean time made my technique much better. Keep at it, and you'll have a breakthrough also. Sam actually gave you some good advice there too. If there's other smiths around you, go visit one for an afternoon. Just watch them work for a while. Notice the little things about how they adress the anvil, or use the hammer, or maybe learn new ways to use different parts of the anvil etc. etc.

That's a good point Jerry. My welder is one of the little lincoln 110v migs. And the "need" to run it off the 10ga. cord comes along fairly rarely, but does nonetheless. If I could afford a decent portable/gas engine welder that would surely be nice. Maybe some day. I figure the bigger issue for me right now than the 10ga. cord is the knob and tube feeding the cord. That's going to be remedied soon. What a pain in the butt trying to get the garage stripped to bare walls so the rewiring/insulating/sheetrock work can begin. I ended up building an 8x12 storage building behind the garage/shop to get rid of "storage" crap in the garage. It'll also end up holding all the tools etc. that can fit durring the remodel exercise. Everything except the table saw and the milling machine. I can see now that I was somewhat optimistic about the time table for this project. It was very depressing last weekend when I put all my smithing tools away in rubbermaid containers in the shed. Luckily Mike-hr said I could come out and use his shop if I was having withdrawls... Thanks Mike! I'll probably take you up on that in a couple of weeks. Anyway, once I get all the "crap" out of the garage, I'll start a new thread and post progress pix of the transformation of my garage into a blacksmithin/glass blowing shop/studio.

However..... Many folks I know who are in business for themselves (seems like a lot of folks on this forum fit that category) have their home/office numbers forwarded to their cell phones most of the day. If you're in that category, it's probably still a good idea to list your home/office numbers with the DNC registry. Otherwise you may still end up getting the annoying calls, and pay for them on your cell bill.
My .02
McL

Hey all,
I'm having turkey with my buddy Jim today and he showed me his real nice old Trenton anvil that was on the family farm in Washington. We're kind of wondering if anyone can tell us it's age by the markings. On the heel end of the base/feet it's marked Z111 on the left side and A15830 on the right side. It appears to be approximately 100lbs so maybe the Z111 is the weight??? Any idea from the other number what it's age might be?

Thanks in Advance and happy thanksgiving all,
McL

Ah.... As Mike-hr put it... Midnight Madness is the BEST!!!. Mike, show them a picture of the dragon that you made durring midnight madness last summer... Camping on the grounds is indeed a great thing. I felt a little sorry at the last hammer in for all the folks that were staying in hotels in town. Heck, they were missing out on all the fun. Folks have given some good points already. Though I don't think my waistline really needs any more dooughnut Ed. One other thing along the same vien as advertising and word of mouth. I've only recently begun to discover that there's a lot of other "groups" of folks out there that are into doing traditional stuff. So what if you did some research and contacted your local mountain man / rondevous club, and the "hit and miss engine club", and the threshing bee club, and the old tractor dudes, and oh heck I dunno but I got a feelin the list goes on. The point being a lot of these folks might need some blacksmithing done once in a while besides the possibility that they might be real interested in bs'ing in and of it's own. How cool woud it be to hook a big 'ol hit and miss up to the flat belt running a power hammer and a hammer-in. I'd be in line for that one for sure. Anyway there's my 30 cents.

Jens,
OK, not to keep pestering, but like I said I really, really like the fit and finish. So... The drilling: Do you use a drill bit that's the same diameter as the tang is wide, then drill a series of holes, then clean up with the chisel. OR.. Do you drill quite a bit oversize, then use the chisel to make slots in either side of the drilled hole? On the chisel... So do you have a very narrow chisel, or is it a wide, but very thin chisel? I was thinking maybe something on the order of a very narrow mortising chisel? Sorry to keep pestering you, but I just picked up a real purty piece of Bocote that is just itching to have a knife built around it and I've got a couple of pattern welded billets that I need to do something with. Thanks for the Intel.
McL

Just went to Woodcraft last week and the ones they had were priced at $35 to 50 each. I got a buddy who's into fine jointery and I might have to make him one for Christmas.

Where the heck did you get all the "powder"? Isn't the stuff from a machine shop awefully contaminated with cutting fluid etc.? Another real nice one Jens.

Jens,
That there is absolutely beautiful. How did you attach the handle? It looks like one piece from the angles I can see. Do you bore a hole in the end, then epoxy and pin? Also, wouldn't L-6 with the 1084 give you a higher "performance blade" with the same high contrast to the pattern? Or is it more a matter of what's available? Anyway, that thing is real purty. I think I can get some decent blades, but the fit and finish of the hardware on the knives some of you guys are putting out just astounds me. Makes mine look pretty unrefined.