Latticino

The real question then is, do you have an analogue castable forge liner to Kastolite (high alumina for flux resistance, but still light enough to provide more insulation value than hard refractories like Greencast 97).

JHCC. What a lovely compliment. You really made my day today, and I had fun working with you in the forge as well. Of course you "nocked it out of the park" with your first forge welded hawk build, but that was only to be expected. I'm a bit afraid to show my son you railings. He is sure to want me to make something similar, and I've never worked nearly that large or precisely. Beautiful work

As far as I am aware, the springs used for these vises can be just mild steel. If that is the case, just remove it, cold bend to shape and reinstall. I assume you are aware that you do need a lower pivot bolt for proper function as well. If spring is actually high carbon, I would heat it, bend it, then reheat treat (tempering to a peacock blue in the end).

Not sure where in the Adirondacks you are located, but you might consider getting some direct instruction and recommendations from the Adirondack branch of the New York Designers Blacksmith group. Typically there are monthly meeting where you can interact in person with other smiths and even use tools and equipment that have already been proven.

Of course John. Wishing for the best future for you and yours.

I use forced air and residential pressure natural gas in my forge. I currently have a single port burner, but have run multi-port inthe past. It gets up to welding temperatures. However, I have commercial grade regulators and a 1.5" gas line feeding the forge. Propane is certainly different, but the lower the pressure the larger the line required to get the same BTUH output. Codes are pretty easy to check to determine allowable indoor pressures and connection types (available online at this site: https://codes.iccsafe.org/codes/united-states )

Key problem I see with your design is the shear plane. I have certainly punched square and rectangular holes in the past, but for ease of successful shearing you need a relatively flat, "sharp" plane to cut the plug free. The irregular tip on yours will just get frustrating, particularly in the middle of a large hammer billet. You can have a tip, it just has to emanate from a flat, regular crossection with an abrupt change (to either a flat or a short beveled tip). Yours also has a lot of taper in the longitudinal direction which will make it more difficult to shear effectively. There are a number of timing and process details that help a lot with hot punching. You can learn a bunch more about punching by starting with 1/4" thickness and working your way up to hammer sized billets. Here are some to consider: Punch one side until you feel the tool "bottom out" on the anvil. Then flip it over, flat quickly, counter punch and shear the plug. Shearing works best, in my experience, when done on steel that is dull red at most. While punching take your tool out at least every 3 hits and cool down to avoid having it overheat. Rotate either your stock 180 every 3 hits or yourself around the anvil. This will help keep you straight. Hit hard with as heavy a hammer that you can handle (and that the tool can take) Treadle hammers, hydraulic presses, or strikers are great for this activity Put a deep center punch on one side of your billet as a guide (some drill up to three holes through the billet, but after time you will find you don't need to). Tap your first try and make sure the tool is correctly placed, then hit harder once you are sure it is in the right spot. Don't just put the tool on the stock and start bashing away, it will bounce and come down away from the target. Resett he tool every hit until you get a good size divot started as a guide. John's point about the ease of punching a round hole and turning it oval is also well noted. A round punch can certainly do the job.

Looks like a nice, solid piece of kit. With the controller properly tuned (and if the coils are still good) it should easily be able to accomplish what you need. Note that it does appear to have some significant thermal mass, which is a double edged sword. As noted, it should keep temperatures more stable, but it will also take more time and energy to get up to heat. This will also impact you being able to easily double purpose it as an austentizing oven and a tempering one. A cheap toaster oven can also be used for this (they can also be fairly easily modified to perform really well at this).

Well, I haven't used cones in close to 50 years, so take this for what it is worth: Ceramic cones are a temperature over time system. My feeling is that it will likely be helpful to get a better picture of the variation of temperatures in your kiln in different locations, but not necessarily a good indication of the actual temperature within a couple of degrees that you would get with use of a proper thermocouple. By all means put a bunch of cones of different ratings on shelves in different locations in your kiln, but I would take that as a relative test rather than an exact indication of what temperature each location is holding. If you are using the kiln for heat treatment, the controller and associated sensor are really the critical piece of kit you need to setup. The cones may tell you what peak temperature the kiln gets to, but a calibrated thermocouple and readout will give you an instantaneous reading. Control systems are prone to drift, overshoot and hysteresis. Any of these can mess with your planned heat treatment cycle. Fortunately most simple carbon steel heat treatment doesn't need +/- 10 degree accuracy to give an acceptable outcome. Still, proper selection and setup of a correct controller/sensor system will lead to success more often than not. Your high power (coil supply) switch is also critical to good heat treat oven performance. Old school standard contactors will eventually arc, oxidize and fuse. SCR are great, but can be expensive and hard to tune. I used to use mercury relays in my builds. They are a good compromise between contactors and SCR, particularly if you can source them cheaply from a liquidator like I did. All things being equal, the more thermal mass in the system the slower, but more stable the heating.

I'm hardly an antique anvil expert. Just going by what I have seen in my travels. Seems like you both have quite a collection.

Looks a bit like a South German anvil with a French or Italian hardy hole location to me. The raised horn should be nice for drawing out stock with a helper swinging a sledge (nice radius over the sweet spot on the anvil) Kind of reminiscent of this one (which is identified online as being French), which also has a protruding horn:

I have a small flypress (unfortunately the number on it doesn't appear to correspond to standard rating system, so can't tell exactly how large). It came with the manufacturer's CI table, so I can't directly comment on that other than to say that your legs sound heavy enough, but the assemblage needs to be configured and assembled in a way that will resist the torque load that Jon mentioned. Gussets and cross-bracing will help with this. As far as the lag bolts go, I used 1/2" with lead inserts to tie mine down to my concrete slab. I expect that these will be most challenged by a shear load, so I selected grade 8 bolts for the purpose. Your press is likely larger than mine, so I don't think you can go wrong with larger bolts, but a lot will depend on the floor type and the eventual weight of the table (which will also function to absorb some of the torque load).

I have a 250# Fisher anvil in slightly better condition than the one pictured where one of the former owners cut off the mounting lugs for some reason. That being said, it is a great anvil and has worked extremely well for me. As far as I know, there no real modern equivalent that has the combination of materials that intrinsically reduces the anvil ring without appreciably affecting surface hardness and resilience, mass in the "trunk" (so critical for efficiency), and rebound (arguably a evaluation standard rather than a critical parameter). The quiet aspect of the anvil was important to me as my shop is in a residential neighborhood and I don't want to alienate my next door neighbors. The anvil you are looking at is large enough far almost all work, unless you start making huge architectural pieces. It will likely last another few generations if used with care. Compare that cost over time with the purchase of a new high end cell phone... That being said, in the condition I see from the photos I would likely try to purchase for closer to $1K. I paid a bit more for mine, but it was pristine.

Actually direction of planking will also have an influence on suitability for knife scales (as well as shrinkage to some extent). For scales mounted on a full tang knife I usually like my scales to have the grain running parallel to the width rather than the thickness (i.e. some of the perimeter cuts from Plain or Live, but not Quarter or Rift from your sketch above). Of course if you stabilize the wood you can get away with almost any grain direction. For stabilizing I have heard good things about "Cactus Juice Stabilizing Resin", but typically the wood should be fully "kiln dried" and put into a vacuum chamber for good penetration.

Bought time to make a plan for how you are going to lag it down. Otherwise you may find it dancing around the shop.

Depending on how you plan on using the hammer, it can be helpful to have dies with different crossections for different tasks. Flat dies like you have now with a 1/8" radius are pretty good general purpose and allow use of hand held tooling to cut, flatten, isolate mass, punch holes, tennon, spread... I have a smaller hammer (Anyang 33) and find that I most often use drawing dies in mine (which have more of a crown to the top). One of the nice things about being a smith is the ability to make equipment and tooling changes, as required. If you are just tempering, why not use your kitchen oven? Most likely it will get up to at least 500 deg. For steel stock, check and see if there is an Alro Metals Outlet or service center near you. I know there are a bunch in Florida. I have found their prices and selection of "drops" in the outlet near me are quite good (and you can always order "virgin" stock as well).

Anyone who can build a power hammer can surely rig together a heat treat oven. These days PID controllers are cheap (or were last time I checked, who knows now). You don't need a SCR. I've made them with contactors or mercury relays and surplus coils from electric duct heaters. I wouldn't obsess about heat treating the dies. You are probably fine with the dies as is as long as they have been adequately tempered after the welding. I've heard bad things about misaligned air cylinders and power hammer rams/tups. Hopefully you have a linkage that will accommodate a bit of misalignment and vibration.

Sounds like you are on a good path. Unfortunately I'm not either a professional welder or a power hammer maker, so I can't really speak with authority about proper die welding and heat treatment procedures. I was just making suggestions based on vague memories of conversations with actual professional welders. I urge you to do your own research regarding the welding of large 4140 sections to mild. What I have seen is recommendations for preheating, use of low hydrogen electrodes and post heat treatment to relieve stress. Depending on how the billet was supplied, you may even want to fully heat treat the die and temper it afterwards (I am not familiar with flame hardening surface heat treatment, so I can't really comment there). If it were me, I would temper pretty high (650+). That being said, I have worked in a shop where the owner used mild steel dies that had been super quenched in a hammer significantly larger than yours. He even used them for some cold forging, and mentioned that they lasted years for him. I guess the worst that can happen is that the dies deform early and you have to make another set. What I wouldn't want to see is a weld fail in a HAZ zone and send a sharp piece shooting out.

Bolt on dies will certainly work. I was afraid that you were centering the bolt under the die itself. On the side is certainly better, particularly if you do both sides. If you make oval holes in your die "flanges" you will get some alignment correction ability. Those welds will be regularly stressed, so make sure you use the right rods and get really good penetration. If the dies are medium or high carbon you may need to temper the welds. I recommend relieving the corners on the long side of the dies to at least a 1/8" radius.

From a small amount of research it appears that there are a number of folks in the same boat. I also saw one post indicating that someone who had ordered their forge in early December finally got it delivered recently. I think there have been significant upheavals, but the company is still trying to honor their commitments. However, based on this level of service I would consider alternatives. One major selling point for their forges was the support for re-lining kits. If I had to order one I would certainly include a relining kit with the original order since all gas forges will almost definitely need to be relined eventually. I found the following explanation post online as well (presumably from February of this year):

Well you are certainly making progress, when weather and the dogs allow... I'm a little confused about your planned hammer die mounting. Are you planning on putting a threaded post on the non-contact side of the die and locking them to the hammer by screwing it down to the hammer anvil and tup? I think there may be a number of issues associated with that strategy: No easy way to align the dies No easy way to "lock" the connection If hammer vibrations loosen the attachment, and you make one more solid strike, you will bork up the threads and have a lot of trouble ever getting it apart again. Nothing wrong with being innovative, just don't ignore lessons learned by the previous manufacturers of power hammers.

Nice, subtle April's fool. Good one John.

Thought you were over in Europe where anvils are plentiful and cheap.

I've not played with charcoal much, but as I understand it as a "natural" material the quality can vary pretty widely. Might be an issue for you as well. Do be careful about using conventional red bricks for your forge. Might not be an issue for charcoal, but I would be worried about spalling at higher temperatures.

Based on the radial impeller configuration, that is a relatively high pressure blower, not a high volume flowrate. At 30 HP, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been used in an industrial setting for dust extraction from a large wood shop or the like. I do use a similar configured blower for my forge, but it is only 1/2 HP (and is still rather overpowered - but I had it handy).