RP Coyle

When soldering copper you have to clean it... tin it... and go slow in heating. It takes practice...but if you learned to weld, you sure as heck can lear to solder.

Nice try Chandler. I have done some sand casting, but always into an empty mold. I think part of your problem is that brass cools off pretty fast and because it had to burn through the foam, you got it solidified before it could flow in and fill the whole space and as John Newman says, you need to risers to feed in extra metal as it shrinks.

You definitly have a good eye for form Dominic, I think that once you lear some basic blacksmithing, you will really create some interesting things.

One of the best tutorials on bolt head tongs I have seen. Easy to follow, and just enough explaination. Keep up the good work

I kind of took a leaf out of the book of my old HS metal shop. I built a melt furnace for brass and bronze and I just put a fire brick cut to a 45 deg angle in front of the burner so that the flame was thrown upward towards the vent hole. The advantage is that instead of a limited diameter fire tube, you have a vertical flame from the vent hole that you can place any length or shape over. just like a conventional coal fire. Most gas forges I have seen are horizontal and like Frosty says, scroll work is limited by the diameter . I just got a two foot long section of 14 inch duct and lined it with fire brick and Kaowool and cut a whole in the side so the flame tube came through at the bottom kind of on a tangent. cut out a 14" steel flange with a 5" hole for the top and lined it with Kaowool underneath so that it fit the duct and had instant forge/foundry furnace. .

Sounds like this may the best way to go structurally and aesthetically. Do you have any software that you can use to render what it might look like? The idea sounds good but looking at your drawing all I could initially picture was “ironing board”

Nice work LastRonin. the roll handle looks way cool. The critial part will be whether the roll into the handle will bend.with use. The first trowel I made I welded a 3/8" round for the handle and it bent so I went to 1/2" and so far it has been fine. How much of a metal cross section do you get at the joint of the roll?

Good info... Ill have a go at it next time I am making trowls.

Not sure I see how this works Rashelle???

Thanks for the comments. No Mrobb...I cheated and just fired up the Miller. Too new and scared to try forge welding and there was not enough left on the shank to beat into a decent diameter insert into the handle. People are really impressed with the look of the center spine and it does add a lot of reinforcing. Thank's for the heads up Frosty... I will try like xxxx to keep my comments under control.

Here are a couple of trowels I made by inverting 1 1/2 " angle iron and drawing out the edges. Peened the xxxx out of it to make it look REALLY look hand forged.