bigfootnampa

Because the heat is pretty low when tinning the flux can be pretty soft. I have had good luck with the wax type plumbers fluxes. Plumbing solders are mostly tin as they are now mostly made lead free. Some plumbing suppliers will carry bar solder which should work fine for tinning bowls (make sure it is the lead free type though... roofers still use solders with lead in it).

I was given a new forge as a Christmas present and ordered one from Mike Tanner. I finally got it set up and lit the first fire in it yesterday. I had been working on a little portable forge previously and had been feeling limited when trying to forge larger pieces of metal. I was very impressed with the new forge! I did some of the projects that I had set aside as too time consuming before and also some other small things. I was more pleased than I had expected by the increased ease of heating and forging. The blast control was amazingly sensitive and also added an unexpected dividend of efficiency. It was a BLAST to operate! I did allow myself to be distracted for a few moments and had some minor burning of irons but caught it just in time to save everything (this was mostly due to having started the fire with all new coal and increased heat levels as the coal converted to coke caught me off guard).

This forge was a lot of fun to work with and more than fulfilled my expectations! My thanks to Mike for making a nice product and being a pleasure to do business with! I hope you sell a lot of these Mike!

Here in Missouri there has been a resurgence in branding cattle as the ear tags are easily clipped off by rustlers. The resurgence in branding has been fueled by a resurgence in rustling... they have targeted cattle in remote pastures and pens... theories circulate that they may be using airplanes as spotting vehicles. The problem seems fairly large and quite likely involves professional criminals.

Everybody here who is making filet knives is making them too wide! When you have ground that blade down to about 1/3 of it's present width it will be about right. You cannot have the proper spring in an inch wide blade. This is currently a boning knife... not right for filetting. I don't mean to be mean but I have caught and filetted a whole lotta fishes and I would have a lotta trouble with that knife. For less experienced filetters it would be even harder to work with. My old mentor (Ted Trueblood) preferred to use a regular butchers boning knife that was many years old and ground down to the proper profile from use and many sharpenings... I like the nordic mfrs versions though (sometimes I still will thin them a bit more on the belt sander). My advice is to trace out a Rapala profile and emulate it.

All stainless is not equal though... I have heard that some alloys will separate when heated leaving pockets of regular steel. The stuff I have worked doesn't have that problem though and forms a thin, tight, brownish/grey scale that I like the looks of. There are many alloys available and they have widely varied properties. There have been some other threads here about this and it would be wise to search these out and read them for more specifics. The stainless I have worked was softer than mild steel and forged more into the dark red heat zones. I can't tell you what alloys though as I have bought it as bolts with unknown content.

OOOhh! OOOHHhh! I know! It's a wagon wheel!

The picture is not good enough to be definite but my best guess is a stone axe (NOT made of stone, for chipping stone). Twybills are normally much longer (on each end)
to reach into the mortises. It could also be a woodcarver's adze.

They appear to be mason's plugging chisels... used to remove bricks from a finished wall by chiseling the mortar around them out. They wear quickly and get too short to use for plugging but may still be useful for tuckpointing... most masons use grinders for that nowadays though.

You can buy asphalt cutback from pro paint stores (lotsa painters use it for staining). Really though I'd probably just mix in a little black artist's oil paint... the linseed will add significantly to the protective qualities of the mixture and the pigment will get it real black. Mortar colorant would work too, it's just powdered pigment... you should be able to get black mortar color at Lowes or HD.

I have torch welded copper and also used hard solders with it. Straight silver either fine or sterling will make a decent extra hard solder for copper. Copper oxidizes quickly so flux is essential and not after heating like you do with iron... you need flux on it when you start heating. I can't remember what flux I used but it's a commercial jewelers flux... not just borax.

I like it! To get the best from it turn a small burr upward on the cutting edge with a burnisher and then tilt it down in cutting mode (the burr corrects the cutting angle but will take a fine cut and NOT catch). I do all my standard parting tools this way, the diamond type is my favorite.

Buy the Fox unit! the Vanco is old and has solid backer all the way up... you'll want to use the unbacked areas a lot. The six inch unit is too wide for knives and such and the belts are too rigid also... you'll use the flex especially at the edges of the belts to excellent effect. You won't use the disc feature much but you'll get plenty of service from the 1" belt and the Fox unit won't seem underpowered when you use it... mostly you have to grind lightly anyway to avoid overheating the metal too quickly. You could make one but the Fox unit will be cheap for the years of fine service you'll get from it... you won't be sorry.

If you will hot seat the tangs (black heat... melted in rather than burned) or set them in epoxy, you will find the bolsters are not needed anyway... save perhaps on tools meant for heavy mallet driving. I misdoubt your son will ever miss the bolster.

Well the outcome of any such chisel-bolt encounter may well depend upon scale... I believe that I might easily snap the head from a 1/4 inch bolt whereas I might need a torch if taking on a 3/4 inch bolt. If I had no torch I might just go the other way and use some refrigerant (used to be freon) to freeze the bolt so that my chisel would crack it right off. A blacksmith would think nothing of hot cutting a bolt of ANY grade! There are many ways to skin a cat! ANY tool is just junk metal in the hands of an ignorant user. Conversely, a skilled craftsman can make some pretty humble tools to sing an impressive chorus!

Sabre; I keep a package of split rings handy and install one BEFORE bending my leaf stem closed. That way the fob is permanently attached. Keep the fit loose so that the split ring can slide around as keys are added or removed.

The best use I've made of them so far is as nail headers. Chop them off about an inch and a quarter below the head with a cut-off wheel in a grinder and then wrap a rod just below the head... heat to bright red and flip the cut end up on the anvil (kinda roll it so the rod stays in place) then pound with a big hammer to upset the shaft and trap the rod. Voila! You have a nail header ready to drill and drift. I like to weld my rod tight with the mig so that it doesn't rattle in use at this point too. The crown of the spike head makes a good surface for the top of the header but it flattens a bit from the vigorous upsetting, so I reshape it a bit with a 36 grit flap disc.

PS: Once you get a header or two made you can start on the nails... and use those to make lotsa stuff. I just made a nice key rack with nails as pegs for the key rings. I like the heads kinda biggish for these so take a heat after tapering and notching so that you can get a nice big head flattened and shaped. I'd take a pic but it's already wrapped... so after christmas.

For outdoor projects I have heated the heads of stainless screws and brushed them with brass to get a bronzed look that matches my metal. I like the oval heads best.

On the surface it seems to me as though this case hardening might offer neat potential for very thin/narrow blades such as used by detail carvers. For some that I know the blades resemble tiny needles more than they do toothpicks. I wonder whether the process could be tuned to allow these blades to survive the process though.

I admit that I have been making blades that tend in that direction lately and they are AMAZINGLY EFFECTIVE! Of course I have been using pretty good junkyard steel to begin with. My blades still look like large roughing blades compared to the most delicate ones I have seen but they are much finer than any being sold through regular suppliers. It is kind of shocking to use such small knives to remove so much wood so fast and with so little effort. The tiny cross-section of the blades seems to reduce the force required to make the cuts to near insignificance... even in very hard woods.

It just seems that for thin small items the depth of case hardening would be relatively insignificant as they could be hardened clear through and they are not suitable for any heavy grinding anyway. Take any significant material off of one of these blades and you'd have nothing left.

Jayco;

I do lots of handling and I have found that I usually need the cross wedges to get them thoroughly tight. Cross wedging with steel is much easier than using wood and also gets them tighter, I think. Of course I do the first set of wedges in wood.

I make my steel wedges from HR rod (usually 1/4"). I forge them flat and tapering and then cut the top off with a stub of round rod left for hammering. When they are set tightly I chop the little round drive buttons off with a cut-off wheel in my 4 1/2" grinder. I like to fuller the taper with the edge of my hammer so that I get some lttle ridges that help to keep the wedge from backing out. Whenever I encounter looseness (rarely nowadays) I will either add a wedge or tap the handle further into the head and then deepen the set of the wedges with a ball peen end . I have some awesome glues... I think far better than sikaflex... but I have seen them fail anyway. Proper wedging is hard to beat!

I used a small piece of an Oldham hollow ground planer blade to make a carving knife years ago. To this day I have not experienced any other blade that will hold an edge through so many months of carving. I carve more now and sharpen or hone it four or five times a year... I used to use it less and only sharpened about twice a year. It is very fine steel. I hardened it (cherry red and oil quenched) and then cleaned and tempered to straw at the edge (purple at the spine) by using a very tiny flame from a propane torch and taking an hour (or so it seemed) to gently heat at the blade's spine until the colors ran to the edge.

Well I bought a 2" belt sander/ 6" disc sander combo from sears for about $100 and that seems to beat this deal. I understand that they have discontinued selling them now though. I use mine a lot and really like it. The disc sander part is expendable though, I never use mine. The belt is great for all types of shaping/beveling/sharpening projects.

They look nice but personally I would be loath to use cocobolo for handles. Cocobolo is one of the most toxic wood species and commonly causes allergic reactions. That's a shame as it is so very pretty. I read about a flute maker who brought a whole logs worth of billets back to NYC when he came home from a Cuban vacation. The first flute he made ruined the career of a promising young flutist... he had such a bad reaction that he had to give up flute playing altogether! After that the flute turner made police nightsticks of the rest of his expensive cocobolo log!

All of the rosewood species are prone to cause allergies but cocobolo is particularly likely to do so.

I like to handle my marlinspikes. Here are some that I have made. I don't usually need an eye for the ropes that I work with here on the farm. Real sailors might need to work much larger lines. About 3/4" manila is as heavy as I use.

I think you got it too hot mainly. I've had that too.

Hauser & Miller here in Saint Louis is a leading national dealer. I've been very happy with their service and pricing too.

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