NickOHH

10 hours ago, Buzzkill said:

Nice work Nick!

How are you holding the chunks of hot bar in place when you are making the original slits?  I've been thinking about trying to make a hammer or two, but without a helper I'm picturing hot metal dancing off the anvil with every strike since I haven't grown that third arm yet.  Did you build a hold down especially for this or am I missing something really simple here?

I came up with a simple solution, slightly flattend it on 4 sides to make it easier to hold with the tongs and to to sit flat on the anvil , then used a small hardy swage to keep it from moving around and helped keep the punch square. Worked great.

10 hours ago, ForgeMan32 said:

Punching hammer eyes alone is very tedious work. They look great and just think your swinging arm will be big as your leg before long .lol. hek it must already be if your forging hammers alone.

I'm gonna have to learn to swing left handed too so I don't get to lop sided, it did take so determination to punch but overall wasn't TOO bad.

2 hours ago, Crazy Ivan said:

Good work bud! You must have had an excellent lesson or two from a very talented and devilishly charming blacksmith to make those ;D lol. Keep em coming! 

Haha, yea something like that  told ya I was there to learn !

2 hours ago, Everything Mac said:

Awesome work Nick! Well done mate. 

Oddly enough I had a buddy come visit the other day and we had a crack at making some tools too. 

All the best 

Andy

 Thank ya! Let's see some of these tools y'all did!! 

39 minutes ago, Ethan the blacksmith said:

those look wonderful! do you have the assistance of a striker?

Thanks Ethan, getting the hang of em, no striker for these, just me, a and a 6 pound hammer, got my work out in.

i ground the first 2 yesterday and did the heat treating, after of course i forged a 1# cross peen. Then today i stepped it up a bit and cut off a peice of 1.75" 4140 that came home with us after visiting Rthibeau up in michigan, gotta put it on a scale still but should be right around 2.5#, Diagonal peen, gotta grind it and the cross peen before they get hardened and tempered. gonna have to get on some handles soon. 

nice drift, im after an axe drift soon, what kind of steel did you use for it?

Forged a couple of hammers today out of 1.25" torsion bar today, one straight peen and one ball peen, both come in around 1 pound, be good for Marcy, and good practice for me before i jump into some bigger ones. Pictures of the ball peen and after they are finished on the way, gonna grind and heat treat tomorrow afternoon. 

40 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

 

There is a reason to use the specific terms; a lot of folks use "heat treating" to mean hardening when it could refer to making it as soft as possible just as correctly.

Yea I know better , I should have read that one again before I hit submit. 

17 minutes ago, Steve Sells said:

no just Normalizing. annealing is long slow cool allowing grain growth. you have them backwards

No, I was just trying to figure out why annealing it was in the question , sounded like it should he wanted to he wanted to normalize not anneal it after forging, and was making sure I wasn't missing a reason to not skip normalizing it.

50 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

Nick you just said "Heat Treating after forging before heat treating?"  annealing is a heat treating process...

Sorry that was poorly phrased. Anneal before hardening, everything I saw on it was normalizing wasn't nessecary so couldn't it just be forged then hardend and tempered with good results?

34 minutes ago, EricJergensen said:

As Thomas said, to do h13 to spec will require a heat treating oven / furnace. Some people get results acceptable to them from skipping the anneal and doing the quench and temper by eye. Do also note that high alloy steels like this often have to be significantly above magnetic to harden. h13 is about 1900°F, i.e. several hundred degrees above magnetic. Do not forge below 1650°F. Actually, consider some other steel.

Anneal after forging before heat treating??

22 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

the air hardening steels usually need a computerized furnace with ramping controls to anneal which is why I was wondering about the ash process.  Heat cool in air and temper would be what I would be looking into and as I recall the draw temperature for tempering is quite high indeed!

Looks like tempering at 1000-1200 degrees f , pretty hot when your used to working simple steels.

Annealing for is something like let it cool no more than 50 degrees an hour.  Forge it, and use it, or forge, heat to orange and let it cool, maybe in front of a fan, no?? I tried to link an old thread I found, real quick using the search but it won't let me post it.

40 minutes ago, Crazy Ivan said:

If it makes you feel any better, I have had no trouble getting welds to stick and blend since your last visit. Iirc, you never stuck that weld though did you? ;D

No we didn't, that's how ya get the curse to stick so consider yourselves lucky!  That hammer head was trying to take you out though, maybe another sacrifice needs to made to Clincus.

9 minutes ago, Michael Cochran said:

Thanks for the replies, I wasn't quite sure that W1 is not the best choice. This weekend I'll swing by a local scrap yard that has accumulated several old vehicles and see what I can get for a reasonable price. So keep an eye for easily accessible sway bars, axles, and while I'm at it torsion bars. Can leaf springs be safely removed in the scrap yard? If so I might need to get some while I'm there. Not being a mechanic I'll have to do some looking to see how to go about pulling materials lol.

Leaves can be carefully removed using the oxy acetylene ratchet pretty easily. 

I would say go with something like s-7 or h13 , something tough, made for hot work, after all it will be seeing a lot of heat, my eye drifts are not but if I was buying stock for them which I soon will hopefully it will be one of them probably h13. No fun to work by hand but will be worth the effort.

1 hour ago, Kevin_Olson said:

If i drop something and it points towards the door its time to eat or get a cold beverage.  :-)

I like that one, no walls so it will always face the door ... I'm gonna have to stock up on beer and start dropping more lol! 

50 minutes ago, Daswulf said:

The first pushed overboard would take care of the second two.  

Hahahaha, very true, very true!

1 hour ago, Steve Sells said:

oops... you said HORSE shoe?  I better take down the 8 inch stiletto I have nailed up.  It is no wonder that lady thought I was nuts when I asked to buy her shoe for my shop ....

Lol 

Hammers are typically easier to dress and typically easier and cheaper to replace. 

3 hours ago, DSW said:

When I wanted to forge some top tools in class ( flatter, and set hammer) first thing my instructor set me to do was to take a piece of 1" round and draw out and taper it to form my drift. Working the 1" steel was certainly a lot easier than working the 2" piece of 4140 for the heads later on.

Yea that's a good way to warm up, first time with even 1" mild it seems hard... Then you try something actually tough to work. Once you know what to expect it's much easier, ya don't wear your self out in the beggining trying to get it goin.

2 hours ago, GoodOlEagle said:

If it is a Craftsman just take it back to sears and they should give you a new one.  my dad took a 25 year old drill in to get a new chuck for it and they just tossed it in the trash and gave him a new one in a case with everything. If they don't replace it they can have the parts dept. give you the bearing number

I didn't even think about that, don't know if they will still just replace power equiptment like there handtools but they are good about getting parts unless the maschine is real old .

You don't have the tooling to make the drift but you have enough to make something with the drift??

Even if it doesn't have a legible number you can measure inside bore , diameter , and width and find a bearing for it pretty cheap

Very cool das . Like the "giant" acorn for him.

16 hours ago, j.w.s. said:

Yup.. lol It's kinda like making sainthood.. except instead of 3 miracles, you need to utterly obliterate 3 peoples hopes and dreams

 

Oh well then you are qualified as a senior curmudgeon then im sure it has been atleast 3 people.

Alteast it's tied down, I once saw a guy fill his fill his truck bed with plywood and leave with the tailgate down and lose all but the bottom couple sheets down the road. I laughed at him pretty good when we got back to the job site, glad I was in front of him on the way back. 

Does that mean if you unsheath your sword more than twice your just playin with it?

That turned out nice das, good job, don't know how you see all these awesome sculptures in all that junk