TwistedCustoms

Anvils are too heavy a subject to make light of

Hard to beat a Stihl. I still have an old Stihl Farm Boss my dad bought in 1970. Still runs great. Not as fast as the track hoe though! I look forward to seeing more as it comes together!

Thomas,I bought the complete set, seven or eight of them all boxed together last year and put them up for my nephew. He's four and not quite ready to sit still for a feature length film but when he's ready I'll watch them with him. I haven't seen them but I'm not judging mind you! I re-watch LOTR and The Hobbit every couple of months since they came out :-) MC Hammer, I'm a longtime fan of Roy Underhill! Best thing on PBS!

I routinely estimate the amount of time I can allow a clothing fire to burn unchecked so I can keep from loosing a heat or continue a grinding operation! I usually get the fire out before I smell burning flesh but all my shop cloths have a distinct post apocalyptic look about them. Some evenings I have to run in the grocery store before I clean up and change clothes. The ladies who work in there must think I just crawled out of a house fire!

I had to look that one up and I'm still not sure.....Harry Potter reference?

Tupelo Egypt or Tupelo Mississippi? Since I'm in Dixie probably the later.

Hey, when you're sixteen years old and that's how everyone on the job pronounces it you take it for granted! I was always pretty good with angles and reading prints so by the time I joined the Army I already had several years of building dormers, cutting rafters for hip roofs and yes, building tupelos :-)

Me too! I was a collector of 18th and 19th century carpenters tools long before I got interested in forging so I have amassed some interesting tidbits connected with the use of lots of them. Some of my favorites are "regional names" of tools. In some parts of the US that is called a carpenters hatchet and people look at you funny if you ask if they have any half-hatchets for sale. Thomas I can relate to the jam/jamb mix up. A lot of the tools and building techniques I was introduced to as a young man were taught "word of mouth" on the job leaving me at the mercy of the regional dialect of my upbringing. We built "tupelos" on top of barns for years before I found out they were cupolas!

Thanks Frosty, I'm not familiar with that one but I like the name! Granted. I consider it general duty because it covers most of my production but my statement was not an accurate generalization.

"real heat treat oil" could be taken to mean a specified brand or formulation as specified by a manufacturer for a specific alloy which information would be listed in the published heat treat data for a given alloy. Or it could mean a general duty quenchant such as Parks 50. For most hobby smiths who aren't doing precision heat treat exactly to manufactures specs we can get good, repeatable results with food based oils like canola, vegetable oil or peanut oil. All of which are "real" quench oils as long as they cool slower than water. To maximize the potential benefits of a higher grade of steel you would need to know the viscosity, cooling rate, boiling point, flash point, ideal oil temp, all of which is pretty much meaningless if you are then going to toss your hardened work into a thirty dollar toaster oven or temper by eye. More sophisticated alloys need tighter controls at every step to maximize their hypothetical potential. For simple steels and some low alloys water and canola oil will see us through.

Welcome Freddy. You are smack in the middle of oil country and you are surrounded by good, inexpensive forging material! Every pipe yard in West Texas has about a million feet of "sucker rod" that makes great tooling and can be had for cheep! Ask around till you find someone who works on land rigs or hauls pipe and your metal scrounging worries will be over! If you're not familiar with sucker rod ask around. There is such a surplus of it that lots of fences in Tx are made out of it. I haven't been out that way since the early 90s but Midland Odessa should still be a blacksmiths dream as far as materials go. Hot but low humidity and lots of steel! Half way between Cowtown and El Paso, man I used to hate that drive!

Have you been able to find a makers mark? I don't see any pitting so if there is a stamp you should be able to find it. I have examples of the half-hatched marked, Plumb, Stanley, Kelly Tru-Temper, Vaughn, Crafstman, Shepleighs Hardware, and a few with no name but stamped "Spain" Vaughn is still making them in the US and some of the other brands are still around but are now imports which are a pale shadow of what they used to be in terms of quality, The US made Vaughn version is still top notch. That style hatchet was seen on job sites much more often before the widespread use of laminated sheeting. Before plywood and particle board stud walls were wind braced with diagonal strips of 1x4" set flush into the studs and then covered with ship lap siding. Since the wind bracing was being covered the notches didn't have to be very clean and to save time the framers would hack the pockets into the studs with those hatchets giving rise to the somewhat derogatory term, "you really did a hatchet job on that" meaning ill fitting or imprecise joinery resembling the old wind brace pockets.

What JHCC said, there's plenty of info on site about claying. Those cast iron pans weren't meant to have the fire sit directly on them but most often when the forges turn up the last clay that was installed has been busted up and dumped out so you never see them ready to work. Clay is a consumable and has to be done periodically. If done well and the forge doesn't get moved often a clay job can last for years. If heavy material is dropped in the pan it can crack the clay lining and cause it to need replacing sooner. Search for "claying a fire pan/iforgeiron" on an off site search engine such as google and you should get results for how to.

Searching "rivet forge" will bring up lots of images. Monetary value is whatever anyone is willing to pay but I would say that if the blower works flawlessly and there are no cracked castings anywhere then $100.00 USD would be the absolute top end. I have picked them up for anywhere between $10.00 and $50.00 depending on condition and after a little TLC in the form of disassembling, greasing/oiling, sometimes repairing legs or feet that have rusted away and claying the fire pan and then re-sold them for $100-$125. Good little starter forges or better yet good for demos where weight of equipment makes them easier to lug in and out of craft fairs. PS it looks like you will need a leather link belt to drive that fan. Harbor Freight sells them and some co ops and feed stores might have them. Figure in another $30 for the correct type of belt for that forge or make your own if you happen to already have some veg tan saddle skirting on hand.

Thanks for that, great article and a very cool anvil! I also like the notion of forging underground. Very Dwarven.

Shawn, it mostly depends on the type of steel and whether you want robust tongs or gracile. Also whether or not you will be using a power hammer, press or hand hammer. I have made tongs for holding 1 1/2" square stock from 5/8" round 5160. If I were going to use mild I would want them to be a lot beefier and in that case I might start with 3/4" square stock. The 1045 water hardening you mention should be plenty tough so you can afford to trim weight where you can. 1 1/4" to 1 1/2" is way more than enough material and if you are hand hammer will give you a bit of a workout!

Half tongs are for holding half-hatchets ;-)

Nice! I have that exact same mini fridge in my shop. He must have got tired of defrosting the itty bitty freezer ;-) Maybe some jokester epoxied it shut with all his Lone Star inside! I love those bush swords!

As with all mystery metal you wont know until you try. I can tell you that I have gotten the same results enough times that my go to for those projects is 1) water quench 2) draw the whole thing to straw. I temper using drifts in the eye which pretty much guarantees the eye will be drawn back further than the cutting edge by the time straw runs out to the edge which should make it stand up to any kind of impact forces you can generate with a 14" handle. If you want to remove all guess work just scrounge up some known water hardening steel or an alloy like 5160 that will oil harden and be easy to temper. The only advantage to using a hatchet to make a hatchet is the eye is already there but after you punch and drift a couple you will see that it's not a big deal to do. Wrapping and welding isn't too hard either but like I said, I have done what you're asking about. If you want to be double safe you could try oil quenching first but I haven't yet had a factory made head like that crack in water. I don't make hawks out of them but ball peen hammer heads are just a couple of heats away from becoming handy hot cuts. I've done a bunch of those in water quench with names like Kelly, Craftsman, Vaughn, Stanley. I don't know but I would be surprised if the prolific makers used different alloys for all the different striking tools they made. They could have, but I doubt it. A cast steel ball peen Stanley is probably the same alloy as a cast steel Stanley hatchet. edit... cast steel or drop forged as the case may be!

That pair of tongs looks very much like my first pair! Serviceable comes first, everything else comes with repetition! If you're making mild tongs keep them beefy. If you get ready for some light weight tongs which are much more comfortable to work with, make them from 5160/aka coil springs. You can draw the reins out much thinner and they will still take lots of abuse. They wont hold up to heating and quenching so when you make a nice pair of higher carbon, tougher steel, keep them out of the quench pail! The nice thing about mild is that they wont harden so you can use them to cool nails quickly or a million other things with no worries of getting them brittle. If you're anxious to make another pair try a pair of bolt tongs. Very handy! If you make them to hold 5/8'' stock you can adjust the rein angle so they will grip 1/2", 5/8", and 3/4" round or square stock. Six tongs for the effort of one! My most used tongs are 1) fire tongs (very similar to your first pair) 2) 5/8" bolt tongs, 3) wolf jaw tongs, 4) single and double pick-up Once you get three or four basic pair that do most of your work start refining the designs to include offset jaws for gripping the center of longer sections. You may also like using a set of punch tongs. I do all my punching/slitting using tongs that are made to hold my punches at right angles (keeps my hand from hovering above the hot work) Then you will have an excuse to make a set of punches for use with the punch tongs! You can make the punches shorter because you don't need room to wrap your hand around the punch. I have over 20 punches in a .30 call ammo can that weigh about as much as five or six of my hand punches because the tong punches only need to be about four inches long. All in all your first pair look good. Keep at it and you will be amazed at how much easier the second, third and so on become. If you haven't done already, bring the jaws up to forging heat and grip the stock you intend to use them with the most. While holding that stock lay one jaw on the anvil and give the top jaw light taps to form the jaws exactly to the size stock you will be using them with. When they cool you should have a very secure grip with that stock.

Mild will work fine and you don't have to heat it to peen the head onto the pin. I use heat and a rivet heading tool to put a nice head on one end of the rivet and then cold cut the shank to length. Make a dozen or so at a time and put up some extras in a cup, then when you need one set it in the pieces to be joined and cold peen the head with a ball peen hammer. As a general rule I leave the length exposed to peen equal to the diameter of the rivet, ie 1/4" length for 1/4" round etc. When your tongs start getting a little sloppy, and they will with use, just set the rivet on the anvil and give the head a pop with the hammer to tighten them back up.

Flawless as always. Thank you for sharing the tip in one of your previous posts about how you achieve the effect with the gun blue fading into the silver. It's deceptively simple but the result is "ghostly" and mysterious!

Beautiful work, truly outstanding!

Cost and efficiency are relative. How many pieces approx. the size of your elephant are you producing? One a month, two hundred a week? The methods you have eliminated based on cost are high on the list for efficient volume and are going to cost less and give better results in the long run. Acid bath followed by dip priming would be the most efficient but only at the level of small scale manufacturing. If your only producing one or two pieces a month you aren't likely to improve on hand sanding and spray cans. If you go the chemical coloring or heat/flame coloring rout you will still have to seal the piece with a clear coat, lacquer or polyurethane. If not you will lose your patina in short order and clear coating may cost as much as primer and color paint. One other thing to consider. As an artist, at what point do you consider your artistic expression to be over. What I mean is, do you need to control every step of every process in order for this to be "your baby", or when your done with the form work could you hand it over to someone else and still call it your own. The reason I mention this is because if you produce enough volume to make it worth someone's time, but not enough to invest in your own powder coat booth or spray booth then taking it to someone else may be the way to go. An auto body shop with a spray booth could be an option. It will be easier to talk to someone in a small auto body shop than a huge manufacturing facility that probably wont help you anyway. The small business owner who needs to stay busy to make the payments on his own newly purchased equipment could be your friend. If it works out you can say "make the elephant green and the cow purple" and then walk away. You maintain artistic control without the headaches. I'm not trying to discourage your efforts to learn for yourself the best ways to do this. If it is art for arts sake then by all means, bleed for your art! If money is involved in the decision making process as you stated in your post then concessions must be made. Good luck! Good looking elephant too!!!

Nail headers are nice beginner projects too!. If you don't already have a tapered square punch making a nail header is a good excuse to make the punch! In a few hours you can have yourself a new hot cut, new square punch or two or three and a nail header. And a hand full of really cool square nails and none of it requires more than the most basic steps of forging. I have always thought tongs are good beginner projects, a lot of smiths disagree, but square punches, nail headers and nails are much easier than tongs! Getting fast at making nails is another story!