JHCC

Welcome to IFI, Dave! If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST!!!

...to run away screaming?

Well, at some point I have to stop making tools and actually start making, you know, stuff.

I've been watching a series of YouTube videos about welding metallurgy, and the lecturer (Thomas Eagar of MIT) has some very interesting things to say about the changes in steel composition over the years, even within a single ASTM standard. It got me thinking that a lot of these older processes (like the whole folding-and-welding to make a consistent billet of tamahagane) may well have had some value with older, less consistent materials, but (A) people didn't always know why a particular process worked (or seemed to work) and (B) there's a natural reluctance to give up the role of the expert when your expertise is no longer relevant -- or indeed to admit that the expertise of the person who taught you may no longer be relevant, if your sense of your own competence and worth is derived from the unquestioned value of their teaching.

The mold for the block got coated in (rather old, stale, and partially dried out) Crisco; the crayons got a coat of cooking spray. They did NOT want to come out at all, and I ended up having to drill them out. There is probably some wax that got pushed into the plenum, but I think that was what the white smoke coming out of the T fitting was. That hasn't shown up for the last burn or two.

I've also got a good bit of leftover kaowool, with which I plan to line the toaster oven I use for tempering.

I made one from a jackhammer bit, using the collar as the shoulder. Very handy, indeed!

It certainly made the mixing a lot easier and a lot less messy. As for the wrinkles, shaking all the mixed refractory down to the end of the bag and wrapping it up around itself pretty tightly helped a lot with that. The "foamed bottom with skim coat" idea is really interesting. I had thought about using some more of the extra Kastolite to make "bricks" to use as doors for the forge, and I think this might be worth a try. (Or I might just get some firebricks. Who knows?)

Depending on the manufacturer. sawyers's anvils were often made harder than smiths' anvils, because tuning a sawblade was a much gentler procedure than hot-forging a thicker workpiece. Not to say that you can't smith on one, but you do need to be aware of the greater risk of chipping an edge with a mis-hit.

As noted above, much depends on the fuel. Forge fires of bituminous coal, charcoal, wood, and corn generally are able to sustain themselves without a constant supply of air, so you have a choice. Anthracite, on the other hand, Will Go Out if it doesn't have a steady stream of air at all times. My own forge setup has an electric blower on a variable transformer (variac) that adjusts the speed. If I'm burning anthracite, that's all I need. If I'm burning bituminous (especially on smaller jobs, as Kevin Olson notes above), I'll add a "deadman" switch to the electric supply to the blower, so that it only runs in I'm standing on the pedal. As ThomasPowers says, it saves a lot of fuel to only run the fire when you have to.

Well, I can always revisit it in a month or two -- however long it takes the excess calcite to burn out -- and retune the burner as necessary.

No clue. I just had the idea pop into my head, and I wanted to see if it would work.

Burning outside the forge:

Fired the Kastolite “tile” in the forge. All done (still warm).

I don't know if that's an exclusive usage; I think it may simply mean "steel", but is applied to the bloom as such. I am, however, not a Japanese linguist; this is just from some googling around.

Dan Bance, welcome to IFI! If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST!!!

I think the Japanese word for the bloom is "kera".

Having a blade come out of the quench as a pretzel isn't a bad thing. If I mess up a blade that badly, I'm going to be hungry!

I used Kastolite because that’s what I had, but Latticino (to whom I defer in all matters refractory) has strong opinions in favor of Mizzou. I will leave it to him to explain why

My coal forge is just inside the door of my garage, and I have a removable flue on wheels that gets rolled out the door when I'm forging. Great solution for when you can't put in a permanent stack.

My wife's grandfather survived the North Atlantic convoys in WWII, was shot, stabbed, survived cancer twice, survived heart attacks, strokes, and a career as a long-haul trucker. Drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney. Coffee was his lifeblood. The joke in the family was, "God don't want him, and the devil ain't ready!" Good to see you hanging in there, Ted!

Unwrapped the Kastolite “tile” for the forge floor:

Generally speaking, tongs are NOT a beginner project, and we don't recommend people attempting them until they've got a good bit more experience with the fundamentals. One significant exception is these:

To quote Peter Parkinson in The Artist Blacksmith, "Because the thickness of the work forged between the hammer head and the anvil will vary, the drive to the hammer head cannot be a solid mechanical linkage. There must be some give to the system. The two fundamental types of hammer solve this problem in different ways. One uses a spring system* between the motor drive and the hammer head, the other places the hammer head at the end of a piston, pushed up and down a cylinder by compressed air." *This can be either a Dupont linkage such one sees in Little Giant type hammers or a spring-loaded helve (of which the Abno mechanical hammer in Torbjörn Åhman's videos is a good example). This press as it stands has no such "give to the system" and would therefore tend to tear itself apart if it couldn't complete its full range of motion. I suppose one could theoretically introduce some mechanism into the drive train that would have the desired effect, but I don't really know what that might look like.

Welcome to IFI! If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST!!! There are lots of posts in this section about the comparative advantages and disadvantages of different fuels. Anthracite isn't the best option, but this page discusses how it can be done.