JHCC

How often do we have to say it: CHARCOAL DOESN'T NEED THAT MUCH AIR!!!

Welcome aboard! If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST!!!

Depends entirely on the kind of motor you have running the blower. I have a variac (variable transformer) controlling the speed on my own blower, but that only works on universal motors (the kind with brushes). Take a look at some of the other threads on controlling the speed of your blower; those will give you an idea of some of the issues and possibilities.

My neighbor across the way (the one who’s moving and gave me a 50 gallon trashcan full of coal) stopped by to give me this nice little propane torch setup:

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

It will cut!

My Pontic is in the Attic.

Well, obviously this is a complicated problem with many variables. What I'm trying to do with these drawings is isolate out the extraneous factors and focus solely on one variable at a time.

If you don't plan on selling it, it's priceless!

And yet, you allow me in....

Okay, it sounds like we're all back on track. Let's get back to the subject at hand. Jennifer, do you think my last set of drawings shows what you were trying to describe about "smearing" the metal?

More likely what happened to them when they came back down!

Oh, please; let's not even go there.

There's an interesting scene in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath where Tom Joad and Jim Casy do a field re-babbitting of a broken connecting rod bearing.

And bears.

My college classmate Laura (also a classmate of the NASA wizard Paul) is a patent lawyer in DC and occasionally regales us with tales of clueless clients trying to take shortcuts for the sake of saving a few pennies, and of how much it costs them in the end. I think my favorite was the client who said, "Oh, I don't need to do a search for prior art; I just know that this is an original idea!" And many tens of thousands of dollars later....

Plenty of cranks, though....

And if you have a source for stainless steel kegs, save one for use as a non-rusting slack tub.

Yes, a couple of hammers, some split-rein "universal" tongs, and a new hot-cut.

Not sure what your plans are for the keg, but please read the threads about the JABOD forges before you proceed further.

Dangerous curves ahead! That's beautiful, Steve. Thanks for showing us.

Looks decent, Hans; looking forward to seeing more photos. 150 lbs is a good size, too. Do those holes (pritchel & hardy) go all the way through?

Well, I’m going to give it a shot. Imagine for a moment that the workpiece is made up of many flexible rods standing on end, as in (1) in the drawing below. If you hit straight down as in (2), those rods will buckle outwards from the center, pushing the material out equally on all sides. If you strike an angled blow (hammer face parallel to the workpiece) as in (3), those rods will all get deformed in the same direction. This pushes the material out in the direction of the hammer blow. Make sense?

Inter-Library Loan. If your library doesn’t have a book and another library does and is willing to loan it out, they will send it to your library. You check it out and return it there.

Once again, I didn’t get a chance to fire up the forge this evening. However, I did get into the shop and made something for the linkage on the treadle hammer. I’ve been playing around with this idea in my head for a while, so I’m pleased that it seems to work fairly well. As noted before, unhooking the chain that connects the arm to the treadle lets the hammer swing up and out of the way, giving me the clearance needed for hand hammering. Pulling the head down and re-connecting the chain lets me switch back to treadle hammering. Being able to switch back and forth easily is one of the greatest things about this rig, so I wanted to make the process a little bit easier. The solution is this adjustable linkage, shown here in the unlatched position: And here it is closed: So basically, all you have to do is pull down the head, pull down the lever to shorten the distance between the ends of the two chains, and hook the ends of the lever to keep the thing together. To lengthen the linkage, reverse. The lever is made from about three feet of garage door torsion spring, straightened, normalized, and bent cold. If this proof-of-concept works well, I’ll forge a nicer looking one from another section (although I think it was either Frosty or ThomasPowers who said there’s nothing so permanent as a temporary solution).