JHCC

Ah, the ongoing saga of @Lou L and his blowers! Glad this one is working out well.

Did the basic welding on a combination RR track anvil base/portable hole. Much still to be done, but alas, I’ve run out of welding wire. There will be an adapter to reduce the size of the hole to match the hardy hole in my anvil. Here is the underside of the top, before welding. As you can see, it’s made up from very heavy angle iron.

Why not cut the threaded sections off of the old U-bolt and weld them onto the new one?

A very nice anvil, and certainly one you could get good use out of. One thought, though: depending on how much you paid for it and how quickly you could turn it around, you might think about seeing if you could sell it at a profit to a collector and use the proceeds to get something larger, with a cleaner face, or otherwise preferable.

Told ya!

Here are the stems that fit into the hardy hole. One of them is a piece of angle iron; the other, a bit of flat bar that goes corner to corner. All very rough-and-ready. Pretty ready, but also pretty rough.

And after a little grinding and wire wheeling:

Nice. Did you harden and temper it, or just normalize?

Welded up some field-expedient swages out of scraps of pipe, rebar, plate, and angle iron. Still need grinding, but I think my welding is improving.

Nice job, Das!

You’re going to want a layer of adobe at least 2 inches thick covering the entire firebowl and the top surface of the forge. The rest of the space can be filled with sand, clay, or just basic dirt. The adobe should have a sand:clay ratio of somewhere between 2:1 and 3:1. Mix up your dry ingredients, and stir in enough water to moisten the entire batch. Let it sit for a while to give the clay time to absorb the moisture, and then mix it again. Pack it into your JABOD and let dry. Cat litter doesn’t need any extra grinding, if you give it enough water and time to hydrate properly.

In my casual perusal of Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, I usually see a mix Peter Wrights and Hay Buddens (Hays Budden?), with the occasional Fisher thrown in.

Please say a word for my friend Dave, who suffered a stroke while on a business trip in Colorado (he lives in Boston). His husband Eric is with him and the prospects for recovery look good, but prayers appreciated nonetheless. Dave is one of the smartest, most compassionate, and insightful people I know, and the thought of what this might do to his brain is just a bit much right now.

For now, let's stick to trying to convince people that Plaster-of-Paris and sand don't make a good refractory and that zinc and chrome platings shouldn't get burned off in a fire.

I've heard of tempering tongs, but "quenching tongs" (even as an unintended or unwanted effect) are new to me. Thanks, Frank.

Back in the '80s, someone was marketing the "Walk-A-Shrink", a cassette tape (remember those?) that you popped into your Walkman (remember those?) to play a deep reassuring voice saying, "Uh huh...uh huh...go on...right...and how did that make you feel?...right...tell me more...uh huh..." and so on. One thing computers are really good at is pattern analysis, and one area where pattern analysis is really, really important is reading EKGs. There was an article I read a little while back that described one of the first EKG-reading programs, which got tested against one of the best cardiologists in the business and came out far ahead.

This is a HORRIBLE idea, as has been discussed here numerous times. Hexavalent chromium is highly toxic, and even if you're not making yourself sick, you're risking the lives and health of everyone downwind. Would you want someone upwind of you putting something in the air that could give your kids lung cancer?

Added some more bed rail to the end of the cart to make a rack for hardy tools.

Not in the shop, but realized that the persistent irritation in my left eye was a grain of grinder grit stuck at the edge of the iris. Fortunately, it was not imbedded so deeply that I couldn’t get it out with some careful Q-tippage. Much better now.

My blower is annoyingly loud, so I have to wear ear protection whenever I forge. My ear defenders (20db nrr) have built-in speakers, so I get ear protection and tunes. I neglected my ear protection in my woodworking youth, and I’m paying for it with tinnitus now.

That's the moment you need to put things down and back slowly away from the anvil. Best case scenario: you mess up your workpiece. Worst case: property damage, injury, or death.

And Elizabeth Brim, whose work constantly blows my mind: http://www.elizabethbrim.com/

See, if you were going with solid fuel, you could use that workout to power your blower. By the way, if you still have the motor and controls, a number of folks here have used treadmill motors to power grinders, metal-cutting bandsaws, and the like.

Be very careful: the last thing you want is for your forge to run away from you.

If you get a meatpacking plant up to forging temperatures, you start to get spoilage.