JHCC

The wire -- 1/8" round, a thousand and one uses.

Man, you are golden. Mount it up, polish it up a bit with a flap wheel or sanding disk, and get to work!

Not the best haul of election signs, alas. Most had been collected quickly, presumably for use in future campaigns. I did pick up a few that had been posted on public land and which I therefore considered fair game. A couple of friends let me have theirs as well.

Welcome aboard! Nice to see someone from Cornwall, the land of my ancestors!

More VHF, actually.

Not necessarily. "Minutiae are the badges" would imply that each minutia is itself an individual badge, whereas "Minutiae are the badge" implies that minutiae collectively are one single badge. One could avoid the ambiguity by saying "An obsession with minutiae is the badge of the incompetent" (singular "obsession" takes singular "is"), which would also better convey the original writer's intent. However, since "Minutiae" is plural, it must take a plural verb when serving as the subject of the sentence. Or badgers, for that matter.

Josh, @Cavpilot2k put some photos on this comment in the "Show me your anvil" thread:

That should be "Minutiae ARE the badge of the incompetent."

I noticed that every time he said he was quitting (both in the video and in the comments), he always qualifies that as "quitting blacksmithing professionally". Does anyone know if he was smithing professionally before he took over the smithy in France?

Check out flea markets, junk shops, and scrapyards, which take a little more work, but are often much more affordable.

Can we get a close-up of the badge?

Ooh, pretty. Hey, want a bit of wrought iron for the butt cap? I've got some bits of ¼" x 1¼" bar that would work nicely.

Hey, no politics! I went to the doctor, who said, "You're sick." When I said I needed a second opinion, he said, "Okay, you're ugly too." This, precisely. To borrow a phrase from Emerson, this guy is slashing at the leaves rather than hacking at the root.

Any hotter, and you’ll be poaching your fish.

Jonah, unless you're specifically referencing something in an image that cannot be adequately described, you shouldn't include images in what you quote. We have members who still use dial-up, and it really eats up bandwidth and makes pages slow to load for them. Thanks.

Okay, here's the thing. When the air blast enters the fire, it provides oxygen to make it burn BUT it doesn't all get burned up at once. This means that you've got three layers to the fire: oxidizing, neutral, and reducing. In the oxidizing layer at the bottom of the fire, you've got a lot of hot unburned oxygen just waiting to grab onto a piece of hot steel and turn it into scale. In the neutral layer in the center of the fire, all the excess oxygen is burned up, so it's just hot. In the reducing layer at the top of the fire, there's not quite as much oxygen as you need to sustain combustion, so it's not quite as hot as you want. TL:DR = The top and bottom layers of the fire won't heat your workpiece efficiently, and the bottom layer will increase scaling. Stick your workpiece straight in from the side, into the center of the fireball, thus: (Note that this shows a bituminous fire with its layers of coke, but the same principle applies.)

If you have the tang go all the way through the butt cap and peened over, you can do some fun stuff with it as decoration. For example, check out this offering from @templehound:

You can also get dust/grit/gunge in the charging port and speaker jack. A ziplock sandwich bag is another good defense.

Hmm...gives me an idea for a new aphorism: "As useful as a three-legged caltrop!"

I stopped by the most pathetic looking little flea market in Granville, OH a few months ago and got a really nice little pair of flat-bit tongs (and a cheapo pair of Chinese vise-grip knockoffs) for five bucks. Just gotta keep your eyes open and keep moving if you don't see what you want.

You are pushing the coal horizontally, from outside the fire towards the middle. Do this regularly and incrementally, so that the fire is constantly being replenished from the outside, rather than letting it die down too much (hollow out) and trying to rebuild it dramatically all at once. So, when you put your workpiece back in the fire, push a little more coal in from around the outside of the fireball, rake a little cooked coal over the top to keep the fire black, and add some fresh coal around the outside. Rinse, repeat.

Yes a long time ago lol. If memory serves, they tried to fill hollow steel spheres with concrete, but found that they absorbed too much energy without transferring it to their neighbors. Possible lesson for those considering concrete anvil stands....

I had the reverse problem when I was making my Andy hammer out of rebar: I'd been quenching the part I was holding during forging, and inadvertently hardened a spot of high-carbon -- which then cracked in two the first time I hit something with it.

The show itself, or just the scripts? Yakov Smirnoff used to tell the joke, "An American told me he stopped smoking cold turkey. I asked him, What do you smoke now -- ham?" Wouldn't that make you "Cavpilot10k"?