JHCC

Hey, man; he opened the door.

True enough.

Umm...that would be "When I said "all", I suppose it was an exaggeration. What I wrote and what I meant were different things. [...] I really need to learn to proofread what I write."

I hate one-post wonders.

I just lost my hat of a dozen years, transferring between planes at Newark (NJ) airport last Friday. A lot of miles, a lot of memories. However, its replacement arrived yesterday. Time to put some miles on this one.

@ThomasPowers can correct me on this, but the two basic options are to push the metal out, like blowing a bubble (this is called "sinking") and to bring the sides up and upset them onto themselves as described above (this is called "raising"). In the first method, the rim stays the same as its original thickness and circumference, but the bottom gets thinner. In the second, the circumference gets smaller and the edges get thicker, but the bottom keeps its original thickness.

In the court of Albert the Great?

Surely that's no fluke.

All trees have sap -- the living ones, at least. (And yes, I know you can make syrup from birch sap.)

Better than alone and palely loitering.

True, that.

Amen to that. I wasn't sufficiently scrupulous about hearing protection back when I was a cabinetmaker, and I suspect that's why I get tinnitus now.

Would that make me a holey tarrier?

All part of my quest for greater holey-ness.

Says the man with the biggest post count of any of us....

I'm trying not to be boring.

I should have dug deeper.

Don't make a mountain out of a molehill.

Think like an archaeologist and go gently. Stratigraphy is your friend.

If you start out gently with the wire cup, it'll remove the rust from the outer surface before it gets down into the recesses of what's left of the stamping. That will create some contrast and make the stamping easier to read.

What Latticino said is all true. I would add that the open joint (presumably to allow longer stock to pass through the center) is interesting, but potentially problematic. Two riveted joints is twice as many mechanisms to get jammed. Most current designs for holding longer stock have some kind of offset, so that you can just grab where you need to grab, without having to thread the tongs over the length of the rod. I like Latticino's idea of the detachable 3-axis clamp to mount in the hardy. For that, I'd suggest some kind of quick-release that clamps onto a specific spot on the reins (one without any protruding lugs or sharp corners to mess with your tong hand when not in use) for fast and positive locking. One advantage of that would be the ability to put the tongs in exactly the same spot on the anvil for multiple heats, without having to reposition every time.

Diameter.

Now you're getting it! Stay on the right side of the punsters, and you won't be left in the dust!

"Southpaw" is an American colloquialism, dating to the early 19th century. "Sinister" comes from the Latin for "left" (as opposed to "dexter", right; from which we get "dexterous" and "dexterity") by way of Old French senestre, sinistre.

Rowan Taylor uses a very similar hardy in his chainmaking video (starting at about the 3:20 mark):