jumbojak

I really like the design. How large was the drift for the handles? Also, nice and pointy too. The store bought pokers I've seen are always too blunt to be of much use. 

Edit: I just realized you probably used the horn for the handles. My anvil hasn't grown a horn yet, so I'm still in drift/bick mode...

Some from the ReStore (the punches, drill, one of the saws) others from  friends (another saw and the plane) plus a few sale items from Ace. At $3 that Wonder Bar was too good a deal to pass up. Now to resharpen the Disston saw, get the height adjustment on the plane freed up, and bang those punches into something useful. There are a few nail sets there as well which I think might work as eye punches without any additional work. We'll see if I get burned...

Wow, higher than here and I bet they didn't clean it up as nicely as the one I saw! Leaves me wondering what a step faced anvil would be used for. At least, if such a thing ever existed...

That looks like the "rare step faced blacksmith anvil" I saw on Craigslist about a week ago for $500. Someone bought it apparently...

A 55lb zinc anode? That would keep one heck of a crab pot in the water for a long time.

6 hours ago, George Geist said:

First thing you need to learn is to order BLACKSMITH coal.

Nut, rice, pea etc are indicative of the size of the pieces not the type.

Two main types are anthracite (hard coal) and bituminous (soft coal) TSC and every other feed or hardware store will inevitably sell you anthracite as that's what is used for home heating. It is a very poor choice for forging. Ask for blacksmith coal

you'll get bituminous. They'll know what you're talking about and what you need.

George

No, they really won't know what you're talking about. At least not at my local store. When I asked about them possibly stocking anthracite the guy looked at me and said he didn't know what that was. Fortunately regional demand has been great enough that my local store keeps it in stock now.

As to its suitability for forging I, and at least some others, can say it works very well. It's easy to light if you know what to do, burns clean with practically no smoke, and gets as hot as I could ever want a fire to be. This anthracite doesn't coke up and of course requires a constant air supply so you would be hard pressed to operate with a hand cranked blower or bellows.

For the cost and availability though, I'll make those tradeoffs any day of the week. Electric power for the blower works well enough and due to the low smoke output the lack of coking really isn't an issue. Quality bitumious coal is much more expensive in many places, so I use what's available. It gets the metal hot.

To the OP, I found that a mix of the nut and rice sizes works best out of the bag but if I only had one to choose from it'd be the rice. Some of the nut sized pieces can be nearly as big as your fist and it's nice not to worry too much about resizing. At least until I get my corn sheller up and running...

1 hour ago, MrDarkNebulah said:

I have a very similar anvil, except it is a cylinder. Any advice on a stand for it?

If you have access to a router and a large enough piece of timber you could trace the anvil on a piece of scrap, cut a circular hole, check for fit, and then use the router to remove a lip that fits your anvil almost perfectly into the timber. the same could be done by hand with a drill and chisels but it would be a long, tedious process with a lot of opportunity to accumulate error.

I've been working on rounding the taper I managed on a piece of two inch round to mount in my vice and use as a bick. Mind you, it isn't a very long taper - probably more closely akin to a hardy shank - but it should work for making a few bottle openers to hand out as penance for recent favors.

What's wrong Thomas? This is just a nibble of cheesy fun.

That's pretty much what I have now, minus the stand. Thoughts have been a brewing in my head about an effective way to secure mine and I like your design. My plan was to make a sleeve out of angle iron to attach the legs to and apply a layer of clay on the bottom to deaden any bounce. What's the total weight of your setup?

True Frosty, but the answer sheet you get from mice is usually squeaky clean. 

16 hours ago, Frosty said:

THE answer is 42. Everything else is just being picky.

Frosty The Lucky.

Listen to the little birds. Not the little mice.

I do something similar, only it's all change and I use my car. Whatever falls out of my pockets and onto the floorboards is considered to be in my savings account. Falling change is considered interest.

The cross peen engineer's hammers you get at most stores may be a little heavy, but once you dress them down to avoid odd marks left in your work you would be suprised at how much lighter they can be at the end. Also, if you buy one from Tractor Supply watch how the handle hangs in the eye. I bought one from them and it was just epoxied in. That came loose after about four days. 

10 minutes ago, John McPherson said:

How do you know that it is high carbon steel? Why would you even think that it might be high carbon, as opposed to low alloy abrasion resistant steel, which would make more sense in that origanal application?

My research indicated that ground implements were typically 1080. I don't have the thread handy, but there is one here regarding the use of disk harrow blades for knives and I drew my conclusion from that, along with some information from Weygers. Now I think it isn't a high carbon steel, instead being a low carbon boron alloy, thanks to yahoo2.

I don't have the means to perform a spark test at the moment, so I did the best I could with the information available. Some of this is anecdotal, some from old sources, and some from this site. It was a failed experiment that I learned something from. I'm happy with that.

16 minutes ago, Charlotte said:

Do You have a buddy or local fab shop with a plasma torch? They will cut nearly anything that can melt.

I have several actually. The question I had wasn't so much about cutting those blades specifically as it was about the difference in cutting low and high carbon steel with a hot cut. A proper identification of the material eased my bafflement. 

At this point I'm not worried about the blades specifically. If it is boron steel it will be succeptible to abrasive cutting, at least from what I managed to find on the subject. I will have a new angle grinder this weekend, provided nothing goes terribly wrong, and can work from there.

Thank you for the suggestion though. But now I want to find out if this is worth the trouble with a small scale test before I start shelling out to have them cut. A small piece, just a sample, is what I'm after now.

Boron steel seems like a strong possibility based on what I have managed to read on that alloy today. The hot working properties described match very nicely. The fact that it needs to be worked in a special environment (I want to say low oxygen but will need to double check) dissapoints me, but I guess you live and learn! Thanks yahoo2.

5 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Have you seen if you can forge it?  May want to check that out before worrying about cutting it.

The pieces are rather large so I wanted to pare them down to a workable size before messing with it too much. Holding the blade while hot with one hand was more than a little awkward. With any luck I'll have something I can snip them with by the weekend and can see how they forge. Now I doubt much can be done with them, but I'm hard headed enough to try.

The site's search function didn't turn anything up, and I couldn't find what I was looking for on Google, so I figured I would just go ahead and ask. Recently I aquired a stack of four peanut points (also known as peanut cutter blades) that fit a KMC peanut digger. To the best of my knowledge they are a high carbon steel, most likely 1080 like other ground implements, though I couldn't find a manufacturer to contact and be certain. Here's a link to what I think I have: http://www.agrisupply.com/peanut-blade/p/75502/ No pictures of mine as I kept losing the light while working.

They are very hard, eating up hacksaw blades and all other manner of hand tools. I think they would be a good candidate for experimenting with wood chisels and heat treatment in general. The problem I have had is getting manageable pieces from them. The aforementioned hand tools didn't make a dent and the "hot cut" I have been using, which is a 12lb splitting maul turned upwards chips on impact.

I tried what I consider a normal forging temperature, in the orange zone and it chipped. Cranking up the temperature to yellow produced the same result. Finally, I left the point's tip in to soak until it was throwing sparks and... another chip, this time with a small indentation left in the point.

This has me baffled as I can cut mild steel using that maul without any problem. From an orange glow I can make it through 3/4" round with the hammer blows on the stock keeping it hot enough to continue working. Those points just don't want to move.

Now, I've settled on having to cut them with a grinder if I can even work them at all. I just want to know if chips like that are something to expect with higher carbon steels, or if my hot cut is deficient by lack of design. The maul was never very hard so I doubt that would be the cause of my troubles.

Time to work on my portable hole, I guess, and make some real tools.

I'll say that have been very pleased with the anthracite I bought. Some of the nut size seems to be a little big, but spiking the mix with a bit of rice gets it to settle nicely and catch well. There is an old corn sheller at my mom's that I think I might repurpose into a coal breaker. We don't deal with grain that isn't packed in a 50lb bag, so it shouldn't be a problem to repurpose it.

With any luck - and a bit of elbow grease - I should be able to resize the enormous chunks that find their way into the TSC coal into manageable, effective fuel. Then again... I may end up destroying an old tool. We will have to see how it goes. The coal is hard, but I think the sheller is up to the task. Better than going through the bag with a tack hammer.

A bucket of water big enough to stick your foot in won't hurt either. With proper gear anything that could hurt you should roll off, but the chap idea worries me a bit. Not that they wouldn't work. I think they would. Sometimes a complex solution can be so cumbersome that we decide not to use it though. Heck, the number of grinders I've seen with the guards taken off says that the elegant solutions can be too much for some. Keep it simple and you'll fare better.

It irks me when a post dissapears! At any rate, I play it safe now. It doesn't bother me one bit when someons calls me a Safety Sally. Aside from not wearing steel toe boots, I pretty much follow the rules.

Check your boots to make sure there aren't any synthetic fibers on them. I've seen combat boots that employ man made materials and that's the sort of thing that melts and sticks to you when something hot hits it. With good leather work boots you can stand to be around some pretty hot stuff. I've dropped hot slag on my foot cutting with a stick welder many times and never had serious problems when wearing work boots. 

You could say I was a contender for Honorable Mention in the Darwin Awards as a teenager... hiking boots can't be removed quickly enough when they start to stick. A face shield is a good investment too. Trying to blow the hot sparks out of your nose without dropping a grinder is no fun at all. I actually consider myself lucky to still have two eyes that see!!

Something to keep in mind about that video you posted is that Grant Thompson puts up videos about a random weekend project. He's also the guy who popped a piece of dry ice in his mouth to see what would happen, knowing full well that it could be extremely dangerous. Lots of his videos are very interesting, like the spot welder he slapped together, while some are the stuff of nightmares, like his "scariac."

While plaster might work for a flower pot foundry he probably never intended to use his creation repeatedly and for a long period of time. He moves from one project to another and creates some really interesting stuff. Some of it probably shouldn't be replicated though and all of it should be regarded as a working concept at the most, at least until serious testing has taken place.

2 minutes ago, Charles R. Stevens said:

Black smits, hard headded?! Parish the thought

Uh huh. Yup, I guess that's the way I am and maybe others too. I wouldn't call myself a smith just yet though. Blackmetalmangler might be a more appropriate description at this point....

A 12lb metal handled splitting maul worked well for me at the start. Find a stump with from a tree that was slightly rotten in the core that you can drive the handle through and use that to secure everything down. the flat(ish) surface you get is a bit bigger than a hammer head and you can pull it out to use the bit of the maul as a hot cut when you need one.

Also, Thomas Powers is definately one of the folks you listen to. Charles too. I've been hard headed about a few of his recommendations but he has been right in the end every single time for me!