BeaverNZ

While its easy to criticize from a distance this machine has probably been in daily service for years, it never fails to amaze me the ingenuity of people who do not have access to anything better. I find it a great source of motivation and I admire these sort of people doing the best they can and often producing very good work with little

Here is a better vid from earlier in the year making slow progress towards what happen a few days ago, the billet I was using wasnt pre shaped much at all and required many heating/hit cycles which would of damaged the steel. The flame flash is from the graphite and grease lube i was using

I have been busy in the workshop during the lockdown and made some good progress on my long term project. I have finally forged my actual conrod blanks out of the EN39B steel and I am very pleased with the result. I only need one but have forged four in total , Its been a long journey and I still have to do the machining myself and get profesonals to the crack, testing, carburising and heat treatment. i have been working up to this for the last few months experimenting with the preshaping of the blank to get the minumum amount of materail that would give me the desired result and the least amount of heat/hit cycles and because my hammer is really to small I got it down to three heats and lots of hits. I also made a new LPG fired forge to cut down on the formation of scale which will be a big bonus for knife making in the future and a second 2x72 linisher to complement my 100x2745 machine

Yes that maybe the case Frosty but I can just add more heaters if the need arises, I was thinking this way to keep the wattage to the mininmum from a saftey point of veiw so not to have a possible bottle venting in the shop and the water was to give more effective heat transfer i was thinking of maybe a water depth of 300mm or so

Has anyone tried this as a solution to bottles freezing That is a Aluminum box with the bottles sitting in it and filled with an antifreeze solution to stop corrosion with around 3-500 watt fish tank heaters and a submersible pump to circulate the water. The temp of the heaters cannot be set higher than 20 deg centigrade and even in the unlikely event of thermostat failure the low wattage could not over heat the bottles

Hi 671 I am not going to rain on your parade If you are willing to acept failure then My advise is to go for it the learning curve will be steep and the failure rate will be high but if no one was prepared to fail there would be no progress and its better to learn with some thing that once made and breaks nobody is likely to be hurt. Just do as much research as you can, look up uncle youtube etc look at forums there is usually more than one way to do things and some of them are just a more correct way. Enjoy your journey into the metal working abiss Cheers Beaver PS And remember you havent failed or made a mistake until you cant fix it

The blade is so small as I am only intending to use it for axe and hammer handles and the handles are just file handles from a local hardware store and are glued on with 24hr araldite This is the first draw knife I have used and I am amazed at how efficent they are at removing materail but also has the ability to remove small amounts as well

Good work Plain language avoids missunderstandings

More progress with the conrod and a new phone yippie and I tried the proper die for the first time though I used the aluminum forging from the other die just to see what would happen and it looks ok. Now I need to make the central button that will form the centre of the big end and work out what shape the blank will need to be. I am going to do the trial forging using aluminum to reduce the chance of damaging my tooling. The cross section of the rod beam looks ok as well, the weight of the dies and mounting block adds about 10Kg to the mass of the tupp so that should help as well

thats really nice work

Wow thats a beautiful blade i really like that pattern but does anyone else see the faces in the pattern in that last pic of the blade

This weekends work was succesful a W pattern axe , Its just not as W uey as I was hoping. Bandsaw blade and crane rail track and the last two pics are some new tooling for the press for punching the eyes

I have just hopefully posted a very short and poor vid of my first go at forging a conrod for a motor bike that I am buliding and some stills that you can see more detail, I need a new phone . The centre button of the die needs to be bigger in dia to push the metal further out but its replaceable so I will either be able to use the bigger one next time or step up through several sizes to get the result I need as my hammer is probably far to small but if I keep removing the flash so it dosent absorb any more force it may work WP 20190524 15 53 48 Pro

Cheers back at ya Ausfire from across the Deetch LOL I wont try quoting as with my clumsy keyboard skills getting me in trouble with the Mods

So far I havent heat treated it at all, What ever sort of steel it is is fairly hard just from air cooling and I suppose the lack of mass lets it cool quickly as well. I will probably do a heat treat that will be just the usual non magnetic and temp to a dark blue or some thing that can be filed