John in Oly, WA

Are you looking at the horizontal crack, or separation line I'm seeing about 1/2" - 3/4" down the side from the face? Thinking possible delamination? Aside from the anvil, the stand is pretty nifty.

That makes sense. I've only visited Hawaii once and I kept wondering how anyone made a living there that wasn't connected with the tourist industry.

Welcome to the forum. You've got some great BBQ in your part of the world!

Do you know any train puns? Welcome to the forum. I've lived in Washington my whole life, except for a short stint in California and another in Oregon - don't hold that against me - and I don't have any idea where Olalla is even though I've heard the name quite a bit. Guess Google maps could cure that. LOL Hawaii?! What would possess you to move from there to here?

I used a spring and a turnbuckle for the tensioning arm. Turnbuckle makes the tension adjustable. I've never had my tension arm bounce. It stays put unless I pull down on the handle to take the belt tension off to change a belt.

Oh all right, we'll wait. (tapping foot impatiently) LOL

Maybe so, but it wasn't on porpoise. Nice set of knives there, Matthew!

Well, that's a bit of a different paraphrase. Makes me picture someone out on the battlefield wielding a lit forge blocking axe blows and burning the axe heads off the haft.

I'll be tuning in Theo. Too cool!

No Latticino, you're not feeling needy, just expecting a bit of (un?)common courtesy.

Pics of it, brand name, model #, etc. would be needed to help you with your question.

Thanks Latticino. I'll keep experimenting and see what happens with future projects. The part that had the microcracking texture was black glass - the part that stayed smooth was clear glass. I've read that different colors react differently to the heat, so that might have something to do with it. I'm tempted to think the multiple heats didn't do it any good. Like you said, it can take things out of the glass - like overheating steel.

Nice work! Unusual design. For some reason unknown to me - it makes me think of whales.

"+John: Thanks for the comment! I'm surprised you got the reference (no one else I've ever talked to has)" You're welcome! Not much gets past me! LOL, cough,choke,sputter

Just beginning to read about metal glass, or "amorphous metal" and the spinning disk method of cooling was mentioned. Also mentioned was the small size of the metal glass produced due to the extreme cooling requirements. Seems a thickness of over 1mm was considered large. More recently the focus seems to be on alloys that form into an amorphous state with slower cooling rates allowing the size of the material to be much larger - several centimeters in thickness.

1Forge2RTA was his original user name - One forge to rule them all. Paraphrase, of course, of "one ring to rule them all."

At least his user name paraphrases a bit of Tolkien for it. Can't be all bad.

All of that is possible. There is much information here to get you started and help you learn how. What is your situation - do you live in an apartment, in a city, or in a house with area for a forge? Are there schools nearby that teach blacksmithing, or a blacksmith that you can learn from?

And while you're waiting to get in to the doc, STOP all activity that even comes close to causing the pain. The problem can't go away if you keep making it worse.

Graphic design and website creation/maintenance.

Thanks for the interesting info Latticino. For more detail, we fused the glass at max temp of 1480F. But we were sandwiching small pieces between two 1/8" plates and ended up with (the inevitable) air bubbles in between. So in my brilliance, I thought what do you do with air bubbles? Well, pop them of course. So I heated it again to 1500F and pierced some of the bubbles. But it didn't do much - surface cooled enough my "needle" soon wouldn't pierce - so I heated it again (never letting it cool more than what happened opening the kiln) to 1650F and let the bubbles rise and pop themselves. And standing over the kiln was kinda warm popping them the first go 'round. Then after annealing and cooling, (it was smooth and shiny at this point) heated it back up to 1225F to slump it over a bowl mold. During that process, parts of the surface of the glass developed striations or more or less parallel cracks/grooves - like if you bent something and instead of the material stretching, it developed a texture of hundreds of very small, shallow cracks along the bend. Weird thing was though, it was the inside of the bend. The outside of the slumping bend came out very smooth and shiny. Thomas, thank you! You've got my curiosity piqued. Now I need to go research metal glass. I can't imagine cooling rates in the millions of degrees per second.

Here's to it all going well, Thomas! As I'm sure it will, a premature congrats to go with the premature arrival!

I learned that you can only heat glass so many times and it gets hard to keep the nice shiny smooth surface when you bring it to slumping temps. Something I'd like to learn is the structural? compositional? molecular? property? differences between metals, ceramics and glass. They seem to have similarities.

Beautiful! The liners add a nice touch.

Beautiful work, as usual. Really like the Solar Storm pattern.