olfart

On 11/18/2017 at 11:40 AM, ryancrowe92 said:

i kinda thought about being a cop

cops and robbers fun game me and my brother played when we were young

Speaking as a retired LEO after 30 years, I can tell you that a GED will not cut it on an application to be a police officer/deputy sheriff.  Most agencies now want at least two years of college on top of a high school diploma.  The old game of "cops and robbers" bears no resemblance to police work today. 

Nothing other than mild bar stock.  Most of what I have is car parts, leaf and coil springs, torsion bars, etc.

I cut an inch off one end of a big blade to get a full cross-section, heated it to orange and quenched in water.  After placing it in a vise, I tapped it lightly with a small hammer, and it broke in two pieces above the vice.  No visible grain in the breaks.  So yes, it's very hardenable, all the way to the rear edge of the blade.  It did twist and warp like crazy in the quench, though.  Would 5160 be good to stack with it in a billet?

I don't know.  I'll see if the guy at the sawmill can find out for me.

A friend at church works at a local sawmill, and he just happened to find a few pieces of bandsaw blades lying around.  These are some serious blades!  The shiny circle on the bottom blade is a quarter for size reference.

Thanks, rockstar.esq!  The face is about 2" square, overall length about 3.5".  To speed things up I asked my wife to hold it for me "right there", and she drew back to hit the work with the flatter.  "NO!!!"  Just put it right there and hold it flat while I hit it!  Once she got it, it worked like a champ.

At the rate I'm finding coins, in another 40 - 50 years maybe I can afford to upgrade to an AT Pro.  Right now I'm running a Bounty Hunter Time Ranger that I've had for about 6 months.  Just went out to the local fair grounds this morning and brought home $ 0.36 more than I left home with (except for the $15 worth of gas I put in the car).  No old coins among them.  Looks like the carnies must do a surface sweep just before they pull out, because all of these were 2" to 4" deep and heavily corroded.  One interesting coin was a penny with a cross cut out of it.  Never saw one of those before.

Beautiful work as always, Das!  It's especially nice when your work compliments her work, and vice versa.

If you use a heat gun as an air source, you're wasting electricity.  A plain, cheap hair dryer will put out plenty of air, and you can bypass the heating element to run even cheaper.  Feeding the fire with 1,000 degree air from a heat gun may be part of the problem with your air inlet pipe getting hot.  Also, the pipe should not be exposed to the fire, it should be surrounded by the dirt /clay to shield it from the heat.

Like many kids, I suffered from the "get outa school" syndrome (we had a saying; "In God we trust, in school we rust").  After 3 years of high school ROTC, I was convinced the Army could teach me whatever they needed me to know.  My dad suggested going to a newfangled computer school (in 1959, that was a radical suggestion).  If I had listened to him I might have been where Bill Gates is now.  But no, my mind was made up.  US Army was going to teach me to fly helicopters, no college required.  I had that in writing after taking the entry tests.  Then in basic training they told me helicopter flight school was closed until further notice, so I needed to make another choice.  I chose radio communications.  That was my first introduction to "No battle plan survives first contact".  There I sat in a 3 year enlistment with no flight school, learning to operate radioteletype.  Two good things came of that; I had to learn typing and International Morse Code in the process.  I still use them to this day. 

As for the rest of my career, I worked my way through a few dead-end jobs doing what I had to rather than what I wanted to do.  College or computer school would have opened many more doors for me.  The decisions I made in high school were flawed, and they impacted the rest of my life.  Think about that before you jump off the deep end.

Now to round this out and bring blacksmithing into it, I was 74 years old before I started blacksmithing.  Now it is my primary hobby.  I'm not good enough at it to make a living, but I enjoy making things for friends and family.

Maybe you could turn your leaf vertically and call it a flame.  Then you wouldn't need veins.  The artful curvature of it lends itself to a flame in my opinion.

As you said, Latticino, it's slow.  But it's faster than trying to move heavy metal with a hammer.  A bigger/better compressor might improve the speed a little.  Even having to turn the valve to retract the jack, I can still get 2 - 3 squeezes to a heat if I work fast.  I'm working on a piece of 3/4" coil spring in hopes of turning it into a knife-shaped object.  So far I have the blade portion down to about 3/8" thick after working for about an hour this afternoon.

OK, thanks.  I'll probably give it a shot.  If nothing else it will be better than the manual bottle jack I've been using on the press for other things.

I've got the bug for a press after seeing the hydraulic press that the club bought recently, but I don't have $3,500 lying loose at the moment.  Would a 20 ton air-assisted hydraulic bottle jack do the job if mounted in a press frame?  I have a large press I built 35 years ago, and adapting that jack to the press can be done in short order.  One drawback is having to manually release pressure on the jack each time to get it to retract.  For the difference in price, I think I can handle that inconvenience.

I thought that's what they made knees for...

Although this ain't pretty, I believe it will work.  It's my first solo attempt at making a hammer.  The eye is a little off-center, but that's not critical to the operation of a flatter.

The material was an old hammer passed down to me by my dad.  It was made by a friend of his from a piece of RR rail with a pipe handle welded on it,, and it had lived a rough life.  Both faces were mushroomed badly, and my attempts at re-squaring it were not successful.  That necessitated grinding, a LOT of grinding.  I don't have a swage block, or anything else to form the large face of a flatter, so I welded a 2" X 2" piece of leaf spring onto it for the face.

Deer are just turbocharged goats.  When I asked a friend who had given me two goats how to keep them off the cars, he replied, "Don't park in the goat pen."  That was his way of saying, "Build a pen, dummy!"

7 hours ago, JHCC said:

Pavlov...Pavlov...that name rings a bell….

Do Ruby Begonia ring a bell?

After seeing Pancho's paper towel holder, I decided to try my hand at it.  Added a few things to it so it's not a direct copy.

I already built one of Frosty's fullers, and it uses 5/8" dies.  Cutting them might not be a problem with an angle grinder and cutoff wheel.  Not sure I'd want to wear out a bandsaw blade on them.

If I had a metal lathe, that could be handy.  They're only 1/8" thick, so not a lot of shear strength I would guess. 

Unfortunately these were donated to a "xxxx in the hat" drawing at our blacksmith meeting, so no clue what sort of machine they came from.  No mfg markings on the blades themselves.  I Googled "planer blade metal type" and came up with the idea that they might be D2.  Guess the "xxxx in the hat" may have been aptly named this time.

I picked up two planer blades (probably D2?) and am wondering how to deal with the sharpened edge.  I'd like to forge these into knives, but I'll need to reduce their width and draw them out longer.  If I try to forge the sharp edge off of it, I'm figuring it will just roll and form a cold shut.  Is there a way to change the sharp edge to a square edge without cutting/grinding it off?

On 7/2/2017 at 4:42 PM, ThomasPowers said:

olfart: is that NE corner as in Texarkana or as it Perryton?  One is more east and less north and the other is more north and less east...the rasptlesnakes I see a lot of down here along the US-Mexico border.

 

Mine is the Texarkana corner.  We have a few rasptlesnakes, but mostly copperheads and water moccasins.  My wife killed 17 copperheads near the house the first summer we lived here.  Our herd of 6.5 cats has reduced the snake population to a more reasonable level now.

Aus's snake looks sorta like a brasshead.

When I was a kid, I had to carry a knife to school to play Mumbly-peg during recess.  Nobody ever thought anything about a boy carrying a pocket knife to school in those days.  Worst that was likely to happen was cutting a finger while sharpening a pencil.

Thanks for that info, Mark.  It's good to know that if I make a Bowie, I'll be able to carry it soon.