Judson Yaggy

+1 BF Price seems in the ball park for size and condition. If it's a user just wire brush and oil like you said and start hammering. No grinder! Welcome to the craft and enjoy your anvil.

Collaring is easy if you know a few tricks. Length of collar stock is calculated by measuring the periphery of the pieces to be joined and adding 2 1/2 times the collar stock thickness. Put a short flat taper on each end of the collar stock and the ends will overlap slightly, no gap. Make your first 90 deg. bend in the vise, then go back to the anvil and straighten the legs. Make the second bend either in the vise again (if it fits) or around a template held in the vise. Result should look like a sharp cornered U. If just working out of the forge set the last 2 bends in the same heat (work quick), if you have torches you can be a little more leisurely and do one bend at a time. If torch heating keep the heat closer to bend 1 or 2 while making 3 or 4 and the material will stretch a little more tightly around the work piece. There are other ways of doing it this is just what works for me.

Country of origin is a valid question and now that we know that a real non-snarky answer follows. In the USA look into Bader, KMG, Kalamazoo, Burr King, Riverside, No-Weld, Grizzly...many more. Google them. Above list is from memory and perhaps in order of quality (debatable) except for Bader (best IMHO).

Vaughn, I like that. Nice design. Here's mine, a coat rack WIP. Needs more hooks and a bunch of finish.

He should be able to, IIRC they were just the standard brass gas nipples threaded into a square tube manifold. And you are correct that there was no adjustment on the air intake, I often meant to add a way to choke the intake but in the end just sold the thing and built a couple of custom gas forges that better suited my needs. Typing that jogged my memory. Horse, have you removed or loosened the manifold from the burners? I remember doing that once to mine when relining the forge and realigning the injectors with the intakes was a bear, it ran like crap unless all 3 were in the perfect spot.

We call them "tongs" (grin).

I had a NC Low Daddy for about a decade and welded with it all the time at 10psi, even with beat up insulation. I'm only at 800 ft. elevation thou. The one thing I found that made it run better was to every now and then bend a wire bottle brush so you could stuff it up into the burner nozzles inside the forge and clean out the crud. BMUS is correct that the burner design has been surpassed by others in recent years but they are still functional.

The trick I use is when no one is looking run the side of your pencil lead down the edge of the cut. Looks like you split the line, and you can blame any mistakes on the layout guy (grin). Of course all my timber framing crew know that trick, and I tend to be the layout guy, so...

Aldren Watson in his book "The Blacksmith, Ironworker and Farrier" reprinted an excerpt from a blacksmith's account book circa 1842. The entry "to use of plow" cost the customer 75 cents. 100 years too early but interesting none the less.

Amazing that it's still in one piece, looks like there is more air than iron!

Broadly speaking to get the same performance yes. Note that Baston's book is a little dated at this point, the higher end press builders are now going for more speed than he generally advocates, which also requires more power.

Weld on a lag screw and twist on the wooden handles.

Fryburg Fairgrounds, Fryburg ME June 2,3,4 Joel Tripp is the demonstrator. There will be a promo in the winter news letter.

You will certainly get longer life out of proper alloys and heat treated dies, but mild holds up ok if ONLY hitting hot mild steel. Probably 90% of my clapper dies for the power hammer are mild steel. Where this breaks down is if you start working tougher alloys or using the full capability of a power hammer by using top tools and flat dies. When you start punching and fullering etc on flat mild steel dies they will get chewed up quickly.

I spend about half my time (depends on the season and flow of projects) as a professional architectural metalworker, try to push the design teams toward forged work but I'm quite familiar with my welder. The remaining time I build custom timber frames and when needed will project manage construction jobs or even put on a tool belt and bang out some carpentry. Whatever pays the mortgage, each of the above compliments the skill set of the others. BS in Industrial Design and Technology from a state college in New Hampshire. In retrospect it was more of a machine and manufacturing degree with an unfortunate (for me) minor in biz management. Don't know any orthodontists but know a retired orthopedic surgeon who is a pretty good blacksmith.

Yes, I know. We have had several Icelandic smiths. That's why I asked. Thank you for your input.

I like the "blacksmith's burn". Suspect many of us have matching ones.

Any Icelandic smiths lurking on the forum? I may be traveling there in a few months and would love to meet some fellow blacksmiths!

Note on the above linked thread I've stopped using linseed oil as it eventually dries out and now mix the graphite with grease instead. It's still $5 per pound at the local John Deere dealer.

Can you dress the edge with a quality file? If a good new file will cut, then perhaps it is not quite as hard as advertised.

How many actual hours of forging since purchase? Are those edge defects dings or chips? What have you been hammering, only hot stuff or tweaking cold stock too?

Yup. Outside. As to the cold weather comment, even back when it used to get to -30deg. F. here a 100 gallon tank had no problem delivering. If your bbq tank freezes up because it's outside get a bigger tank or wait for warmer weather or build a more efficient forge. Here's an idea! Coal! Pictures on request happen less frequently here than in the past due to thousands of "lost" pics due to software upgrades.

Bicycles have sprockets, cars have gears, SNL has funny stuff. I love hanging around with other blacksmiths precisely because of the weirdness factor. So much more interesting than "normal" people! BTW what is this "film" you speak of? Sounds like some outdated mechanical technology...

Thanks Jeff and everyone else. Pretty much what I had gathered, great to get confirmation. Harbor What? I've been trying to block those sorry xxxxxxxx out of my life for years. As to come-a-longs, when I'm not smithing I build timber frame (post and beam) buildings and use LOTS of winches to assemble the things. Lug-All cable hoists are my preferred pullers for that sort of work, but will look into Harringtons on the above recommendations.

If you are going scrapping keep your eyes open for strips of brass or bronze, will work as well or better than PE in a home built power hammer if you luck onto the right stuff. Nomenclature note: UHMW stands for Ultra High Molecular Weight. Correct abbreviation should be UHMWPE the PE part is an acronym for polyethylene. Most folks reading this should know that but we get beginners all the time...