Judson Yaggy

A flatter isn't a hammer, it's a set tool. Set it on your work and strike with a hammer. Flatters are for smoothing rough hammer texture on a workpiece. Because there are 3 moving parts involved (flatter, work, hammer) you need either a striker or a holder. A power hammer counts as a striker if the flatter is shaped the right way.

First traditional project in a while, but more inquiries for similar projects are coming in. Things are finally looking up. While the budget stretched to collars, rivets and tenoned joinery the clients drew the line at going non-linear with curves and tapers everywhere. The happy medium was some limited scroll work. I liked doing the curves, they liked the price of using stock sizes on a lot of the pickets.

For a totally luxurious shop I'd aim for 5k sq. ft., 16' ceiling so the forklift has plenty of room. If you want a gantry crane I'd bump that up to a 25 or 30' ceiling hight. In all seriousness lots of us started with or still have shops that are tiny, 10' by 10' or drag the anvil into the driveway and hammer for a few hours. For what you describe a 12 x16 would be just fine, you can have a lot of fun in a shop that size but you'd be hard pressed to pay the mortgage or put the kids thru college. Hammer away, if you've got the skills you will quickly build something bigger.

1000 sq. ft. with some exterior concrete pad workspace. Way too small. But I've alway said that blacksmiths are like hermit crabs, we grow to totally fill whatever shell is available and then start looking for a bigger shell.

From the look of the underside I'd say it's a H-B. It's ok to work in the rain, you won't melt or rust ;)

Fisher never used the English system, they were all marked in pounds, or tens of pounds IIRC. A face of 5" wide should put it in the 300#+ range I would guess. Good luck!

Ralph S. is in New Hampshire. His contact info is indeed on the NEB website. He definitely has a certain spark when it comes to applying all that power hammer tooling info that Clifton Ralph and Steve Parker have been teaching all these years.

Just put 2 and 2 together. Matto, did you sell a Little Giant to a blacksmith in Vermont about 15 years ago? My first power hammer came via the ABANA website from someone in Kearney. If it was you, thank you, it was a great little hammer.

Um, the dumb answer is to have your bees make honey with it. :) Non blacksmithing answer is that locust is rot and insect resistant, and fairly dense. What do you need to make that is rot resistant? Wear your dust mask when working because it's mildly toxic. Blacksmithing answer is anvil stump or dishing stump, see above. Round here most common is black locust. After a year or so off the stump the heart wood turns a vivid purple and will dull a chainsaw about as quick as running it into the dirt.

Can you hear us all shouting our questions and praise over the hiss of shifting valves and the wham wham wham of steel being squished into cool shapes? For our sake I hope you can, for your enjoyment I hope you can't!

Whatever you use as a base, glue down your anvil! Use Sikaflex, 3m 5200, basic silicone, or construction adhesive like PL 400 or Liquid Nails. Once cured any of the above will grab the anvil strongly enough that you won't need any other fastening devices. Also, any adhesive bond will cut down on ringing by at least half.

1. Membership in ABANA. 2. Membership in your local smithing group. 3 thru 20. Buy every book on blacksmithing you can find. 21 thru 25... Start buying tools. Start with anvil, forge, hammer, tongs, vise. You can make everything else you want once you have the above.

Thanks everyone. Sandblasting media was whatever our usual guy uses as his default, Black Beauty or similar. Not sure of the exact size. Weather conditions were definitely a factor, some pieces were rusted in sunny 50 deg., some windy and 20, some while raining, some while snowing. Even several rounds of freezing rain. Welcome to Vermont! Drying time seems to be one of the biggest factors, the faster the mix evaporates the lighter, more orange the rust will be. Second most important seems to be temperature, lowest temps produced the least rust. I considered and rejected using more aggressive oxidizers, decided against using them because of the sheer volume of overspray I would be standing in and blowing around the job. Doug, pm on the way.

60% iron? Wow. You know, you could mix that with aluminum powder, bulldoze it along your driveway, ignite and run away, and you could be the first guy in America with a thermite driveway! ;)

Some folks in another thread asked for pics of this. Private residence, exterior is 90% done, materials are antique barn board, Cor Ten steel, and western red cedar. Cor Ten is 16 gauge, sandblasted and patina accelerated with a sprayed on mix of water and bleach. Fastened with a mixture of 3M 5200, hidden screws and big decorative pan head screws in the field on larger pieces. Steel gave radically different appearance depending on the weather and temperature when treated. This week's project has been one of the exterior stairs, mahogany treads, 3/16" stainless risers, and structural steel supports. Very picky work, less than 1/32" tolerance anywhere because of the way one piece integrates with other elements. Photos are just snapped off the phone, so not top notch.

Looks like there is a parting line on the base, casting? Something odd going on along the seam between face and body, electric weld and ground or mushroomed and hammered back to shape? Hard to see for sure on the mobile screen.

IIRC Grant and or Larry used plastic in one of theirs. We really need more info. What is the make of the hammer? Are you talking about the seal between the piston and cylinder wall or the seal around the top cap, or a seal around the shaft on the bottom of the piston?

I agree. But with the 8 foot eave overhangs on this house there will be less water than normal hitting the siding. It's quite something to see, but instead of continuing this threadjacking I'll snap some pics tomorrow and try and post them in the projects forum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathering_steel Cor Ten is a brand name for "weathering" steel. It rusts a little then once a good layer of oxide builds up it sort of self-seals and stops rusting. Bridges, shipping containers, steel power poles, highway guardrails are common applications. To weld it properly you need to use matching filler material, usually has a -w on the end of the electrode code. It's fairly reactive (keeps rusting) if in contact with non-Cor ten metals such as mild steel, screws, rivets, etc. An architect I work with a lot loves the stuff for some reason, I spent the last 6 months cladding the outside of a very large house with thousands of square feet of 16 gage Cor Ten.

Teaching your boy the old square peg in a round hole lesson early I see. Well done, he will soon learn that a bigger hammer is the answer...

What's a "homeowner's association"? Sounds horrible. IMHO blacksmiths benefit from living where we can build, burn, or blow up anything that doesn't hurt anyone else. ;). On a more serious note, if your vise isn't of the wedged variety do a search on IFI for the "Gozinta" modular tooling concept. Basically you mount your tools onto a square tube that slides into a slightly larger tube fastened to the Earth or some other immovable object. Set screws or wedges lock the tubes together.

The first professional blacksmith shop that I worked in back in the early 1990's had a MINT 550# Fisher anvil. On occasion we would do jobs that required texturing larger pieces of plate, say 3/8 thick by 2 or 3 feet square. The portions of the plate that didn't fit under the power hammer would be hand textured by smith and striker with fullers and sledge on the big anvil. Between power hammer work and heating time, there was a small percentage of the time where hot work was in contact with the anvil. But the mass and surface area of the workpiece combined to transfer a huge amount of energy to the anvil. Often by lunchtime the anvil would be too hot to touch, and then we would work for hours more... Last time I visited that shop, some 20 years later, the anvil still looked and performed great. There is little that we as mere mortals can do to damage an anvil, not counting 30# sledges or cutting torches or bulldozers or stupidity. The working faces of good anvils are tempered steel and a tough but still fairly hard tempering temperature is 500 deg f +/-. Perhaps some of our more physics minded members could run the numbers on what it would take to over heat an anvil forging 1/2" round bar.

Sam- It could be mild steel, or it could be something with some oddball alloys that meets the performance spec for A36 or 50 or whatever. Currently the people making I beams care less about the composition (chemistry) of the steel than they do the yield strength and other engineering specifications. There are some good threads here on IFI about the difference between mild (1018) steel and A36.

Well, people were shorter back then ;). That is one heck of an air line DD, must have been easy to run thru that thin wall but what do you all do when it gets down to 20 below zero?