All but deleted account

I found this website on a post quoting another post. Thank you for the search method suggestion, JHCC!

Squirrel Motor Blower

A friend recently gave me two centrifugal fans and I want to make an electric blowers with them but I don't know where to start. I've looked around here but I can't find anything on the topic. All I have are the motors with the two wires (pos. & neg.) sticking out. I was thinking about maybe using a variable light switch to increase/decrease the speech at which the fan rotates but I don't know how to do that nor do I know how to actually power it: what to connect how to connect, etc. I'm trying to melt some copper and silver to cast a couple of rings but with the old "blower" I had, it didn't work (it was a hair dryer duct taped to the end of a pipe that was stuck into the ground into the forge). Can anyone give me any advice? I would also like to have a pipe attached to the blower with a container or something on top of the end of the pipe to hold the coals and the metals.

1 minute ago, JHCC said:

According to the website of the U.S. Treasury:

"Is it illegal to damage or deface coins?

"Section 331 of Title 18 of the United States code provides criminal penalties for anyone who 'fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the Mints of the United States.' This statute means that you may be violating the law if you change the appearance of the coin and fraudulently represent it to be other than the altered coin that it is. As a matter of policy, the U.S. Mint does not promote coloring, plating or altering U.S. coinage: however, there are no sanctions against such activity absent fraudulent intent."

Awesome! Thanks! I will definitely look into that!

Thomas, isn't that illegal? I thought that melting/defacing/destroying U.S. currency was a federal crime. I didn't realise it, but mokune-gane is almost exactly what I'm trying to do.

I'm a 16 year old Junior in high school looking to start blacksmithing! I'm a very . . . busy musician. I make a lot of stuff on a whim and most of the time it all turns out right. I've made instruments, I'm working on casting a couple of rings with cuttlebone (the technique is called cuttlefish casting), I've made stands for some instruments, and a lot of other stuff. If you search, in Google, "copper and silver ring", that's the effect I'm hoping to have once I've filed it smooth and polished it. I haven't gone through all of the posts/topics yet but I plan to. If anyone has any advice for a broke beginning blacksmith, I'll take it gladly!

Thank you,

Gideon

natenaaron, where is that? 

Mr. Stevens, that last paragraph was Koro, to me, I'm sorry.  What's a drop, a circle drop, and a plate? 

I'm looking to make two anvils out of railroad tracks. I need about five feet total (about 2.5 ft. each). Does anyone know where I can find some in NC, preferably around Lenoir?

I just built a furnace, I don't even have a fuel picked out yet (post answers pending), and I want to spend as little money as possible until I get into it and know that I'll enjoy it enough to put money into a proper bellows. At the moment, would a vacuum cleaner that blows work as a bellows when connected to a steel pipe? The pipe goes into the base of the furnace so the air is blowing directly onto the coal/charcoal (again, fuel question answers are pending - Coal vs. Charcoal) in the bottom of the furnace. I'm not just using the furnace to heat metals; I'm also using it (with a crucible) to melt soft metals to cast into jewelry.

I'm sure there have been numerous posts about this topic but which is better to use: coal or charcoal? I have never done any blacksmithing before but I want to. I need to have a fuel first, though. My furnace is a hole in the ground lined with kiln bricks (I know not what kind; the potter that lived in my house before I did left a huge pile of them in the woods). I had originally planned to use a steel pipe with a vacuum cleaner on one end for my blower. After reading a couple of other posts, I'm not sure if that'll work; at the moment, I have no idea what blower I'll use (if you have any advice, that would be wonderful). I don't have an anvil yet, either.