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I Forge Iron

Desmond Redmon

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Venedocia, Ohio, USA
  • Interests
    Learning, Understanding, Applying

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  1. Sounds to me like your setting yourself up for both a positive experience with selling a lot of goods, and a realistic appraisal of how much you can earn. The only bit of advice I would give is keep the same records for all of the craft shows because part of your first show will be the "first time I have seen this" factor then if you keep it up you will develop people who buy something each time they see you at a specific show. If you are good you will both get requests for direct orders and people who make a point of stopping at a show to see what you have.
  2. Thank you, I hadn't thought about the art studio. We'll have to see how obliging they are willing to be lol...
  3. So as I set out getting farm insurance on the 20 acres plus buildings and house, I find myself wanting not to haul a 400# forge in and out of the shop every time I want to forge. So does anyone have experience with getting structural insurance for your forge building?
  4. Haha, yah that seems to be where this has been going... I find myself designing tools that would make projects easier and then in the middle of making the tool realise I spent the rest of my free time on the forge LOL.
  5. I got into smithing because it is getting hard to find some woodworking tools that aren't way over priced. And it is good to spend time sweating out problems.
  6. That sucks I was hoping to see how it went, but at least you got some new toys.
  7. I am struggling to finish out woodworking tools using only bench grinders and angle grinders and a handheld belt sander. I have the swage block to form out some of the radii I want but end up finishing the concave surfaces with a dremel then polishing the convex surfaces with strips of sandpaper. I'm not bad with the angle grinder either with grinding or sanding disks but they just are not efficient ways to produce a consistent and quality surface. So I am looking to add a finishing machine to the shop. I can very much see the utility of a belt grinder in knife making nut I am not sure how well they work on complex shapes. Leaving me unsure if it would be better to build one or if there is a better tool out there for finish shaping woodworking tools (and finishing other smithing products). I have a mostly finished out plan for a 3 horse variable speed belt grinder I can afford to build but I wanted to ask if anyone has any better machines to finish out things like gouges, chisels, froes, or draw knives? I am also not sure if a belt grinder can produce small radii for smaller gouges for carving. I'm not as worried about finishing the surfaces on most of the things I forge out but since woodworking tools are where my primary interest lies I am trying to develop the forge in that direction. (Yes by the way my next up project in the works is a multistage heat treating oven...) So I guess my question is if I should focus on a heavy belt grinder, a smaller belt grinder and a second machine, or if anyone has a better alternative for complex shape finishing... Thanks in advance for the advice.
  8. That is exactly why Arkie's post made me reread the safety handbooks... I don't need anymore days like that...
  9. Your comment made me go back to the safety training book my son received in his tech high school. Which did not list the facets of passive welding lenses only auto darkening (Hobart doesn't manufacture their own apprently). Which lead me round about to Millerwelds.com and a specific quote "A passive lens helmet uses UV- and IR-coated dark-tinted glass with a fixed shade value, usually #10. The passive helmet is worn in the up position while the electrode, gun or torch is positioned. Then with a quick nod or snap of the neck, the operator flips the helmet into position immediately before striking an arc." When I was practicing forge welding mild steel, I made 100 2.5" rings (from 3" rings left over from practicing forming on the horn), the first day I did about 20 rings at welding temp before my eyes gave out and I could only see a spot on my point of focus, since I hadn't figured out to glance at the metal and just watched it heat through a hole in the coal... Next morning I woke up with gummy eyes and felt like I had sand in my eyes. After that I tried my auto darkening welding helmet but the forge didn't produce enough to darken the helmet (minimum shade 9) and I tried a shade 5 O/A cutting lens and it was a bit dark but left my eyes intact the next day. All in all for a single weld I'm not bothering, for a bunch of welds I'll wear a set of goggles but I think shade 3 or 4 would be better than 5's. Though I know there are several different types out there and after reading today I see there are green lenses for IR, the black and gold generally available at welding supplies are both UV and IR protected according to OHSA and manufacturers.
  10. Agreed, when not able to find a dark corner most old portable forges I have seen had optional shield that would enable the smith to dim the area around the actual forge itself. Though the way to tell if you are susceptible to UV etc is to visit a welding shop a buy a low number cutting lense for people using oxy-acetylene torches. They usually carry shades down to a #3 which should be a good one to try for just a couple of bucks.
  11. .... banning borax sounds surprisingly like:http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html to me... Edit wrong link...
  12. Six pounds is a bit much for my arm for more than a few one handed strikes at a time, but definitely moved metal... It could well be a rock splitting hammer since our fields have grown boulders for a good 160 years.
  13. I was rummaging for steel a while back and found this in the corner of a machine shed on the family farm with a broken handle and did a quick belt sand on it. Since one of my numerous questions was about large diameter stock I had to find the biggest hammer head I had on hand to try out a suggestion today so I shoved a new handle in it. The handle is an engineering handle from Rural King and had to be trimmed a bit to fit into the existing hole. It came out with a distinct angle and the had mass (Or at least the stamp) is around 6#. Anyone have an idea what it was for originally?
  14. I wonder if a tube steel solution would work? Most people have some steel tubing lying about if you notched out a place in the middle then placed that just off to the side of your burner perhaps you could heat your target area while providing a minimal heat shielding to the rest of the piece? Not having a gas forge I cannot even try it but on my coal forge to focus a special heat to push up a handle stop on a chisel I used two pieces of mild plate to block the heat and oxygen from the surrounding coal to either side and focused the heat a bit. In my case it was a partial success since the heat wasn't as confined once the plates were heated for an extended time. Just not sure how effective it would be on a forge reliant on forced air for heat.
  15. Check, sitting on a 4x4x1/2 to cool it burned the polyurethane off the top of the workbench when I let it cool while I ate... I am making a 3# or so hammer for driving nails into 80 year old oak chicken house framing (somehow a standard claw hammer just doesn't have the oomph.) I cheated and drilled a 1/2" hole to start drifting the hole out to an engineering hammer drift I made up from 1x1 O1 I had on hand (I didn't have any S7 laying about). And Anvil's comment: Both of those sound like fine advice I will give them a try Thursday when my striker goes to preschool :-) I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I missed the volume aspect since I was thinking of the issue as being effectively 1/2 of the actual cross section (guess that is what comes from programing machines in radius rather than diameter). Thank each of you for the insights and advice! As so often happens however I am left with many more questions now that I Last and certainly not least, Cr VI can be produced in any oxygen rich environment at greater than 400C as far as I have been able to find. While in theory I suppose I could take the risk and try to heat the Cr plate off in the oxygen depleted zone in this case I turned the Cr plate off by .03" to expose the 1045 core on an old metal lathe a friend has (two of the ten shafts were case hardened and just got sent back to the scrap yard). Worked pretty well to cut the blanks at 4" and just run a surface cut right under the plating since the plating notched the HSS cutting point. My next shirt from Glenn will be the In Rust We Trust!
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