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From what I can tell 44w is the Canadian equiv. of A36. I have made several tongs from mild steel that work just fine. Because its is mild I would leave the tongs a little "stockier" than if I used tool steel . Hope you have a power hammer or some stamina if you plan to draw out 1.5" into tongs though.

Just a heads up. Peter Ross was on Roy Underhill's show recently. You can watch the episode here http://www.pbs.org/w.../3100/3111.html I really like that helper Peter built. And if you have never seen the Woodwright's Shop, Peter Ross has been on it before and I'm sure you could find a couple more episodes with blacksmithing if you look in past seasons.

Next time you have to mess with the stuff try keeping a spray bottle of water with you. Mist the area you are working, specifically the sides you cut. i found this to help alot. Nick.

If you do indeed cut the wood down below the height of the rail, you may find it useful to sharpen the top of the flat side the sits flush against the wood on one side of the web and round it over on the other side of the web. This way you will have a fuller (basically a small anvil horn) and a hot cut in reach at all times. I tried to upload a pic to better demonstrate what I mean but was unable to. :( If you do this please be careful, while not a hardie protruding from the face of an anvil the sharp edge could still cause damage if careless.

Wrought Iron anvils are some of the best. The wrought iron was used for the body which then had a high carbon face forge welded to it. Peter Wright, Mousehole, Arm & Hammer are all wrought iron bodied anvils. I'm sure there are more i'm missing. Of course most of these anvils are at least 100 years old, so whether or not it is a good anvil has much to do with its current condition, but in general they are very good anvils. They also ring very loud, something to keep in mind if you are in a suburban area.

Looking good. These look very similar to the hooks when I first started. My recommendations: Draw a full taper on the part you are curling on the ends rather than just making it flat, make them pointed and then do the curls. I was doing them very similar to you until someone showed me, and they started lookinig 10x better. For you drive hook, i can't really see the scale of it in the pic, but it looks to me that the nail part is perhaps a bit to big. I would try making this part smaller. Both length and dimensions. This should allow you to drive it into wood without causing splits. Hope this helps. Keep on forging.

One way to get an idea of what good vs bad grains look like is to make yourself some examples. Take 2 pieces of the same steel. Stick one in the fire, overheat and let it sit in there for too long ( just don't let it melt away) quench and break it. Now take your other piece and give it a proper heat treat. Anneal, 3x normalize, quench and then again break it. Don't temper them and a solid tap should be sufficient to break them. You should notice that the abused piece has a very grainy looking appearance along the fracture while the heat treated piece should look and feel almost velvety. You could probably get a good comparison without doing the full anneal on your heat treated piece and just doing a 3x normalization/quench to save some time. The normalization process is what refines the steel grain structure back to smaller size after heating to forge has caused it to grow. Hope this helps.

and another E-bay I'd probably buy that for 33 dollars if it were local haha

At the moment I break mine up in a sheet metal box with a tamper bar, outside with good vent. cause it can make a nasty dust cloud. However I like Mr. Powers advice of using some sort of grating to evenly size it.

ty for your opinions. Wish I had an xtra roll of that greenback toilet paper just to have an excuse to go look and feed my curiosity, but i suppose im not alone.

what do you all think of this anvil. craigslist fisher - post has been deleted by craigslist First off im not buying this but want to see if im way off base here or not. looks to me like its had alot of repair work. The face looks convex, has that suspicious black line on it...not to mention no straight on photo of face. Also the side of the table near horn looks weird to me. so what do you think... fishy fisher?

http://nashville.craigslist.org/tls/1846772103.html

Under the Memorial Weekend Conference it says for Saturday the 26th , should be the 29th. Just a heads up. And thanks for the link I always enjoy browsing these publications.

I'd leave it alone. Could be pretty nasty if you throw it in the forge and inhale some fumes. I try to stay away from anything of that nature. I suppose you could strip it but not worth it to me. Something from google Hex Chrome Someone more experienced have input some input?

Very well done. Is this at a park etc. or on private property? And yeah I would be the one to run towards it and jump on only to find it doesn't swing :unsure: