BillyBones

In Iceland you will find little tiny houses on road sides and the like that are put there for the Fairies. This past summer i taught my granddaughter how to build fairy houses with twigs, leaves, grass, etc. in the backyard.

I very rarely use the horn of my anvil. I have tried but as far as fullering on it i get much better results using the soft edge or a hardy fuller. Mostly i just use the pein of my hammer on the flat face though. For rings and scrolls i have anvil bicks and the like for that. If i were looking for an anvil, i would buy it. If it had good rebound and no dead spots that is.

Frosty you are right about the month but it is 9 years away in 2033.

One of the reasons i like living in Ohio, nobody wants to come to Ohio. We had clear skies and i got to see the eclipse quite nicely. Did discover one thing though, my auto darkening welding helmet does not darken when pointed at the sun. Had to get out the old one with just a dark lens in it.

Buy? Who sad anything about buying? I was going to make a drill. Frosty, thanks for the tip about the copper. Julian, that is how they have been done for many centuries, not my idea so please do go for it. Huh, 3 pm and it is getting dark outside. Wonder what is going on?

Goods, i also like to look at the background of photos and sometimes ask about stuff in the background. As far as function they work quite well. I made some similar for my bathroom but rather than spirals they have leaves on the ends. Got my rock prepared to drill, got my lead ready to melt, got my hammer drill ready to... well, drill. Then come to find out that i do not have a drill large enough for the legs. My biggest is 1/2" and the legs are made of 1/2" square bar. So the boot scraper will have to be put off till next weekend.

Finished and put a handle on the tomahawk i made, can definitely tell it has been a while. Had to reshape the eye. Ordered some handles and they are oval rather than teardrop shaped. Then i made a couple towel holders and a boot scraper. The rock is what i am going to mount the boot scraper in. Today i will drill the holes and pour the lead. Please ignore the mess on my bench...

Just doing a youtube search on "making charcoal" came up with dozens of videos making charcoal the primitive way. From huge mounds like Frosty mentions to much smaller scale about the size of an average camp fire, maybe 3 feet tall.

If you have the space you do not need a barrel or any kind of container. Charcoal used to be made by piling wood up then covering it with wet dirt, not quite mud but very wet. IIRC pile up the wood, then a layer of dried leaves, then mound it all in wet dirt. Leave 4 air holes in the bottom, light the fire through the holes. When it is going good seal up the holes. again if i recall correctly i do not think you even need a vent hole in the top after it starts burning good. Next morning crack it open and you have charcoal.

Stair railing for a motorcycle shop.

The weld actually came out better than i wanted. I had to actually work the bit end apart little by little with a chisel to get the bit in. I can usually just pop the initial weld apart in my vise with a chisel. Nice fork and spatula, are the handles curved or is just a heavy chamfer giving it the look of being curved?

Expecting some weather tonight so the cancelled my shift at work today. That means a free day in the shop to me. So i made a tomahawk/belt axe. Still a bit thick started with 1/4" x 1 1/2", want to draw more of a "beard" into it. 1018 flat with a 1095 bit, 1/4 x 3/4. Edit: forgot to add, it has been a long time since i made an axe of any sort so this was just a aint done one in a while kind of thing.

Being one of those crazy preppers i just so happen to have a steel pot. I keep t in a go bag along with my gas mask and MOPP suit. Here it is with the liner taken out. When i was in we had the kevlar helmets. So to heat water and the like we used a canteen cup. Try taking a bath in one of thse sometime. However being on an Abrams tank we could just start the tank and heat water on the exhaust vents of the turbine engine.

Welcome aboard. I did a couple stints with the 3rd ID in Germany and the 1st Cav in Tx. 19K, M1 tanker. I got out before retirement becuase of the politics. I think there are several reasons as to why we do this. Order from chaos, attention to detail, strict discipline, etc. Smithing has also one other thing in common with the which i think comes more into play than many other things. In the military one thing that was driven into my head : Adapt, improvise, overcome.

Gideon come in with his eyes on the floor Says, "you ain't got a hinge, you can't close the door" ----------- I should have also said "or made".

What tool have you purchased that at first you thought may be good for a few things but has become one of the most used tools in your arsenal? So, for me it is my guillotine. I made my first one thinking it would be something that it would come in handy sometimes. I now have 3 and one has a home next to my anvil because just about everytime i work in the shop i use it for something.

I like that leaf. The way it is bent it reminds me of a fall leaf that is dried out on the branch. I am also kind of a minimalist so the few veins lines are appealing to me as well.

Frosty, i have now stolen that idea. I do ladles for camping that are similar. I make a ladle and instead of a handle make a cone shaped socket that a tree branch can be stuck into. Fits much better in camping gear than one with a handle. Interesting fact i learned many years ago. During the colonial period when armies used a flintlock, the bayonets with the round socket were more often used as candle holders or skewering sticks for cooking than they were used for combat. I make my hotdog sticks from a piece of 1/4" round. These are coming out at ~30" overall. I cut the bar at 36", draw out a but and square one end to twist and bend over for the handle. Here is one on a door for a size reference. I am really likig the brazed on forks. The one in the pick is just done and i have not ground off the excess.

Frosty, that is how i usually do carving forks as well. Takes a bit of time to draw out and i was looking for a quick way to get these done. Keep the price down, and they are 3' long so kinds wont have to get close to the fire when roasting their marshmellows. I also do my fire pokers now with either 1" or 3/4"x 1/4" flat bar. Instead of bending and welding the turkey foot i do an upset for it, like doing the tines of a fork but just one instead of 2, so that the spur comes out more of a "T" than a ">" shape. I think it looks much better and is not that much more difficult than the cut and bend method of doing pokers. I also love to forge braze. I find it mesmerizing watching the bronze flow into the joint.

Ok, Gewoon, what in the .... is that going to be? Work is good just trying to figure out what it is. I am thinking octopus or squid. Have un upcoming "new" (to me) craft show shindig. Not sure about the crowd that will be there and i am making i bit of everything to test the waters. I figured take a few hot dog/marshmallow sticks. To make the fork i decided to forge braze a fork with a "socket" on the end of a piece of 1/4" round.

I am to cheap to pay for the ad free as well. I usually bluetooth my phone to either the radio in my shop or my headphones at work and turn on Pandora. I just choose an artist i want to hear then they will play a song or 2 by them and then songs from similar artists. So it is a pretty good variety of music and commercials come about every 4 or 5 songs but they play in about 30 seconds. I can deal with that. I have watched some videos on youtube and i noticed lately that they will put a commercial right in the middle of a song. That is really annoying. Even live streams are getting commercials in them now. I only had one or 2 freinds that were musicians so i did not get to hang out with garage bands.

Went out for a smoke, got caught. Searched and they found my small bag of shrubbery along with a wad of $1 bills and some change. Possession with intent to distribute. That 366 hook thing is pretty cool. i finally got a chance to take a gander. BMTU, a hook is just a shape. Scrolls are just basically hooks. It is up to you the artist to figure how and where you want to use the shapes you have at your disposal. When i was really into drawing i used to say that no matter what it is that you are trying to draw it is just a whole bunch of straight lines. It is the artist that determines size and placement of those lines. Even if you are drawing a circle it is still just a whole bunch of very small straight lines set at different angles. Aint giving up on you either cuase we, or at least me, do not want to see you give up on yourself.

One of the guys from Green Day said it best once, "The radio is stuck on suck". I do have to say though that in this digital age i have turned off the radio and turned on more streaming music. I have been turned on to a lot of bands that i provably would have never heard of otherwise. I have said this before but where i lived the first years of my life was in the backwoods of KY, a county of 3,500 people. But we gave you Loretta Lynn, Crystal Gale, and Chris Stapleton. I suggest turning this one up.

The funding here is done by daily attendance. There are 2 weeks out of the school year that head counts are taken and what ever the average number is determines how much the school gets. But yeah do not get me started on how our schools are run. Anyway that is flying pretty close to a taboo subject, politics, so that is all i will say about that. I could have chosen a much easier drawing like an office building with nice shrubbery ( with a few knights who say "ni" near by) but no, i chose the hardest of the bunch. I just ordered some drafting tools yesterday. Got a new architects ruler and a small French curve set, but i was amazed at how cheap things have gotten. Back in high school i mowed lawns and raked leaves to to raise $35 for the pencil i bought. That was the 80's, so what would that be now like $100? Today i can buy 10 pencils for that. I averaged about a B but like i said almost all art classes and if you fail art there is something really wrong with you. I did have a few credits in English, math, and science. I also took 2 semesters of Latin. Languages was also a required subject. French, Spanish, or Latin was our choices. Our English classes were broke down into sub classes. I took poetry and plays, mythology, novels and short stories. Best class i ever took was called practical math, it taught us how to do things like balance the check book, figure taxes, and stuff you use math for everyday. I forgot history, my world history teacher was a women who was about 90 years old, or seemed at the time, strict old lady too. She had been to more countries and traveled all the time so she not only taught the history but also gave us first hand experience of her time visiting places she was teaching about. I have went on enough about that but one more thing. My science teacher was also female. She was a senior my freshman year at my high school. My last year i was in school, the 5th year, she had gotten her degree and got hired at her old school. Well, we knew each other from being in school together so that was kind of awkward situation at first. If anyone would like i could tell the story of how my freshman year, to set my reputation in high in stone, i was arrested and escorted by the police out of the school in handcuffs.

I took 3 semesters of drafting. The plane was my choice as my final project for the class. When i was in high school i kind of fell through the cracks. I took not only drafting but 3 semesters of ceramics, drawing, industrial arts (photography, printing, etc.), wood shop, metals shop, foods (cooking) etc. When i dropped out of high school my final year i needed 18 credits to graduate, i had 19 or 19.5 but becuase i did not have enough credits in English, math, and science i would have spent 2 more years in high school to get them. I was 18, going into my second junior year, so i joined the Army.