George N. M.

"It is kind of odd but being in a war is both some of the best memories of my life and some of the worst. " Billy, truer words were never spoken/written. The other odd thing is how fresh the good and bad memories remain. Some of my memories of Viet Nam feel like they are only a couple of years old when, in reality, they have been in my head for over half a century. And memories of smells and tastes remain very clear. The memory of the taste of C rations or LRP rations (Long Range Patrol rations, freeze dried) is like something I ate a few days ago. GNM

The US Department of Labor's inflation calculator only goes back to 1913. $14 in 1913 equal $446.19 in March, 2024. So, that vise was definitely an expensive one when new. Cool family story. I don't know if I could tolerate the thickness of the air at 79', particularly when you add the humidity and the heat. I'll stay here up on the hill, thank you. Better thee than me. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

One of the big uses of sand is to prop open the cracks created by high pressure in fracking to increase oil and gas recovery. The cracks in the reservoir rock are created by high pressure and then a sand slurry is pumped in to hold the cracks open when the pressure is released. Some of the best sand is produced along the Mississippi River in MN, WI, and IA. And the deposits are becoming depleated. Also, some alluvial sand and sandstone is unsuitable for some uses because of trace minerals. The sand and river gravel around here is unsuitable for making concrete because it has a small amount of volcanic rocks in it which have an origin in the headwaters of the Laramie River about 60 miles away in Colorado. The volcanic rocks react with the cement in the concrete and cause it to crack and weather prematurely. Sand used in glass making has to be very pure and much of any other minerals as trace constituents make it unsuitable. GNM

Welcome aboard from 7500' in SE Wyoming. Glad to have you. It would help if you put your general location in your profile. This is a world wide forum and we don't know if you are in St.Petersburg, Russia, St. Petersburg, Alaska, or the middle of the Amazon Basin. Very nice vise. I don't think I've ever seen one with a cam and handle rather than a screw. I can't help with ID but there may be someone here who can. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

Welcome aboard from 7500' in SE Wyoming. Glad to have you. As you can tell, there seem to be a higher percentage of veterans on IFI than in the general population. We've got all the wars from Viet Nam on and all branches of the military covered. Yes, blacksmithing is great therapy for whatever ails you. I've been at it since 1977 and it has helped me through the rough times and made the good times better. I recommend it for most everyone. George LTC, US Army (Ret) late of 1/C/1/12 Cav, 1 Cav Div (Air mobile), Republic of Viet Nam, 1970-71

Billy, you may have found an ammonite that was buried quickly enough that the ctitter's soft parts were preserved. In life an ammonite looked like a modern nautalus, a squid with its tail stuffed into a shell. Some have straight, cone shaped shell but many have coiled shell, like a snail. Hence the name. The shells are supposed to look like the coiled ram's horns of the Egyptian god Amun/Ammon. I've seen some that are completely replaced by pyrite and have a spectacular gold/brass color. G PS To bad about your geologist ex. MY experience has been that geologists make good partners.

Definitely a recovering geologist. It's one day at a time and you're never completely cured. Whenever I get an urge to make a map or hit a rock with a hammer I call someone up and they talk me out of it. "Hi, my name is George and I'm a geologist." (applause) "I've gone 27 days without hitting a rock with a hammer." (more applause) Unfortunately, Martha, my late wife, and I were codependent since she was also a geologist (and an attorney). On the other hand it has been an interesting and useful field of expertise. I was hired for a couple of legal jobs which involved regulation of the oil and gas industry because of my geology background. In hearings I was the oil and gas industry's and the invronmenalists' worse nightmare, someone who was advising the legislators who knew about the industry and could see past the smoke and mirrors. "What a long, strange journey it has been." G

I had a friend in law school who had previously worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. It was a union shop and you had to belong to a union but it wasn't specified which union. For some reason my friend had a grudge about the regular railroad unions. So, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka Wooblies) which are still an active organization. That satisfied his union membership requirement. The IWW did have good songs. They say you aren't a real radical unless you know ALL the verses to "The Red Flag." GNM PS Here is a link to the IWW's website: https://www.iww.org/

FL Man, I hadn't given spontaneous combustion much thought and I have never heard of it happening on a blacksmith level. I have done some research and it is a murky and complex subject without a lot of clear indications of what to do or not to do. Here are some facts that I have been able to gather, in no particular order: -Some coals are more prone to SC than others. Some coal seams have experienced SC in situ when exposed to atmospheric oxygen. Generally, it seems that lower grade coals such as peat, brown coal, lignite, and sub-bituminous coals which have a higher volitile content are more subject to SC. -The finer the pieces of coal the more chance there is for interaction with atmospheric oxygen and more likelihood of SC. -Larger piles of coal (hundreds or thousands of tons) seem to be more subject to SC because the centers of the piles are more well insulated. It seems to me that in blacksmithing contexts and back when many homes had coal furnaces (amounts of a few tons at maximum) that spontaneous combustion is a pretty low risk but not zero. I have only heard of it happening in the context of large coal storage piles and steam ship coal bunkers (it is probable that the USS Maine blew up in 1898 due to a coal bunker fire overheating an adjacent magazine). I'd like to hear if anyone has any stories of SC occuring in blacksmith or home coal piles. GNM

The coal advice is true for most everything. If you find something you really like/need, buy two or more because they will stop making it. Buy as much coal as you can afford, haul, and have room to store inside. It will last forever inside. Do not store it out in the weather, water and freeze/thaw cycles will cause it to "slake." That is, break down into smaller and smaller pieces until you just have a pile of black, coarse sand. It will still burn but not as well and the coking ability will probably be reduced. GNM

Billy, just print out or email the gold panning posts to your friend and let him do with the information as he will. Or, keep it to yourself if you have been bitten by the gold bug. BTW, don't eat the potato. Yes, as Frosty says, metallic mercury isn't particularly dangerous but some folk go nutso about it. When my son was in elementary school a kid brought in a vial of mercury that he had brought back from a trip to Mexico and, of course, it got broken and spilled. They closed the school and brought in a hazmat team to clean it up. An over reaction IMO. G

There is always more money to be made by mining the miners than mining the earth. Also, mining the investors can be rewarding. The mining millionaires usually sold out at the right time, reinvested and sold out again, wash, rinse, repeat. Very few miners or prospectors ended up wealthy. G

One trick is to pan where there is natural turbulance like the bottom of a waterfall or rapids where the river naturally separates out the light fraction and concentrates the heavy minerals. I was once teaching some folk how to pan and there was a nearby irrigation ditch which came through a culvert under a road with about a 4' drop out of the culvert. It turned out that the little sand bar/beach at the bottom of the plunge pool was about 40% garnets (sand sized but garnets are heavy). Having a dark red tail in the pan was kind of cool. No real use for garnet sand but a good illustration of how Ma Nature does gravity separation. G

PS Gold panning can be a fun hobby, like blacksmithing or metal detecting, where it MAY pay for itself but if you think you are going to get rich you probably have a better chance if you buy lottery tickets. BUT, there is always a chance. Frosty probably has some insights into the realities of gold panning.

Billy, nice work. What kind of steel did you use? Tell him that this is from an old Wyoming geolgist who has used a gold pan fairly often over the years. A gold pan is only an exploration tool. Once you find a place that is promising you set up a sliuce, rocker, long tom, or something else, Trying to do production work with a pan is very hard work, particularly for someone whose knees aren't what they once were. You spend a lot of time in the squatting position working in cold water. Not a lot of fun. I have always liked metal pans better than plastic. They hold up better and you can use them for cooking if necessary. Putting gun blue on a steel pan helps with the color contrast. I'm afraid that there aren't many placer gold locations very close to Ohio. North Carolina is about the closest and that is mostly private land. There are some beach deposits around Lake Superior but, again, there is the land ownership issue. I used a gold pan more for sampling heavy mineral suites to trace hard rock deposits upstream than to try to extract gold although I have panned out some colors. There is a place here, near Laramie, where you have a decent chance of finding placer platinum. GNM

Physically, my old neighborhood on the south side of Chicago has changed very little. However, socially, economically, and ethnically it has changed considerably. When I grew up in the '50s and '60s it was predominately Jewish (we were some of the non-Hebraic folk) but in the '70s there was classic White flight to the suburbs and the neighborhood became predominately Black. The area is now socially and economically lower down the scale. Rappers have referred to it as "Terror Town" but that is mostly hyperbole. Kanaye West lived about 3 blocks from me when he was growing up. All the small shops that were family owned in my time are gone but some of that is due to the decline of local neighborhood shopping all over (no Walmarts, or big boxes back in the day). Interestingly enough, the last time I was there, about 10 years ago, the street I lived on (South Shore Drive, aka US Highway 41) looked as good or better than it did when I was a kid (more security fences and gates, though). It is right along the Lake Michigan shoreline and has higher end, older apartment buildings and single family homes. I am told that the folk who live there today are largely "buppies" (Black Urban Professionals). The further away from the Lake you get the rougher things appear. Here in Laramie I am living where it was just short grass prairie in the '60s when I was in college. My house was built in '77. The town has expoanded about a mile or so out to the east in the last 50-60 years. That said, we still have pronghorn antelope wandering through the front yard. GNM

Most of the slave states that did not secede (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) abolished slavery on their own before the adoption of the 14th Amendment. They saw which way the wind was blowing and although initially the Civil War was mainly about reuniting the Union it gradually became a federal war aim to abolish slavery. Techically, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed those slaves which were in areas controlled by the Confederacy as of January 1, 1863. Legally, it did not affect the states that did not secede or those areas of the Confederate States which were under Union control as of that date. In actual practice, slavery pretty much became a dead letter any where Union Armies had control at that time, e.g. much of Tennessee, southern Louisiana, coastal enclaves along the Atlantic coast, and parts of northern Virginia. As the Union GNM

Almost certainly slag. The vesicles (bubbles), the shiney black surface, and the sharp edges on the face nearest the camera indicate a high silica (glassy) slag. Slag was used for a lot of things including fill for canal and railroad embankments but often only when transportation costs made it cheap because it was inferior to natural rock or gravel. It was lower quality because it was more brittle in use and would break up more easily than natural rock and was also lighter in weight which meant the fill could shift more easily. Like Frosty says, it could have just fallen off a wagon. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand." Because Maryland was not in rebellion slavery in that state was unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery in Maryland was abolished by a new state Constitution effective November 1, 1864. Surprisingly enough Delaware was also a slave state in the 1860s. Maryland had 87,189 slaves in the 1860 census, about 12.6% of the total population. Here is a link that gives the breakdown by county: http://slavery.msa.maryland.gov/html/research/census1860.html Interestingly enough, the Black population of Maryland in 2020 was about the same percentage as slaves in 1860. GNM

Clinker is an independent variable from other characteristics of coals because it is a function of how much outside sediment was deposited in the coal swamp along with the plant debris. You can have a very low BTU value brown coal (one step above peat) or lignite which has little clinker and you can have a very dirty (clinkery) anthracite. Agglomeration (coking) is a different variable which depends on the geologic history of the coal after it was deposited. Coals often get mined because of one particular quality being desirable for a particular usage. For example, the western sub-bituminous coals which are mined in large quantities in Wyoming and Montana, mostly for use in power plants, is known as EPA (Environmental Protection Act) coal because it is low sulphur coal. It is lower in BTU contenet than the bituminous coals of the mid-continent or Appalachia but the low sulphur content means that it can be burned without using expensive scrubbers to remove the S02 from the exhaust gases. This needs to be done to minimize acid rain down wind from the power plant. So, millions of tons of coal is mined in the Western US and shipped to power plants in places like Texas or Iowa even though there are closer coal deposits because it makes compliance with the EPA cheaper. So, there is no "true coal." Everything is a trade off of different variables. There are good coals for blacksmithing (harder to find these days) which have a good balance of heat value, coking ability, low impurities (clinker), and, of course, reasonable price. Most of us have to settle for what we can find in our area and can afford. There are occurences of natural coke. There is a place in Western Colorado where a coal bed is cross cut by a later igneous dike. Of course, close to the hot igneous magma the coal is burnt up but there is a zone further out where the heat baked the coal and formed natural coke. I don't think it is mined any longer but was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And, yes, you can see my old geologist background showing through. I once almost worked for Peabody Coal. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

Definite improvement. It can be surprising how much some finish work can improve a project. one suggestion: For the next iteration I suggest drawing out the ends of the X and turning them up 90 degrees to avoid the possibility of a pot sliding off the edge. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

Nice score. There are probably internet tutorials on how to use the other scales rather than just the C and D scales (multiplication). The trick is keeping the decimal point straight. G

Another good quote and applicable to blacksmithing is one which has been attributed to Hippocrates (5th-4th century BC), Geoffery Chaucer (1382, and used on a fireplace by Gustav Stickley (early 20th century): "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." (using Chaucer's language). "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

Did you draw it out by hand or did you use a power/treadle hammer. I agree with Frosty that a sharper point and smoother sides would improve its performance. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

Since the video was recorded at about 1.5 speed (at least the forging portion) all the audio sounded like chipmunks. Do you have any details on where and when this was recorded? GNM

I think this is going on in either India or Pakistan. I'm impressed at how accurately they were able to forge it down, apparently by eye. These guys have done this before, at least once or twice :-). I suspect that watching this video would give an OSHA inspector the colly wobbles. I was impressed by the coordination of the boss/master smith in the brown garment and the crew. Everyone knew exactly what to do and what everyone else was doing. "By hammer and hand all arts do stand."