Donal Harris

Moving back to the primary thread topic, one of the several ways I’ve paid the bills over the years was as a meat cutter. Used to be a reasonably steady source of income no matter what town you might be moving through, till Walmart decided pre-packaged meat was a way to put more money in their pockets. Anyway, our assistant market manager at the Winn Dixie in Marianna, Florida had been careless when cutting frozen pig feet. Cut his right index finger off the second joint. They were able to reattach it, but it caused it to be permanently fixed in place. It just kind of stuck out. He really had to pay attention anytime he used the bandsaw after that, especially since he no longer had any feeling in it at all. Although I suppose that would have been sort of a blessing had he cut it off again. His fault was the same as mine had been each and every time I’ve been stupid and hurt myself. You do something so many times you get to thinking about other things while working. That or trying to use a piece of equipment while someone has come over and I am too busy talking to pay attention to what I am doing. I suspect the same is true for just about every injury anyone here has had in their shop. I am just more easily distracted than most. Naw, he would need to lose three more if my math is right. He would still have his ten toes.

It was just a video I didn’t want to first post to YouTube. Any other way of doing it

I think I will try brown shoe polish applied while the BLO is a little worm from a torch. Left blade is the one to go in the remaining antler for some reason, a bubble appeared during quenching. I heated it bac up and welded it flat the remaining two pictures are of the smaller blade right side left side the handle will be short, but I see it as more of a boning knife when using a boning knife my pointer finger rests along the blade to control the tip my other three fingers remain on the handle. Hopefully one of the guys at Byron’s shop today can give me a few tips The last pic is proof positive Millennials can work

It had two drops One larger and one smaller. I soaked them both for 24 hours in BLO. I left them to dry on a box outside the garage. Now I have just one. I assume some dog or critter decided to take one. I am not happy with the color. It was whitish, now it looks like what I imagine a corpse would look like after a week in the creek. What can I do about the color?

So you have always lived there?

When did your family move there?

One thing which kept running through my mind today as I was forging was the song by Sir Mix A Lot, “I like big xxxxx and I cannot lie….” Except for me it was, I like big pots and I cannot lie You other brothers can’t deny When another smith walks in with an itty bitty pot you know that he is whipped. His girl said,”No! Ya don’t need it That itty bitty pot will do just fine.” And then I draw a blank. IMG_6535.MOV

Started punching the hole today. Two passes through, started with a thin round punch about 3/8” at the widest point. Then moves to on just a little thicker. Tomorrow I will go thicker still. That dark spot of delamintate I will likely just grind off. It isn’t thick and I have been fighting it from the beginning.

Nice blacksmiths knife. Looks good. Trimmed one of the blade forms and welded all the bad spots again on the small blade. I also began shaping the general profile. On the larger one I put it back in the forge and gave another go at welding up the de-laminations on the edges. It seemed to weld this time. No cracks. The red line beside the one is to indicate what looks like a split, but is not. It is actually the edge of the file sticking out past the edges of the WI taco.

Sweet!!!!

I play electric guitar to backing tracks through pedals and an amp simulator. Headphones only. The sound would drive the neighbors crazy. I am terribad at it. If Clapton is God, that makes me a spider. I’ve always known picks are celluloid, old ones anyway. And I’ve always known celluloid is highly combustible. Like old timey film. It is celluloid and will burn down a theater quickly if you are not careful. My baby brother and I used to play Army. I was always the Germans. David always wanted to play the Americans, specifically Patton. Being the oldest, it was always my pick and I picked Germany. Was fun. We used celluloid shavings and wax coated string to sabotage gun batteries and trains. To light them, we just used one of Mom’s lighters. For fat wood, look in the crooks and stumps of dead pine trees.

You will need to put some other type of steel in the middle of the welds. 5160 apparently doesn’t like to weld to itself.

Or come back and let us know you dithered too long and it was already gone. I am the GOAT at that.

If you have pine trees in your area, you can probably find “real” fat wood. I just make my own. I split scrap lumber into thin strips about 1/4” to 3/8” thick. I then soak them in very hot, melted wax outside in a crock pot for a couple of hours. The wax I get from garage sales. There are always a lot of old, ugly looking candles for sale at them. You can get them for almost nothing. Although with COVID kind of shutting them down, last time I bought a block of paraffin wax at Hobby Lobby. If you want something which burns very hot and fast, find old celluloid guitar picks at flea markets and such. Shavings of them burn very hot. I’ve considered adding the shavings to the fat wood as the wax dries, but have yet to do so. Old guitar picks and wax soaked twine can be used as components of a lightweight emergency fire starting kit for use during the future zombie apocalypse.

Finally got up the courage to cut the antlers a neighbor gave me several months ago. I left them about a half inch longer than I expected they would need to be in order to have some extra to play with when getting the angle right. I am not quite sure how far down in the antler the tang needs to be in order to be stable. In the first photo the red mark indicates roughly where I expect to start the cuts for the tangs. The yellow mark on the one on the right indicates about where I expect to remove material all down the length to remove most of the de-lamination and split WI. This one did not quite go as I had hoped it might. Unlike the one on the left, which was made from an old file sandwiched between two strips of WI the same size as the file, the one on the right is a file placed in the middle of a WI “taco”. I did not have the WI hot enough and it cracked and split. The bottom two photos are the top and bottom edges of the “blade” on the left. The photo in the middle shows a spot on the top edge which didn’t quite weld well. It I may try once more to get welded. The photo at the bottom is of what will eventually be the cutting edge. There is much more de-lamination on this side. I am hoping they will grind away when I put an edge on the blade. Attempting to weld them again would likely be a waste of time. I should have ground off the teeth of the file before trying to weld the pieces together. I probably should have tried making a blade from just steel alone first instead of trying to go straight to san mai first.

JLP makes very good instructional videos as well. She doesn’t speak in most of them, which is regrettable, but she has written comments on all of them explaining what she is doing. This is Part 1 of a video of her making “preforms”. She also has a short version for people with short attention spans.

Ductile iron likely suffers from being associated in people's minds with normal cast iron. That and having heard so much talk of cheap Chinese cast iron anvils. Fairly common problem with other things. A good example is the Ford Taurus vs the Ford Tempo. The Taurus was a fairly decent car while the Tempo was awful. People would get the two confused or would think the Taurus was just a bigger Tempo.

You were in the Navy?

Not likely. This will be the first conference I’ve attended. Life always seems to happen on that weekend and I have to miss it. Last year it was COVID. The year before that it was golf with a friend in Dallas. But assuming nothing happens this year, I plan to be there. Hopefully Brent will be doing a class after. If so, I plan to take the class. On the subject of “fire starters”, I fold a small bit of cardboard into a tube. I twist one piece of newspaper and wrap it around the base of the tube. I place coke around the outside of the tube to hold it in place and upright. I then insert a strip of artificial “fat wood” at the inside corners of the tube. I then take another piece of newspaper and tear it into about four pieces. I crumple them into balls. I stuff the balls into the folded cardboard tube with layers of coke between each ball. This is way more complicated than it really needs to be. But it is a fairly reliable way to get a fire started. If I have no coke from a previous fire (or it got soaked from a rain), I squirt a little mineral spirits down the tube.

Beautiful place. Fishing or no.

Do people go bass fishing there I wonder?

Didn’t get to work in the shop/back corner of the yard today. Spent the day watching Godzilla and zombie movies with the grandkids. Closest I got was swimming with them in the pool, but I guess that could count, since I sometimes cool hot iron down in it.

Thanks. Reading about them has almost been like reading a journal article where the authors are using a lot of jargon and acronyms which they assume the reader is already familiar with.

But no tsunami this time at least.

It is hard to say. I was pretty little then. It was almost as long as I was tall, so probably a little longer than a baseball bat. Your guess is the most likely. He had a machete as well, so it was likely something he used for clearing brush. Now I am thinking something like it might prove to be handy in the almost inevitable, future zombie apocalypse.