Donal Harris

It will be a few days before I’m back at it. I was working on a handle and the knife slipped and cut a 1” gash in my wrist. No nerves or tendons cut. It bled quite a bit. I just held it till it quit bleeding and then taped it closed. I thought about super glue, but decided against it.

The only Facebook game I’ve found worthwhile is a Pool game. Fairly realistic physics. I can’t play it any better than the real thing. Not sure where to go next. Each file is less than a megabyte, but for some reason they total up to 4MB. Sorry. The pictures are not the best quality, but maybe people can tell enough from them. Do I need to continue taking it to a welding heat and hitting it to make sure it is solidly welded? What about the “proud” area along one side? Grind it flat to avoid a cold shut? If it is actually solidly welded, I will cut off the piece I drew out of the middle rod for something to grab onto and disrupt the blank lengthwise to get it a little thicker. The three bars I began with weighed 2.818 lb. As it stands now, they weigh 2.269 lb. I lost quite a bit of mass due to how many times it has been in the fire. It is to thin and too long at present and not even remotely square.

Speaking of shedding your clothing, I once ran over a fire ant mound with my mower. Everything was fine for a bit, but then I felt something crawling on me and saw a few ants on my pants. I jumped off the mower and stripped down to nature and began brushing the ants off. My wife wasn’t too happy about it. “What must the neighbors have thought!!!” The last thing on my mind was the neighbors. If the neighbors had had fire ants roaming around down there, I expect they would have stripped down and danced too. Finally got the rods welded yesterday. The first two were easy. The third one was a bear. It finally occurred to me I could just tack weld it in place and then forge weld it. Much, much easier.

Amazon = Bezos Google = Larry Page & Sergey Brin But six of one.......

Ha! I didn’t see that. It does look like a dragon’s head. The first two pieces welded up fine. When I tried to weld the 3rd piece alongside, one end stuck well, the other hasn’t. Would flux help, or just more heat?

Thanks. Burned one a nipple on my shirt. It had gotten quite hot and I didn’t realize it. When I shifted my weight, the shirt brushed my left nipple. No tears were shed, but It was bloody close.

Forge welded three of the square rods into what is essentially now a flat bar. The rod in the middle I forged out a bit longer so I have something to hold on to. Was fairly easy. Now to notch and fold it back over onto itself and weld that.

Aluminum conduit. Makes sense now. I’ve had one of those garden things, the name of which escapes me now, for a number of years. The handle being detachable has irritated me for as long as I’ve owned it. It is constantly getting wiggly. Someday I plan to weld it on.

Why the removable handle?

This is going to be harder than I thought. I came out today to finish squaring up the first rod and hopefully get the rest ready to weld. What I had first thought was scale isn’t scale.

So far I still don’t have even one rod taken to square yet. The one is mostly square, but it was a very hot afternoon and I had trouble with sweat in my eyes. That and I couldn’t control the hammer well. What would have been just a small mark to smooth out was often very deep with WI. I wasn’t expecting that. But after seeing the rather “rough” state of the the hammer in the first pics above, I think I may be letting perfect be the enemy of good. What I understand from your pics is I just need to get it “close enough” during welding and then worry about getting it pretty in later steps. And it is one of the much later steps I need to be worried about anyway. I may get all the way to the forge welding the steel face and peen step and never get it to stick. Maybe by tomorrow night I can at least get all the rods to square.

When I was a young and not very bright tech, I used to play with the dry ice. Nothing was cooler (PI) than dry ice, alcohol, and a latex glove very early in the morning on night shift. Take a bit of alcohol and a couple of nuggets of dry ice. Put both inside a glove and tie a knot in the open end of the glove. Sneak the glove under your phlebotomist’s desk, then lean back in your chair and wait for the show. For some reason they never found it nearly as funny as I did.

I’m going to start working it this evening. Wish me luck And I certainly appreciate all the help.

Exactly my thought when I first learned who was booked fo be there. Bill told me it has been canceled. Very disappointing. Although I suppose if we were to promise to participate in a little civil unrest during the event, everything would be fine.

Thank you. All the videos and articles seem to be just talking about a different way to get an interesting pattern in pattern welded steel, but would the construction of the billet be essentially the same? This is likely a silly question, but do you have to be as concerned about cold shuts with WI as you do mild steel?

Should any SCABA members see this, what would you say the odds are of this year’s conference being canceled. Especially with Oklahoma now becoming more of a COVID-19 hot zone with each passing day. Our lab in Norman’s 7 day rolling average percentage of positive specimens is just a bit over 8% now. Just prior to the ending of the lockdown our rate was at about 1%. Our 7 day rolling average number of positive tests is very nearly a straight vertical line. Friday we had 40 positive PCR tests. The average number of positive results is a meaningless number because we are testing more patients, but the rise in the percentage of positive specimens indicates the situation.in Norman is getting worse and the increase is not a simple function of increased testing. We are averaging 400 per day now and from the rate orders are increasing, that number will very likely be 500 per day within a couple of weeks, especially if we begin testing specimens for OU as we have for the City, a few local businesses, and one of the larger churches in town. I ordered 30,000 NP swabs for collection kits today. If our current volume wore to remain stable at 400 per day that would last maybe 75 days, but it won’t. It will maybe last 60 if we are lucky. I will place another order on Monday before this vendor’s swab supply is exhausted. As for actual test kits, we have 3,800 on hand, but are bumping our par levels for that to 20,000. So far we have managed to maintain an 8 hour average turn around time for PCR testing while other labs are doing good to turn out results within 72 hours. It would of course require a trip to Norman, but we are performing antibody testing without physician orders at just a little over our incremental costs for testing if patients pay cash at the time their specimens are collected. $31 for antibody testing and $65 for PCR testing. Patients can get tests without orders if they pay cash at many pharmacies, but they seem to be primarily interested in profit. Homeland for example charges $85 dollars for an antibody test. We felt profiting off of panic was just not ethical. We see offering the tests as being more of a community service. Profiting off of elective procedures is one thing. Doing so off of this event is quite another thing entirely. All this to ask a question no one really knows the answer to. Is it still on? Something someone is much more likely to know is, are the two demonstrators still scheduled to come or have they they canceled? I was excited and really looking forward to seeing both of them. It is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but to me seeing their names on the schedule was almost like learning the Stones were coming to town.

I hate to somewhat necro this thread, but it is a subject of great interest to me presently. JLP, do you still think that punch you described is best for avoiding splitting. Do you have pics of it or is it in any of your videos? I haven’t watch all, and for some reason wasn’t paying attention to the profiles of the punches in your hammer videos. Both you and Thomas mention the “jelly roll”. It sounds as if you have found it make splitting more likely to happen?

I can forge weld, but am never certain if it is going to actually work. About a year ago I learned a set of tongs I never used because the shape just never suited me is wrought iron. I cut a small piece from one of the reins and folded it over and welded it onto itself several times. That was easy. I am a little worried about splintering when working on the wrought iron body of the hammer, but getting from the rods to a solid mass is something I feel won’t cause me problems, especially once I learned on another member’s recent thread about his hammer and that of JLP’s. I was concerned about cracks and they said what looked like cracks really were not. My main concern is getting steel to stick to the wrought iron. Jennifer makes it appear easy in her video, but I don’t expect it to be so for me. I will look into the jelly roll. When I was a kid I used to read a series of books my dad had that belonged to my great grandad. They were basically sort of an encyclopedia of everything someone would need to know how to be able to do in 1910 or so, from building a house to basic blacksmithing. Those books are gone. Dad doesn’t even remember having them. I like that people here are so willing to help. You all are basically those books and more. One of the things in the books was punching and drifting a hole in a hammer head. It seemed like almost an impossible thing to do. I have no real need to do so now. I could certainly purchase a custom made hammer much better than one I could make from many people here and elsewhere online. (And at $25 dollars for 7 lbs of wrought iron and likely having to mangle at least 21 - 28 lbs. of it before I get a useable hammer, cheaper as well.)

But what was it in its former life?

Hot and sticky work.

Jennifer, What was your parent stock here, if that is the proper term.

The storm blew down four fence panels. No fun for me today. Gotta get them back up. If not, one of the neighbor kids will find the pool and drown. It is a rough neighborhood for toddlers. 3 killed if 4 years. One drowned a block down the road last week. Last year a woman ran over a 3 year old on her tricycle. The 1st was before we moved into the neighborhood, so I am unsure what happened their. With the drowning last week, the owner was certain a 3 year old would not be able to figure out the latch. He was wrong.

I agree that is the correct pronunciation. It just sounds wrong to me. Sort of wimpy. Coyotes are anything but.

Sounds like the way someone from the city or Hollywood would say it.

Coyote. How do you pronounce it? Kai-ow-tee, Kai-ow-dee, Kai-yo-tee, Kai-yo-dee, or the pronunciation used by those who raised me....... Kai-oat