Donal Harris

Gotta melt the forge before 8 can use it. 

On 1/28/2022 at 3:32 PM, Grouser said:

I scored a bucket of balls from a ball mill. They weren't forged,, I just drilled a hole through it slipped it on,,, kind of disappointing huh

Not disappointing at all. We use what we have. No need to make a ball when one is at hand. 
 

This is what I plan to work on in the shop this afternoon. It is two failed WI Christmas ornaments. I forge welded them together to make them thicker. But rather than rescue them, I’ve now decided to go for a small neck-knife instead. One or the other of the small file pieces will be the steel sandwiched inside. I hope to end up with something leaf shaped with a cutting edg on one side and a false edge on the other. (Cutting edges on both sides would be illegal I think. Handle will either be UV darkened bois d’arc or bone. Or perhaps antler. 

Do those magnets at HF which have a switch work?

This is the tree frogs we have around here. 
 

John, how did you manage to drift that opener without it splitting?  I tried once. One half of it I ended up using for the coffee scoop I finished last week. 
 

No shop for me the past few days. It is too far from the toilet. I’ve been rotating my time between my bed and the bathroom. No fever, but cannot get warm even beneath a pile of quilts. Could be worse I guess. The stomach cramps are bad, but no vomiting. 

Cool scepter, Grouser. How did you form the ball on the end? If I were to make a scepter for my grandkids that ball would be functional. It would keep the girl from skewering the boy. 

I’ve never made handles for anything other than hammers, Jobtiel. I expect an axe or hatchet handle would be more difficult.  I think you did well with it.  When I finish the two hatchets I cut stock for earlier this week, I plan to use flame maple. Not the best handle material, but it sure looks cool. 
 

This is what I did yesterday evening. Still deciding on coloring for the letters. (They still need to be cleaned up anyway. Very raggedy.) I will finish it with bees wax. It holds exactly two tablespoons of water. I believe that is a good size. 
 

Cleaned up the face of one of my HF hammers. Looks like I will need to retire it. 

Welder, Blue. That head looks nothing like a hippo and you aren’t in a competition. Even if you were, you could enter it in the open instead of traditional class. 
 

That bear looks to be a happy fellow, SHC. Nice knife. Too bad a USA made Crescent had to die though. They were good tools to have in a pinch. They would round off nuts if you weren’t careful, but nothing like the foreign made ones do today. 

I’ve seen a few coyotes which I thought were wolves around here, but my Dad told me they were just large coyotes or mixed. AFAIK, there are no coyotes in Oklahoma. We have a few mountain lions. Even in Grady and McClain Counties, but confirmed sightings are rare. Dad has come up on them a few times when quail hunting. 
 

Cold here in the house last night.  Lost all of our propane to a leak. Plumber may be able to make it out tomorrow. Hopefully he does. These milder temps won’t last long. I can shower at work, but sitting around with an electric blanket over me isn’t something I want to do. 
 

I wish I could find a non-Facebook link to the video, but can’t. It is at this year’s Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo. My nephew, Zach Phillips, is currently tied for 2nd in Bareback going into the second round. He scored 88 points. He missed a spur, but other than that it was a very clean ride. The horse performed great. Really gave him a challenge. 

Zach is currently 15th in the world and was for a time I think 2nd in the nation. Really a quality man. His rookie season he finished with a spiral fracture of one of his leg bones. I didn’t think he would come back from that, but he has. He and his wife live outside of Gillette, Wyoming. 
 

My Granny would tan our hides if she saw us kill a spider. They serve a purpose. You leave them alone and they will usually leave you alone. Just shake out your boots and gloves before you put them on, and be sure to check your sheets before crawling between them.

I was finally able to get out to the forge today. Got the bowl ready for a coffee scoop. Had trouble with the handle though. Same noob mistakes as always, but magnified because I was using WI. Forged the handle too thin and also tried to work it too cold. It split and cracked on me. 
 

I also cut a piece of leaf spring for hatchets.   I am not sure what that particular piece is called. It is the thicker, bottom spring. I had cut a 5” piece, thinking I would make another boy’s axe, but then decided on hatchets instead, and cut the piece in half. I may should have cut it into a 3” piece and just wasted the other two inches. At 1.6 lbs I didn’t leave much room for loss due to scale and screw ups. 
 

I also looked at proportional dividers on eBay. I wasn’t sure which to buy. Those with gears were not cheap. As for the rest, not knowing much about them, I couldn’t tell which were just cheap and which were good buys. 

On 1/14/2022 at 11:35 AM, SLAG said:

Folks,

In my experience, creativity was avoided at all costs and I.Q. was severely rationed, in the military.

SLAG.

 

That has likely been true at various times in the past, but certainly isn’t today. Creativity is an essential attribute of any successful leader as well as those they lead. It saves lives.

As for forging, it has been a while. We’ve been collecting at testing patients seven days a week from 0700 to 1900 since Omicron hit.  12 hour shifts or longer.  Short staffed.  
 

At first we had patients lined up out into the street waiting in their cars. The first few days we just could not keep up with demand, but now we are moving a patient every minute through our collection sites. The 7 day average positive rate is just over 43%. Hopefully it ends soon. If the wave here follows the same pattern as it did in South Africa, this will be in about two weeks.

On 1/10/2022 at 1:57 PM, ThomasPowers said:

D Harris; ever  know of a bull rider named Mark Larue from Cedarville AR?   Kinfolk of mine but he may be from a different era.

I was never a pro, so I knew no one outside the small group I catted around with in high school before I went in the Army. This was in the Donnie Gay era. There was a place in Sterling, Oklahoma that had a buck-out once a week. That is were we did most of our riding. Give the guy 10 bucks or so and he would put you on a bull. I rode in a few open events, but never covered any of the bulls I drew. The closest I ever got was in Cache, Oklahoma. 
 

One of my nephews though is a pro. He does bareback and saddle bronc.  He was raised in Hobbs and went to school on a rodeo scholarship in Wyoming.  I didn’t even know there was such.  He lives in Wyoming still with his wife.  This is him.

https://www.prorodeo.com/bio/contestant/zachariah-phillips/60149

On 1/10/2022 at 1:37 PM, George N. M. said:

D, is the nose a brass rivet

Copper ground wire, so essentially a rivet. Didn’t know that about Sweden. These are simple to make, although any others I do will be just normal mild steel from the scrap pile and not WI. 

This Saturday, my wife told me for what she said was the “last time!” that her kitchen is not my shop, so I stopped off at Goodwill on the way home and bought a small crockpot for $3. It isn’t big enough for much more than small things, but it beats having to find a new wife. 

1 hour ago, TWISTEDWILLOW said:

Mail call, I was hunting for some 2” steel balls the other day and Glenn an Stash had suggested a couple places to look, anyways UPS just ran so I got the last piece of the puzzle to start on a new project!

One of the antique stores in town sells these and smaller steel balls as “Civil War cannon balls and canister shot.”  They even have the battlefield they were dug from listed on the card. They are actually modern steel balls soaked in vinegar or muriatic acid and then allowed to rust in his backyard. 

When I was young, I rode bulls. We used rosin to make the rope and our glove tacky. We would grab up a few bits in our hand and then rub it up and down the rope. 
 

I hardened a couple of blades yesterday. One warped, but I was able to get it back to reasonably straight. Not nearly as cool as that cable Damascus, but if I can get the bevels ground and scales on, they may be serviceable. 
 

The only thing I finished was this WI and copper gnome. It turned out OK except for the lines of the cap. The next will be better I am sure. It is either a Christmas ornament or for my daughter’s keychain, assuming she can find her keys. She’s lost both sets. 

What materials?

LOL!

I was looking for cannon bones. For the past three years I’ve been asking everyone I know who hunts to save me a couple. This year my SIL finally did. I now have 20 of them. 4 are from a buck who was hit by a truck outside my parents’ gate. The rest he and my daughter harvested during bow season and right at the beginning of rifle season. 

Finally tried it. In copper though, not steel. Crude, but not bad I think for a first try. 

I have a small ball peen I use for texturing. I just put random lines in the face of it with a cutting disc and then banged it repeatedly into some steel to soften the edges of the cut grooves. I use a small sledge for the same thing on larger items. 
 

Finally finished the hook to hang my daughter’s cutting board from. If you look closely at the holes, you can see a center punch mark that had I not missed it when drilling would have put the holes almost level with each other.  As Twisted said, it is “rustic” but I am not totally unhappy with it. One thing I like about it is it isn’t a leaf. I may forge a leaf some day in “the other place” but not before if I can help it. 
 

Still not finished with my employee’s bottle opener. I was soaking it on the stove in instant coffee this evening, but had to stop because my wife has decided her kitchen is not my shop. I guess I need to see if I can find a small crock pot at a thrift shop. The chasing is not bad for a first try. 

I wish I could find coke in bulk.  I used it during the class after the last SCABA conference and really liked it. It burns with much less smoke and seemed to be much hotter.  

Those links are cool, Billy. I was experimenting with a few different styles similar to that for my schwenker. I really need to get back to work on it. I have the tripod finished. I only have the grill and chains left to finish. 
 

I didn’t get to work at the forge today. Wound up hooking onto the travel trailer for a day trip down to NE Texas. 

Twisted, I wonder if that pick/hammer could be a reshaped pick? And this is a “real” clinker, or half of one anyway.  It isn’t as irritating as it might otherwise be since my grate is a little over an inch tall.  The clinker falls below the level of the grate.  If I had a proper bullet grate it would be even better. Which would be good since finding better coal doesn’t seem to be an option.  This clinker was from burning a little over a 5 gallon bucket of coal.

I finished assembling the hook.  Very crude.   I got the holes way out of alignment.  I am blaming that on poor lighting.  I work outside and the halogen lamp I use leaves me having to deal with a lot of shadows and unnatural lighting.  But really I should have been able to get them closer than that. I have it soaking in diluted muriatic acid to etch.  I checked it this morning prior to work and saw it needed more time.  Leaving it for another 8-10 hours is sort of scary, but we’ll see if it survives the day unattended.

Thomas, what is that old tool about the anvil silhouette on your wall?

That welded star candle holder from 3 or 4 pages ago is very cool, especially how it was held together with magnets during fabrication.  It and all the other things people have posted over the past week are much better than my work.

What I did this afternoon after work was start on a hook for my daughter. She needs one to hang a wooden cutting board she was given for Christmas by the BBQ place where she works, one of the Van’s Pig Stands. The pieces of the hook are WI and I will secure them together with either copper or brass rivets. I got a little lazy with the hook part and worked it at too low a temp, so it has several splits in it. They don’t really weaken the hook much, so I may or may not redo it. 
 

The bottle opener is what one of my employees wanted for Christmas. When finished it will have a copper plate riveted to the front of the handle. The plate will have a Bible verse engraved or rather “chased” into it. I have not decided which verse to use yet. I am not quite happy with the opener. Like the other two I have made, it is not symmetrical. I just used some flat bar from my scrap pile to make it. The copper is scrap tubing I split and flattened out. 
 

Something both the hook and the opener have in common is pitting from not brushing during forging. I have a block brush, but it is hard to use. I want one with long bristles, but can only find blocks with the short bristles. 

On 12/26/2021 at 2:57 PM, TWISTEDWILLOW said:

That’s one solid piece!? Lol I’ve always got one or two but never bigger than half dollar coin, 

That little bit of clinker ain’t nothing, Twisted.  I’ll take a pic of some “real” clinker tomorrow.  

21 hours ago, jlpservicesinc said:

 There are some brite stars on this forum.. Mark Ling,  Brady AKA Fraser (whom is exploring so many facets of forging and doing it well..) .. Goods, JHCC.. You..   I love seeing people coming of age forging and love to see the projects they pick.. 

Jennifer, I am deeply wounded. 

You didn’t mention me as a “brite star”.  
 

 I am a pro at starting and never finishing projects.