Donal Harris

The bright line is from someone welding the face back on at some point in the past. The faces on this one are steel. Vises often take a lot of abuse. My guess is someone missed and hit the jaw and popped the steel off. I am not sure how it was welded. The weld does not rust at all. I am going down to pick up an old homemade disc grinder from my Dad today. I think I will take the vise down and ask him to help me grind down the dome on each face.

How many pieces? Shipping included, I was paying about $4.50/lb for round bar. About the same for the flat. For the misc sizes of flat bar (sort of like the boxes of bacon ends and pieces my parents used to buy when I was a kid), I was paying about $3.90/lb. But mainly I was buying the story. Iron made in the same foundry that made most of the iron used by the South in the Civil War had a certain appeal to me.

eBay, yes. I purchased the last 32 pieces he had the same day. I gave him some tips on where to look for more and asked him to hit me up if he finds a new supply. If there is anyone near you who restores old wagons, they are a good source. There is someone on eBay now selling something he calls 00 WI. Supposedly ultra pure. Not what I want. Then there are usually people selling old anchor chain links. Beyond that, keep your eye out for leg vices which cannot be repaired or perhaps an old Peter Wright which has busted in half.

The round bar is high grade. The flat bar is a mix of high and low, but none is terribly bad.

How do I fix this? If I turn it over the middle portion rests almost on the anvil.

The faces seem to be pretty well bonded. I fullered the ends today just to see if they would pop off. They held. Tomorrow I have to forge a hammer eye drift and punch. (Meaning I have to watch JLP’s video again so I can copy hers.) It is looking rather primitive.

32 pieces of 8” 5/8” WI round bar. I am beginning to think I have a problem. But that is the first step isn’t it? I have no idea what I am going to do with the stuff. There are after all only so many hammers one can make and use. This last batch weighs 21.2 lbs. I must have around 100 lbs of the stuff by now. It does feel nice under the hammer though.

They almost appear to be moving. Good work there. The main problem with my cut is missing skin. The thumb still functions as it did before. I will just keep it wrapped and clean. Same thing the doc would do, but $75 cheaper.

Working on gate anchors for my fence. I am not sure why I decided the “hard way” was the way to go. I could have just punched and drifted a hole on each end of a piece of flat bar, bent the ends 90 degrees, punched a couple of holes to attach it to the gate and called it done. But where is the fun in that. I decided I wanted two guides for the anchor rod to slide through. Wasn’t sure how to best do that, so I experimented with two methods. 1. Wrap flat bar around the anchor and then open it up and bend the wings flat. Then forge weld that bit to another piece of flat bar. Just in case my weld failed, I riveted the two halve together before welding them. 2. Same except laid the top flat bar over the anchor in the anvil and hammered the flat bar down over the anchor. Then forge welded the two halves together without riveting. Method 1 seems to be best. It has material below the anchor hole that can stretch without putting stress on the welds. The second method doesn’t have that. If the top bar stops stretching, there is very good chance the welds on one side or the other will fail. Would rivets have helped prevent that. I really don’t believe it would. Tomorrow I will just go the easy way and use a single piece of flat bar. The forge welding practice was nice though.

Are you sure that isn’t WI?

Never work at the forge without PPE. Needed to just do a quick trim up on a piece of gate hardware. Piece slipped in the jaws of the vise. Grinding disc jumps down to try to make a snack of my thumb. I cleaned it up and taped it back closed as best as I could. I did get the piece I was trimming trimmed before going to the house for a cleanup.

Yes. It is a post vise. I put some white paper to make it easier to see the gap.

Well now I can say “Been there, done that, and bought the bloody shirt.” Hated it. I would switch to side draft and learn to make my own charcoal before using corn again. It burns down PDQ. I will stick with coal and begin work on a gas forge.

I may take a picture tomorrow. This is obviously an exaggeration of what my vise is like, but picture a vice with both faces made of a billiard ball. There is no contact along the faces. There is just a very small area in contact with your work piece.

How would you flatten convex shaped vise jaw faces? Sort of like dentists, carbon paper between the jaws, close the jaws to blacken the high spots, file or grind away the black spots and repeat until flat?

Coal is getting hard to come by. The club has doubled the price and is rationing it. I bought some corn and lump charcoal yesterday. I plan to see how it burns this evening.

Very nice, Johnnytait. What stock do you use?

And that is why we are not allowed to take photos at work. I checked around to make certain there was no PHI in the frame, but missed the thumb drive. Those are forbidden. I am not sure who it belongs to.

I wonder if that purple prep fluid used for joining PVC would work?

Good to know. I think perhaps I have been too worried about burning it. Maybe just a fraction longer in the fire. It isn’t as if I have a lot of money in the steel or a shortage of it. And I found the hammer body I had lost. I need to apologize to the grandson. I had lost it, just as my dad had lost his instead of me and my brothers. it was in the conference room at work. We don’t go in there much these days and it didn’t occur to me to check there.

Paul, I don’t believe rubber or any other material that easily melts or burns should be near your forge, and certainly not your hands. So yes, move tong making up to the top of your list. Check out John of Black Bear Forge’s video on how to make tongs when you have no tongs. There are two parts. Blacksmithing is a whole lot easier when you can actually hold what you are hitting safer as well.

Still trying to get the face to weld. Tomorrow will be the third try. First I will weld some more WI to each side of the WI body. With each try an incredible amount of mass is lost to scale. The first try was a fail that didn’t surprise me. On the second I was really thinking the weld had taken, but when I started working to get the lump back to square I noticed the face cooled much faster than the body, so I set it on the anvil with the face just sticking out over the edge and gave the face a good whack. Just as I expected, it popped off. I wonder how many times the spring steel can be taken to a welding heat before it loses so much carbon it can no longer be hardened?

90 degrees. Would that be oriented to the sides of the hammer or toward the faces? The answer is likely obvious, but geometry and trigonometry were not my best subjects. Some of my tongs are WI. The one I performed destructive testing on was horrible to forge. Forging it square and then back to round was possible, but even at a welding heat it wanted to split when taken down thinner than 3/8”. Most of the pieces of round and flat bar I have seem to be fairly good. The round bar seems better than the flat. I haven’t tried that large piece of hinge yet, but expect it to be a little worse than most of what I have. On the cut end, I can see the inclusions with just my eyes.

I agree about the scarfing. I think he probably would have been better off just using the ball peen hammer instead of the large sledgehammer. Without a striker he was only able to get in 4 or 5 good hits before reheating because he couldn’t keep it on the anvil. Your comment about flat bar makes me wonder if that is why blacksmiths chose to make hammers using this technique. Wagon wheel tyres would have been plentiful. He has a few other good videos as well.

Anyone ever been behind a tractor trailer when one of their tires looses its tread? Talk about roadkill. Had I not been in my old Ranger, I could’ve been roadkill.