Donal Harris

We had a real wet spring. It seemed like most of the good days for forging and my availability just never matched up. I much prefer 20 degrees F and snowing.

99 degrees F. Lit the forge looked around for the piece I was working on three weeks ago when last I tried to forge. Found it and turned toward the coals to place it in. Watched the flames for a second and wiped the sweat dripping of my nose and said “not happening today.” I shut down my forge and went inside to plop on the couch and find something on Netflix to binge. Man!!!!! I wish Winter would hurry back.

Have you tried again?

God willing, I will never have to experience that again.

What does Mrs. Nut think of you bringing your punch in the house?

100 USD is about what you would pay for a new one, Chris, but $100 for a barely used one now isn’t bad. Unless you want to drive to Ardmore. Driving there would burn up about 6.7 gallons of fuel and cost you about 2.5 hours. What else could you have done with the 2.5 hours?

Interesting stuff. I’ve wanted to try, but am quite sure I would be afraid to drink the result.

The bee keeper who came to get them was happy to get the call. She said she had lost 8 colonies this past season.

Nothing important. I just have a thing for carrying small items in my pocket. It gives me something to fiddle with during meetings, but they tend to get lost. When my wife buys me new “lovey” as she calls them, she always buys a couple of spares. A piece of round bar that I picked up turned out to be perfect after hardening. The weight and texture was amazing. I only have about three feet of it, not counting the three feet or so I gave to Chris. It is silly but I thought I might want to determine what the steel is, just in case.

No. I pretty much abandoned it after I realized getting precise volume measurements would be a problem. Now it occurs to me I wouldn’t need to measure water displacement, but could just cut off a specific length and do the math, but I would have the same problem. I wouldn’t be able to take precise measurements for anything except weight. But I think if I could do that plus be able to accurately measure certain other physical characteristics I could identify the steel. The problem is I can’t accurately measure any of those either. I still plan to visit the engineering labs at OU. I bet I could find a student who could help me out for a small donation to their beer and pizza fund.

Do the non vegetable-based quenching oils spoil?

Someone was faster. I missed out on a rivet forge with blower for $45 a month ago as well.

Supposedly it is frozen and the screw will not turn, but for $20 it seems worth the risk. It should be wrought iron. I could use that even if I can’t get it working again.

I have been wanting to try this with a piece of 2” round I liberated from my father-in-law’s shop. I assume it is A36. Had I not read this I would have been doomed before I even started, because I would probably have used too thick of a piece of HC steel for the face. I have never heated such a thick piece of steel in my brake drum forge, but believe I should be able to get the steel hot enough. They aren’t quite as thick, but I have used my forge to put a 90 degree bend in a bale spike. What I am primarily concerned about is the weight. The piece is about 3.5’ long and heavy as heck. I am not sure if I could cut off and forge a hammer-sized chunk or try to hold the whole piece while forging the end from round to a rectangular shape. Assuming that is even possible by hand without a striker.

Well I did say it was a stereotype. Most of my uncles, cousins, and kids I went to school with worked in the oilfield in one capacity or another. Rough life. When it is good, it is very dang good. When it is bad, it is worse than bad. There seems to be no middle way. And almost to a man, during the boom times they live like the bust is never going to happen again, but it does. I resolved very early on to do anything but work in the oil patch.

Not guessing, Thomas. Guessing would be me saying you have between 400 and 500 USD in your pocket at the moment. And even that wouldn’t be a guess. It would be a stereotype. What I am saying is all the posts I have read saying sour well rods are dangerous have said so using roughly the same sort of language they would have used when speaking about welding or forging galvanized steel. And that just doesn’t make sense. Perhaps if the rods had just been pulled from the well and were still covered in gunk, but they never are around here. Around here they all look like this. The closest to newish looking I could find online were some from Texas and even they didn’t look all that gunky. H2S is without a doubt dangerous stuff. If you can smell it, you are probably going to be feeling pretty sick. If you can’t and it is there, the concentration is likely high enough to kill your sense of smell. You will quickly feel dizzy and will almost certainly within 30 minutes or so. You mentioned on another site that rods used in sour gas wells are a different alloy. I assume this is because H2S is corrosive? (Not a guess. It is an assumption, based upon my knowing H2S is corrosive and different alloys being more resistant corrosion than others. ) Are these marked so they can be identified?

I keep meaning to drop by, but am always just too drained by the end of the work day and just want to get home. But I work from home on at least one Thursday a month. Maybe on one of those. Today was out. My wife had a wisdom tooth removed.

Groan as in “bad pun”. And she took the bees home in a couple of wooden hive boxes later that night. She had left the boxes there after removing the honey and comb so those bees that had been out foraging would have a place to go to when they returned. She kept the honey and the comb. She uses them both in some sort of face and hand creams she makes.

My wife drove the lawnmower past this about four times before she saw it. She texted me this photo. When I saw it I texted back “Well, I guess they must not be Africanized, because I doubt you would have been texting if they were.” I told her they were likely just a swarm passing through and I would check again in a couple of days to see if they had moved on. If not, we would find a bee keeper who wanted them. I forgot about it for a week. When I finally remembered to go check on them, I saw this. Obviously these bees had decided they liked our home as much as we do. My wife called a friend of hers who is a bee keeper. She came out the next day and found the bees had actually been living behind our house for quite some time. She said it appeared to be two colonies. One on the inside and another on the outside.

I know hydrogen sulfide kills, but how could a sucker rod used in a “sour well” kill? It doesn’t sound logical. The gas is long gone. Any residue seems like it would decompose at forge temps.

Older thread, but new to me. I have only watched a handful of episodes. What has struck me as odd about almost all of them is very few of the contestants seem to know all that much about basic blacksmithing skills. On one episode they were required to forge a blade from a large steel ball. The trick was they were given no tongs. That appeared to really stump them. In another they were to forge a blade from golf clubs and one of the guys decided to use the shafts instead of the heads. In another one of the guys picked mild steel from some scrap part instead of the high carbon parts. I imagine a lot of it is just nerves, but still......odd.

When I did it I was wearing jeans, but no apron. The wires are like little darts when they break off. More than a couple imbedded themselves in my belly and thighs.

I just used a wire brush on an angle grinder (a fairly dangerous thing to do) and then coated it with BLO. Had I painted it I would have gone with olive drab, because that was the color of the paint beneath all the rust and grime. Yours looks to have been red at some point.

^^^^ what Thomas said.

The best threads drift on and off topic, so no need to apologize. I have found density will not work. There is too much overlap. Besides, I found accurately measuring volume is much more difficult than measuring weight.