j.w.s.

This is a prototype karambit I made to give a client an idea of what the final pieces he's ordering will be like. It felt so good in the hand I figured I'd give it a quick finish. This is 4130 which I normally use for stage combat pieces but it still makes a decent knife if heat treated correctly. Handle is bucote. The actual order is for twin knives made of damascus. Just got the approval to go ahead to tomorrow I'll make the billet for those. -J

This is by far the most often used machine in my shop aside from abrasives. Great job on the build!

I can't tell the resolution of these pics at the moment.. I haven't tried using my phone to post on here before so if they're too low I'll update them later when I get home. :)

I made this piece last week. Did a few techniques new to me and generally i'm not a fan of antler handles so I had to make it stand out from the crowd. Blade is forged from 5160, the sheath is made of laminated mammoth kauri and maple with forged fittings and a little leather. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do - I've actually decided to not sell this piece but, and this is a first, keep it as my own. *gasp* :) -J

Definitely. I use 1084 a lot in my shop and water is bad for it for typical blade dimensions. Personally, and I'm not recommending this (ie you should buy a proper quench oil) I'm using a mineral oil based hydraulic fluid, which is nasty and dangerous because of the potential fumes so for god sake dont do it. :) Of course my quench tank has a manual fire retarder built onto it so if theres any issue the flame can be extinguished quickly and without danger. But you should probably look into parks 50 or the like which is meant for this application. That being said, when I had my small shop I had a 4" black iron pipe welded on a base. At the top I put a hinged flipper style lid (mimicking the tuyer under my forge), a weight to hold it closed and be used as a handle. I just used mineral oil from the local tractor supply store. Worked very well.

Thank you! For the rivets I just used some 1018 rod I had laying around and peened into shape. They flattened out after I brought everything up to welding temp and gave it all a press with the 25 ton, then I just took an old eye punch (for making animal heads) and gave the rivets a whack or two. The conical shape of my punch collared the material and left an attractive mark in the process. J

Well, it's probably been a few years since I've posted anything here but I'm still keeping busy. lol. Here's a hand axe I forged out and finished up yesterday. The blade itself is 1095, the collar is 1018 and everything was set with 3 rivets then forge welded under my press. Haft is puple heart and Borneo rosewood I laminated together. There's lots of studwork and banding as well. Enjoy! -J

Uh, I fail to see how your fantasy world differs from ours in this aspect. :) -J

As a knife maker, I'd say getting the O1 that hot may have really damaged the structure of the steel beyond management. Finish the blade though, practice working a piece from beginning to end still teaches you a lot about the craft. It's not the shape you wanted when you started out but accidents happen and being able to adapt and go with the flow is an important part of any art. Good luck! -J

Ok, here's the result of my tinkering the past day and a half. I added another inch of wool on the bottom and a ceramic welding plate on top. Reached good forging heat but still not hot enough to weld. This morning I stopped by my favorite toy store in the world, Paul B's. Found a blower 1/25hp rated at 148cfm for $124 so I picked it up. Managed to escape its clutches with only $155 on my card which is pretty darn good. Added some Artu drill bits, a new steel brush and a brass brush to the shop along with some misc fittings - anyway, I digress. Cut out a mounting plate on the CNC table, welded a 2 - 1 1/4 fitting to it and wired everything up. I've always used a ceiling fan type dimmer switch to control fan speed. Wow! Now it'll blow out the fire at full crank, so knocked it back to about half, adjusted my gas to about 12psi and I think I've got a pretty darn good box capable of hitting welding heat. I can still dial everything down and keep it around 2000F for general forging. I picked up an old analog thermo-galvanometer at the Cabin Fever Expo this past weekend and I think I'll experiment with hooking it up to a type K thermocouple just to see if I get results - I'd love to have some sort of temperature gauge on this but would really like it to be analogue, even though I've got a few PID's that would work, I'm going for looks on this baby. -J

The burner itself is 7x3, I cut the hole with my cnc table so I'd have to look at the dxf file for the exact cut dimensions but I believe the refrac is set into a 2x6 opening (about 1/2" set inside to secure it to the plenum), 24 crayons (3 rows of alternately spaced), I cut a baffle for the inside and welded it about 3/16th from the roof of the burner (only on the ends so fuel mix would spread throughout the plenum) with about 10 1/4" holes spaced on either side of the inlet. Supply pipe is 1 1/4". The interior of the forge is roughly 11x6x6 (.23 ft3). Frosty, what do you mean by the cross sectional area of the crayons? By my calculations the burner orifices equal 1.84056 in2 and the supply pipe is 1.22718 in2, a 60% increase in area from feeder to burner. I've built a burner with similar dimensions in an even larger forge and get to welding temp quite easily, so I keep thinking that my blower is a tad smaller than I need and / or I need to coat the inside of the forge. Worst case scenario, I add another inch of wool to the sides and bottom and shrink the volume I suppose. It's just a forge for doing demo's afterall. :)

Here's a new forge I'm currently building as a portable unit for doing demonstrations. I've still got some work to go. Ribbon burner is made from 3x3x3/16 tube and refractory, using crayons as part of the form. She's not quite getting up to the temperature I'd like and I think I might need to pick up a larger fan in order to get there.. looks to be hovering around 1900-2000F. I could also have a little debris in the plenum, because, like a dumb*ss, I didn't take the paper off the crayons like I normally do - you can see in one of the pictures that it's not burning quite right. Just lined with fiber because I can't afford ITC-100. Wondering if a watered down slick of Vesuvius 3000 (refractory cement) painted on the wool and dried for a few days would help get me to my welding heat. Any thoughts?

I was playing around with my new build this morning and I was able to get the gun shot but only after cranking it up to 14 psi.. backed it down and the problem went away.. of course, mine's not burning optimally at the moment, there's still a little tweaking to do.

I'm just in the process of building a new ribbon burner forge for demo's.. I forget the fan size i use but it's small, actually came off one of my coal forges. Sounds like you're getting ignition in the plenum. If youve been running this burner for a while, what changed? Did you build the burner yourself? Is there a baffle in the plenum? What kind of psi are you running? Lots of variables to consider but Im a die hard believer in ribbon burners.

Yeah, it's all dry stacked, with the exception of the gas portion. Frosty: no one has said anything yet, but the fact that everything is hidden like the gas line, plenum for the ribbon burner and the blower it really just looks like some sort of oven. I'll snap some more pictures tomorrow and throw them on.

I built a combo gasser/ coal forge two weeks ago. I use it for demonstrations at a Renaissance Faire so I had to 'hide' the gas forge. I just used abbey stone for the facing blocks. My firepot is on two steel rails in between the block. All my clinker drops through the bottom and there's a small opening where I can shovel it out. My blowers for both forges are hidden underneath, along with my gas burner which comes up from the bottom. For the gasser though there is several inches of refractory, both fibre blanket and cement. Take a look. I have a hood to finish yet to really complete the build. http://www.iforgeiro...new-demo-forge/ J

My inner nerd is smiling..

Nice! I typically just use a piece of pvc capped on one end with a threaded cap on the other. A 3" pipe doesn't take that much to fill and you can cap it later to store it under a bench.

Just wanted to share a picture of my new gas forge I built for doing demonstrations at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. I decided having a gasser and a coal forge side by side would allow me to do a few more complicated things, and have things ready to go ala-Julia Chid. We sell swords, knives and other impliments of destruction and people are always curious as to how they're made so I figured having pieces in various stages ready to be worked on might make my half hour shows flow a bit better. I do three of them a day. As for the forge it's essentially two inches of fiber wool, a layer of vesuvius 300, a few more inches of wool, capped off with more refractory and encased in abbey stone. The burner is a 10x2 refractory ribbon being fed from the bottom. I still have a front gate and hood yet to install. Anyway, here's a pic! J I have a few more pictures of the burner build itself that I'll try to upload if my phone decides to work like it's supposed. In the meantime, let me know what you think. Thanks!

This is my first time attempting to build a gasser from the ground up so there's still some refinements needed. I'd appriciate any input. Currently I'm having a problem getting it up to welding temp - it's almost there but not quite to my happiness. Also, you'll notice I'm using 2 venturi's and 1 forced air burner, this is really just for testing purposes but we haven't decided which way to go. For years venturi's were fine for me but I'm leaning towards the forced air. The internal dimensions of this build are 8x24. The whole build started with three old propane tanks that we made sure were empty, removed the valves then filled with water to ensure there was no lingering gas inside before we started cutting. Each section was marked, then cut to form interlocking segments. The segments then needed to be trued, marked again for final fit positions. We decided to cut three burner holes with the plasma, figuring that it was easier to plug then it would be to cut more holes after the refractory is cast, we also cut our back passthrough. Our refractory is Vesuvius 3000, mixed about 7:1 with coarse vermiculite. We weren't sure about our ratio and after everything was done we estimated we could have almost doubled the vermiculite and still established solid walls but we still don't know how it would hold up at welding temperatures over a course of time. To cast the mixed refractory we used an 8" concrete form, poured around it then tamped down our layers until a small amount of slick appeared. For the door I took a bottom from a propane tank, cut our opening and used two pieces of 2x4 as forms. I welded small steel hooks on the inside to hold the refractory in place. All refractory was allowed to set for about 36 hours, after 15 of which I removed the center form from the main body - the wood form for the door was left in, later I drilled holes through it and we burnt it out with oxygen from a torch during a test burn. I manufactured a forced air burner from some schedule 40 1.25" pipe and a hair dryer. The gas orifice is a 0.023" MIG tip tapped into a cap on the end of a 1/4" pipe length. For the end of the burner I took a smaller diameter pipe 3" long, some threaded rod and a 3" length of 1/2" solid rod and welded them in place to create concentric rings at the end of the burner, essentially to lower the pressure at the end of the burner to keep the flame from drifting from the mouth. I later repeated this for the two venturi burners from our donor forge. The first fire was for about 5 minutes with just the forced air burner, after completely cooling we repeated for about 20. We gave it a day to rest and the following morning we started subjecting it to full fires, first with the forced air burner, then adding a venturi. After adding the later both burners seemed to burn more efficiently. Finally we added the second venturi to the body and fired with that. For the floor of the forge we added kaowool to support our two 3x12 welding plates. As is the forge works well and for a general smith would be a dream but still needs some tweaking to get to get it to welding temperature. Currently it's looking about 100 degrees off from what I'm used to for welding Damascus billets. -J

A tire hammer is only going to have as much mass as you build into it. I have a 120lb air hammer that probably weighs in around 800lb and it walked a little, simple solution was to bolt it to the concrete.

That wasn't the question though, i understand there's refractories for sale in small quantities but some of us like the act of making things we could readily buy, especially when we have most of the components necessary. I guess its part of the discovery, probably the same reason Popular Mechanics was so, well, popular - building a project at home that you could buy across town, with the understanding that comes along with the creation. I was merely asking if anyone found success in making their own and if so, could they share their experiences? -J

Just wondering what people's experience with making their own refractory has been and what formulations they found successful. Doing a little research I've found mixes from 13:1:1 vermiculite, Portland cement and lime to just 5:1 vermiculite and Portland cement with 80% the called for amount of water. I'd like to form my own bricks to line the inside of a new gasser. I've got plenty of vermiculite, I use it for annealing blades and the rest is easy to pick up. Any help? -J

Most comfortable floor I've been on was in an old iron foundry outside of Pittsburgh. The inside was something like 250ft x 1320ft and the entire floor was 4x4x3 wood blocks on end. I couldn't imagine laying that floor but I worked in there for a few weeks rigging equipment and it was so much better than concrete. I've kept that idea in the back of my mind for a future shop improvement. I figure if they used it in a foundry with molten steel being slung around everywhere why couldn't I use it in a blacksmith shop? They kept large hoppers of sand around for any accidental fires, plus blocks could be lifted out and replaced. I don't know about you but I tend to keep my hot metal either in the forge or on the anvil - I can't work it worth a xxxx on the floor. :) -J

These aren't the nerds you're looking for.. :) J