Jump to content
I Forge Iron

Fire plus Bird

Members
  • Posts

    32
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Willamette Valley, Oregon
  • Interests
    Knife making, tool making, general forging, woodworking hunting, fly fishing, backpacking

Recent Profile Visitors

138 profile views
  1. Thanks, Bud. It's just enough space for what I'd doing as a beginning smith.
  2. Nice, David. I really should make some similar hooks how that I'm redoing my grinding area. Belts take up a crazy amount of space. Is that PVC tubing cut in half? If so, what size. I'd guess 4-inch.
  3. Great point. There is a postive stop in the vertical postion already. It's just barely visible in the picture on the right side between the two pivoting mount brackets. I plan on building a horizontal stop on the new table that will support the middle of the frame.
  4. Yeah, at least $300 worth satisfaction. That's definitely the point of why I picked up blacksmithing, something interesting and creative to do. The part in question is a nut, set in a wooden, not brass star. I had it laying around from another project I started and nevr finished. The purpose is indeade so I can hand tighten the pivot. I think it needs to be a bit bigger, so I may redesign it or weld an arm onto the bolt head on the other side to make it a lever.
  5. As part of my shop reorganition, I need to move the old workbench in my woodshop that my grinders currently sit on out to the smithy. Before I build a new workbench for the 2x72, which is staying inside, I figured it was time to build a tilting stand so I can run it either vertical or horizontal. I could have bought one from the manufacturer for about $300, but I had some angle iron and square tubing hanging around and thought this was a great opportunity to work on my fabricating skills. My welding sure isn't anything to brag about and I really do need to spend more time designing things before I start building, instead of seeing something in my head and just charging ahead. All that said, it came out decent looking when painted and should be nice and functional. Now I need to get some mounting bolts and top material for the table.
  6. Yeah, I have a piece of rectangle tubing that just fits into my little farrier's forge to use as a muffle, and pieces of firebrick to close it up. Eventually, When I get around to building a new forge, I think I'm going to try forced air, rather than multiple venturi burners. That should give an even more uniform heat, and a thermocouple can be wired into the blower to regulate the temperature like Alec Steele has shown in his videos. Probably not as good as a heat treat oven, but getting closer. I'd still use Dr. Thomas's method as there looks to be sound science behind it. If I where trying to make knives and axes for sale, sending out for heat treatment would make sense. That's not where I'm at though. I'm interested in this as a hobby to see what I can do myself as a creative process, so finding a process like Dr. Thomas is great, because it does take out the guess work using simple equipment and instrumentation, a tempilstik and a magnet. Eventually, I could see getting a heat treat oven if I progress as a blademaker, again because I'm motivated to see what I can do. The Jen-Ken Vertical Air Baths and Paragon models start at what I paid for a 2x72 variable speed grinder, so not unreasonable.
  7. I don't know how much a 1/2 yard of 1/4" minus weighs, but my yard and smithy seem to soak it up like water due to all the terracing and leveling out I've done. The wheelbarrow and shovel method of getting back there is no fun, but Glen is right about small bites and light loads. Those hardness files are great. I've had them for a while now and am planning to put them to a lot more use coupled with this item I just got delivered yesterday. Eyeballing everthing in the heat treatment cycle may be great for experienced smiths, but I've been worried about inconistency due to my inexperience. I'd really, really love to have a heat treatment oven, but that's not in the budget yet. In researching how to heat treat effectively with a forge, I ran across metallugist Dr. Larrin Thomas of Knife Steel Nerds. He's done a really deep dive into how to do it. https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/09/23/how-to-heat-treat-knife-steel-in-a-forge/ Forges heat up much faster than temp-controlled ovens, can have hot and cold spots due to inconsistent insulation and typically can't be held at a specific tempature for a set time. So it's really hard to soak your steel a set temp for a specified time and its very easy to overheat your steel, especially when trying to determine steel temp by looking at the color. Dr. Thomas shows that the way around this is to normalize your steel and for the austenitizing or hardening step, quench as soon as your steel hits non-magnetic, rather than soaking at that point or heating just a bit more. He says that the normalizing step creates a pearlitic microstrucuture that austenitizes pretty much immediately whereas annealed steel take more time and a higher temp. The tempilstik is to check that the steel has hit the target normalizing temp. I've looking forward to seeing if I can get consistent results with this method.
  8. Yeah, no problem with the drainage. It's the high spot on my lot, I'm draining water off the roof into a rain barrel and then a planter, and I've got a few inches of packed gravel. I want a paver or brick floor eventually mainly so it's a big neater. I'm not the tidiest guy out there, but I am trying.
  9. A penny, a nickle, a dime... whatever the market will bear. Or whatever you've got in your pocker, anyway Thanks. They are kinda fun/addictive to do when you start thinking of all the little design changes you can make. Luckily, I know a lot of ladies with a lot of hair. Another thing you can do is make them a bit smaller and without so much bend and give them away/use them as shawl pins for knitted shawls. That's what I did for my mom, who is a big time knitter and has thin, whispy hair now that she's in her 70s.
  10. No problem whatsoever forging before 9 am. Stoping after 8 is probably a good idea too. Yeah, my wife mentioned the setback thing... after I finished building it. The house is set back about 30 feet from the sidewalk and there are some tall bushess screening that side of the yard a bit, so you'd have to really be looking for it to notice. It's all screwed costruction, so if I eventually sell the place and it gets flagged during an inspection I can pretty easily deconstruct it enough to scale it back. My neighbors are great, no probelms at all since we bought the place about 13 years ago and they let get into their side yard to work on the gutter. I'm definitely going to smith them some candle hoders or something.
  11. Thanks, Rank. I certainly wouldn't have been able to takeover any garden space in the yard. Lucky for me it's easier to argue with the dogs than the wife.
  12. I've mostly been spending my free time building my new little side-yard smithy that I just posted about in the shop forum. I did take time the week before Christmas to hammer out some hair pins and tea light holders for gifts. I also finaly forged and finishing a blade, a little blacksmith's knife from new 5160 that I sold to my daughter's new father-in-law for a dime that I gave him. Sounds a bit weird, but my native friends taught me the tradition that if you give someone a blade, versus selling or trading it to them, you sever the relationship you have with them. I like that tradition so I follow it.
  13. I've been smithing in my single car garage, which would be great and all if it wasn't primarily my woodshop. My wife wasn't too keen on me building a forging area in the back yard but I was finally able to convice her that running a 2,300 degree forge in a room filled with sawdust and random bits of wood wasn't the best idea and I claimed half a of a side-yard we've been using as a dog run. I had to level and restack the cinder blocks we've been using as a retaining wall and under-fence barrier first, and then rebuild the existing shed roof, raising it high enough to so swing a hammer and lengthening it to the fence. Then it was on to leveling the ground with 3/4 minus gravel and building a half wall and gate on the dog yard side so the boys don't come in and mark everything up. In a month or so I'll lay pavers for the floor but for now I can move my tools in and play around with the layout. It's a cozy 10' by 14' space and just enough for my forge, main and mini-anvils, post-vice and a workbench I still need to move from the woodshop that my old bench grinder lives on. For temp power I'm running an extension cord from my deck, though I'll get it wired up for 110v eventually. My 2x72" grinder is going remain in the woodshop. Now I just need to get my propane tanks filled and get forging.
  14. I need hooks to hang up my jackets and aprons in the hall outside my woodshop. After I finish these off I'll need to find some nice wood and build a little shelf to mount them onto.
  15. Dang, ya'll are making some really nice things. Very cool. Here's the next set of tongs I'm working on. Little problem, unfortunately, as you can see. I marked these out exactly the same, but the jaw portion on the left is about 3/4 of an inch longer. When I was drawing it out and setting up the boss with half-faced blows, I screwed up and struck a blow that indented the material a bit past where I had started to establish the boss, maybe a 1/16th. I couldn't see how to fix that without causign a cold shut, so I decided to just use the new indentation as the start of the boss, knowing that the jaw would be a bit longer. The stock I'm using is pretty meaty, 1 by 1/5, so it drew out a fair bit longer than I expected. I'm not sure at this point if I should just continue wiht this set and have the bend in the jaw be asymetric or if I should make two new sides, one to match each of the existing ones. I hadn't planned on making another set of bolt tongs right away after making this one, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to have on set for 3/8 as well as for 3/4, which is what I intended for this one.
×
×
  • Create New...