JNewman

Welcome to the forum and hope to see you at an OABA event. If you don't know what the alloy is I would just leave the blocks as is for now. If they are mild steel they will not get any harder with any heat treatment. Depending on what they are you may end up destroying them if you use the wrong quenchant. or you may end up with them too hard and end up with a dangerous block. Air hardening steels are common in tool and die shops. When you are forging hot steel the hot steel is much softer than mild steel. So unless you are doing a LOT of work with a striker or are using it under a power hammer you will be fine with it unhardened. If you do mark it up you have 9 other surfaces to use.

I am surprised that a mill will sell direct that small a quantity of steel unless you are talking random length ends. Half price also sounds very high. A few years ago I saw prices for a distributor that bought from mills and then sold to lower level distributors. This was a distributor that would not sell in less than truckload quantities. Their prices were about 20-30% of what most of us pay. Steel is something I find it is often worth shopping around for, and often the place that is cheapest for one thing is not necessarily the cheapest for another. The place I buy a lot of 4140 and 4340 from at $1.00 and $1.50 respectively, wanted about $3/lb when I wanted a couple of feet of 5" round 4340. I got it for $2/lb from another place that charges me more than the first for whole lengths. I also made the mistake a few years ago of ordering a bunch of misc. mild steel from the place I buy that 4140 and 4340. I ordered it along with about $1000 of 4140 assuming it would be cheaper than my local place with no minimum order. I ended up paying up to double the price for the mild steel over my local place.

As long as you are working hot steel with a hand hammer a plain mild steel block will stand up pretty well. If you cannot find a decent block for a good price True Cut steel in Hamilton will cut you a piece from plate for a pretty good price. I often find I can get a piece cut to what I want from them for the same or less than I can find a piece of secondary steel at a steel yard. You could ask them to cut from the edge of a piece of plate so you get one clean face. If they cannot they cut so clean you should be able to flatten the face in an hour or so with an angle grinder.

Get a heavy chunk of mild steel. It will work better than the CI anvil Look up Brazeal anvil on here.

I understand, the one I picked up used does not have the computer it is just limit switches but complicated circuits are still a concern. Just a stop would not be that complicated or expensive to put in but for the type of work you are showing it is of no use.

Bruce have a look at this Euromac video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fpnHH5286EI The one advantage of having your bending pins that are far apart mounted to the ram rather than on the table is that you can bend a circular piece or a 180 with a smaller diameter than the width of your cylinder. The bulldozer bender I bought has been one of the most profitable tools I have bought for the shop. I have used it for a lot of cold bending, as well as hot bending, forging, upsetting, stamping, and hot shearing. I plan on using it for punching and maybe putting a rod shear into it. The cold bending jobs have usually been very profitable and the number stamping I regularly have to do on an ongoing job, now takes about half an hour each time as opposed to the hour and a half it used to take. Having a limit switch to stop the ram in the same spot every time is really handy when you have to make a bunch of pieces the same. In my press it can be a pain at times for one off pieces because as soon as I take my foot off the pedal it returns so I can find it hard to sneak up on a stop point. But having a consistent stop can be really useful.

The one I have made I threaded the shank of the hinge and made it long enough to go through a door. It can then have a nut (decorative?) put on the inside of the door it holds the hinge to the backer plate and to the door.

Most of the patterns at foundries belong to their customers not the foundry. The foundry cannot use the pattern to make a casting for anyone but the owner of the pattern. They would be opening themselves up for a lawsuit and losing a lot of other work.

The pictured block is not one of mine. My trunnion block has a couple of spoons and bowls. I don't have pictures of my trunnion block on this computer apart from as part of a brochure that is a pdf. You could look on the website that has a flaming anvil they have a swage block page which has a picture. I am not selling the trunnion blocks right now I had to switch foundries for them and the cost went up high enough that they became hard to sell. The last batch I bought I sat on 3 of them for 2-3 years.

You might try these guys. http://www.parkthermal.com/chemical_salt.html

Unfortunately for this situation Caniron this Summer is in Quebec. Which is a long way from Western Canada.

Find a trucking broker, They will find a spot on a truck for much less than most trucking companies will charge you. I would guess you could get the anvil shipped for around $250 unless he is on Vancouver island . For customs your customer might be better off getting the customs broker himself. Most customs brokers will not tell you this but to import into Canada you need a Canadian Broker. To import into the US you need a US broker. Your local broker will probably handle it but they are just going to sub out the job and mark it up, you can use a Canadian customs broker. . I have had good luck with Harte and Lyne for importing into Canada but they are smaller and may not have offices out west where the truck crosses the border. but they might. The tariff cove for an anvil and most other blacksmithing tools is .8205.80.1000

Just small ones. He is 87 after all. He gets upset seeing the poor quality tongs at most guys shops when I take him to OABA meetings. I probably won't get a chance to take many pictures but there are lots of guys who will and I will post links to any pictures/video taken.

OABA Meeting will be here tomorrow and what a mess my shop is. I have been cleaning all day and about 5 hours yesterday afternoon. I have Leo Traggati who was a blacksmith at Stelco for 55 years demoing making a pair of tongs. And I will being doing a couple of small demos.

I cannot believe you are considering setting up heat treating for twice a year to save $120/batch. A shop using a vacuum heat treating furnace will treat all your parts scale free. You can't be heat treating the parts with a torch and then cleaning the scale off in less than 2 hours.

If you are looking for quite a few of these i think you will be amazed at how cheap you can get them cut out either by laser, waterjet or cnc plasma. This thin a material could be cut really quickly, possibly stacked so you could cut multiple pieces at once. I believe Randy who posts here and maybe some others have cnc plasma cutters and could give you a price. Waterjet will give you the best finish followed by laser and then plasma.

As someone who has been involved in OABA for about 14 years now I know there is a lot of support from those of us in the west for a more active Eastern group. I understand how it can be difficult it can be to travel so far to meetings. I have gone to 2 meetings in Ottawa and a several in Kingston including a couple on Wolfe Island. There was a Eastern forge group many years ago and it would be good to see one form again with regular meetings. Unfortunately there have been a couple of our regular monthly meetings held in the Eastern part of the province and apart from the hosts and a couple of eastern attendees most of the people there were from the western part of the province. This can be frustrating to those trying to reach out. If there is a group meeting regularly in the East as a larger group we are more likely to hold more of the bigger events in the east.

I am pretty sure the McDonald plans have the stock feed towards you. This is MUCH safer than rolls that pull away from you. I just read on here or the NWBA forum recently about someone having a set of tongs run through their rolls, if he had been holding a cold end of the stock directly that easily could have been his arm. If you you look at all the rolls on the Bulldog spade videos any where the smith is holding the stock it is fed towards him. This can be done with movable rolls like the McDonald rolls or D shaped rolls like the ones in the Bulldog videos. About 20 years ago I worked on the repair of a printing press where a workers arm was pulled into the press. The rollers pulled the flesh off his arm right to and including the shoulder. This was working in a large shop with others around to hit the Estop and call 911. In a typical single person blacksmith shop an injury like that would likely be a fatality. A power hammer seems like a dangerous machine because of the violence of the blows but machines like powered presses and rolls can be equally or MORE dangerous.

When I was in an unheated shop I had problems with my Kinyon type hammer control valve freezing up. I would think having a better filter/ air drier would help with this. Be careful about using a hot piece of steel held a few inches from the the valve to thaw it. Radiant heat will melt through the plastic air hose commonly used for pilot air lines. Don't ask how I know this :rolleyes:

I have to agree with the just go at it crowd a jig makes sense if you have 100 to do but not for just one. If you don't trust your eye make up a template that you can use to check it as you go to keep things symmetrical.

This was the one I looked at. http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5211725 The chasing either side of the flanges may have been used to hold dovetailed bases in as well but to braze as well would make a lot of sense.

I had to google them to see what they looked like. I have to agree with Tim on this one, brazing would be the way to go.

Big Red I am confused at how you mention that you feel that shops or Blacksmiths should need certification before being able to call themselves Blacksmiths and then primarily speak about electric welding quality. While I realize many shops these days do find it necessary to do welding as a large part part of their work. not all do. Many of the fabrication shops around here have Welding Bureau Certification most of the blacksmith shops do not. Personally most of the forged work that leaves my shop has no welding done here, some of it has a requirement that no welding takes place to the job. Much of my work does does get welded after leaving my shop but none of the shops that do that welding call themselves blacksmith shops. If I need critical welding done for things like lifting devices I get a certified welding shop to do the welding (their rates are lower than my blacksmithing rates). I do agree that a formal apprenticeship does speed up the learning process and can help fully train a tradesperson. But the current availability of courses and sharing of knowledge in the blacksmith community really helps to offset the lack of formal apprenticeships. I have not served an apprenticeship in blacksmithing and there are many things I would have learned much faster, but I did learn from many more people through the years than I would have had I been an apprentice in a small shop doing a narrow range of work. I have been forging for almost 25 years now and am still regularly learning both from others and by myself. I did do a formal apprenticeship as a pattenmaker. I started my apprenticeship in a large foundry pattern shop. There were 2 other apprentices who were a few months ahead of me. I learned a lot in that first year about that foundry's process and the basics of patternmaking. But I only made 2 patterns in that year, we did lots of repairs, adjustments, and risers and gating. I realized I was not really learning the trade because I was not building patterns. There was a strike at the foundry and I took that as an incentive to get out and get an apprenticeship where I would learn. I found a job half an hour further from home and took a pay cut to get a job where I would learn. I went to night school with the 2 other apprentices that I had worked with where things had not changed as far as learning. We all wrote our tests around the same time and all became journeymen patternmakers. They had the same papers that I had but when the foundry closed they had to leave the industry because they did not know how to build patterns at a journeyman level even though they had the same piece of paper I have. Any shop I have worked at when someone new started they were given a job to build. Not super hard but not really easy either. This is a bit of a test to see whether that piece of paper really means anything.

I just looked up the distance. It's only a 5 hour drive. Here in Ontario I have driven 6 hours to Ottawa Ontario for an Ontario Artist Blacksmith meeting that was only a day event. Many of our members often drive 4 hours for a meeting. People around here drive 6-7 hours for quad state and there are lots who travel much further. Jump in your car and make the trip to Westport. Ideally find someone local who wants to go as well so you can carpool. You will be amazed at the difference a weekends instruction from experienced smiths will make.

You will not be able to get product liability at all or if you can it will be in the thousands or tens of thousands not hundreds of dollars.