JNewman

Did the blade snap at the weld? I grumbled a little bit to my industrial supplier that my blades usually broke before they wore out. He asked me if the breaks were at the weld I checked and most were at the weld or within 1/2" of the weld. He asked me to return them and he would get them re welded. A week later I got a box with 5 new blades in it. Luckily I had thrown my blades in the scrap barrel rather than the garbage.

According to transport laws at least here in Ontario any compressed gas tanks must be transported upright. I realize that most of the propane in the tank is liquid but there is still compressed gass in the tank.

The other tool that can be usefull are curved cold chisels which can be used to remove lumps.

For cleaning up swage blocks are as mentioned above a 4.5" grinder with a worn wheel so the edge is nice and round works well. You have to feather the grinder on and off because you can damage the block in a hurry. Hold the grinder at an angle to the axis of the groove and it will give you a smaller diameter than the wheel diameter but larger than than the radius on the edge. The other tool that works REALLY well on ladle shapes and for refining the grooves is a Carbide burr in a die grinder. The Solid Carbide burrs are expensive but they really remove metal quickly and controllably, you do still have to be careful not to over do it though. Wear a face shield when you are using a burr as they just spray metal chips. The ones I find most useful are cylinders with end spherical.

Thanks Grant. I have been thinking about a bender myself. I am going to check out an Auction next week where there is a Ineco rotary draw bender that will bend 1.5" round bar cold. It does not look as easy to tool up as the Peddinghaus.

I do not completely understand the theory behind grain flow but I do know that a lot of critical parts such as lifting devices and turbine parts must be forged because of the grain flow. Thanks for the information on the way you guys made these Phil. I do wonder if forging them in a ball swage then flattening the ball does not make the grain flow around the outside of the resulting lollipop shape I am not sure. I do think I underquoted these although it may have just been I took too long to make them. If I make them the same way again I have to get a new enerpac type cylinder and a power pump rather than the hand pump. The pump and cylinder I used were from Princess Auto (similar to harbour freight) just as I finished the bending of the second hook the pump seized up, so I returned it. I had to do some grinding on these to radius corners, and remove some extra material on the outside on the open end, I also had to grind a little to make sure there was no scale on the outside before I took them in for MPI. This left a finish that had shiny sections and then dark spots especially on the shank which had been swaged but not ground much, however it will be getting machined. I kind of wish I had taken it to get shotblasted to give it a uniform finish even though I had not budgeted for that. The receiver at the machine shop said oh are these used? How do those of you that do industrial work finish your work. I have been in machine shops and seen forgings that are covered in heavy flaking scale in there to be machined. I often wire wheel things before delivery but it often takes a lot of time.

Give me a call to make sure I am here and drop on by, or you could just drop by and take a chance as to whether I am in. I would still file that fold over out I have had similar things grow and that is the most stessed point on your tongs.

They look good but if you are going to be using them take the time now and grind or file out the small cold shut near the hinge. Otherwise that small shut may grow into a crack, and the tongs will break. If you grind or file it out now you will save yourself a lot of greif later on.

I was going to say fishing things off the bottom of a lake but hen I noticed your location.

I am not sure the shanks get machined and threaded. The ones Leo was telling me about were for the blast furnaces in the steel mill.

Here are a couple of hooks I finished last week out of 4340. I have to pick them up from the ndt lab Monday and deliver them. Second picture is bending the hooks around. A retired blacksmith who stops by my shop regularly tells me they made a similar hook by starting with 4" round, making a ball, flattening it puncing a hole in it and hot cutting away the rest. After bending this one I can understand why.

I don't know of any parts locally but you could try Sid Sudemeyer at Little giant for parts. Some of the parts such as arms or treadle linkages you could forge replacements. What are the parts do you need?

Here is the best way I have found to make the vise end of the slotted bracket that mounts to the wall. Take a flat bar (at least 1/2" thick) hot cut almost all the way through about 3/4" from the end, bend this back on itself with the cut to the outside. Then fold the bar back again with the bump on the end of the bar to the inside forming a slot about the same length as the ones on your u shaped bracket that is on the vice. Square up the end of the bar by taking a short heat on the end of the bar and alternately hammering on the end of the fold and on top. Some of the time you should back up the short leg on the edge of the anvil and some of the time not, you are upsetting the bar to get square corners you do not want to move the bend. Once you have a nice square corner, forge weld the first fold to the bar making the slot complete. You are actually doing two welds at the same time here. This is probably a good first weld to do if you have not done any forge welds before because everything is held in place for you and heavier stock is easier to weld because it holds the heat. You could then cut the other end off to 6-8" split and spread it and then wrap it around your postputting heavy screws or lags into the post.

So Grant, how do you determine what they perceive the value to be. And what do you do when their perceived value is lower than your perceived value.

Thanks for this idea I made a quick hook out of 1/4" bar to help me lifting a couple of heavy bars in and out of the forge to the platen table. A lot of the time I had a pair of tongs on the end of the bar held on with a link. I did find that holding near the bits of the tongs the weight of the tongs helped to counterbalance the weight of the bar. I will be making a better hook out of 3/8" I am not sure spring steel is needed as the 1/4 worked with 19" of 2" round with 12" of 2x2 1/2" on the far end.

I have that catologue sitting on my shelf. The cup wheels are used in foundries and drop forging shops for grinding off flash and gating.

What if you just took some heavier flat bar, say 1/2"x1 and then a piece of 1/2"x 2 weld them together and then weld them on the side of your anvil. hardy hole.pdf

Pkrankow I am impressed, that must of been a lot of work cutting a hardy hole in that anvil.

The flat discs I had were flex-ovit A24N discs. The cup wheels were much coarser they were 16 grit.

I needed to do some heavy grinding this week, removing about 3/16-1/4" of aloy steel 2 1/2" wide about 4" long on two forgings. My 7" grinder was taking forever. I called my industrial supply shop and ordered a 5" cup wheel for the grinder. What a difference, it cut probably twice as fast with less vibration to me. The wheels are more expensive but I did not use up that much of the wheel and it saved me a lot of time. If I have a lot of grinding to do I will be using a cup wheel again.

I have a General that I have been very happy with using on a commercial basis. My former employer has had one as the only tablesaw in the shop for about 10 years in a shop with 5-10 patternmakers. The Generals are still made here in Canada, General International are not. They are a little more money but you may be able to get one used.

I used to just put a block of wood under the treadle. At Quadstate I noticed Mindy Gardner's treadle hammer had a heavy arm over the head with a chain to the head so that the head could only go so far down. She was using a lot of hand held punches under the head and that way if a tool broke or skated out from under the head her hand would not be crushed. The arm was quite heavy as that is a lot of force to stop suddenly.

My Dad uses the sawdust trick when he sails his 65+ year old sailboat too hard. He has a box that he sticks under the boat filled with sawdust and it seals things up. It would be much easier in a slack tub.

I thought I would dredge up this old thread because I build a kiss block set up inspired by Forgemaster's. I am using the Clifton Ralph style tooling cage pictured above. I wanted something like the setup Forgemaster made but I wanted to be able to remove it because I often use the dies long ways for starightening things out. My first thought was to drill and tap the side of the cage and bolt it on. But I was too lazy/busy to get around to that. Then this week I realized that I could clamp the tool between the end of the die and the cage so this is what I built. I origionally made the arms too close to the die so there was no room for the round bar that flips the stoppers out of the way but a little work with the grinder corrected that. I also just made the handle for the flipper just the flatbar but there was too much weight in the handle and the kiss block was bouncing. My dies are too narrow to put the stoppers side by side so I just stacked them, the flatbar that holds them just bends to suit whether they are being used alone or with another stopper. I have been really pleased with this setup so far and it seems to work just fine even if the bolt holding the cage tight loosens up. I have been using several of the swages I have that are pinned together. I tried using them like Forgemaster describes above but I have had problems with them bouncing off the pins. Probably caused by me being to heavy on the treadle. I have started welding springs to them as I need them which prevents them from bouncing off, helps in feeding stock into them, gives me something to use to safely lift them off the hammer and it keeps them together in storage. At first I used 1 1/2"x 1/4 but the last one I just used 1"x1/4" and they seem to beworking just fine.

Here is the bottom tool I used to forge the points and chisels. It just slips over the bottom die