ptree

Colleen, If you have a nice long bit of soft rag, say half a meter by about 20-50mm, you can rouge it up and with the item held in very soft jaws pull the rag back and forth rapidly, sort of like how a shoe black polishs shoes and get a fair polish. Soft jaws can be as simple as several layers of corrugated box paper. Being a brash Yank, I have a lovely 1/3 Hp, about 300 watt 3750 rpm motor buffer with 8" wheels. For a fine polish, I file, then sand using finer paper till in the 320 grit size, and then use grey cutting compound on a hard buff, then tripoli on a softer buff and then color with red rouge. Properly done mirrow finish. Assuming you don't loose the item when the wheel grabs. For rings most is done on a tapered mandrel, but much still must be hand held, and why my German mentor and Master goldsmith told me "You must have fingers like little black vises" Referring to the black oxide all over the fingers after working the buff. I never stood a college art course, I was apprenticed to Herr Michael Koff in Hanau au Main in the mid 70's while off duty from the US ARMY. I learned from him almost all I know of gold/silver smithing. But now I have gotten over fidly hand finishing and love the "Get it hot, Hit it hard, Quit when your done" of blacksmithing. Also why I don't make very many knives. I like a somewhat more primitive finish:) Look on ETSY, under http://www.etsy.com/shop/PTreeForge?ref=seller_info for my style, as I make garden trowels, and veggie choppers.

Now to add insult to injury, a heavy wet 5-7" of snow fell last night on the tornado area where folks are struggling to live without electricity. Supposed to hit 60F tomorrow.

Colleen, a bit of polishing compound on a rag will start to bring out highlights and with heavy application it will take a polish. For you info bracelets are VERY hard to polish safely on a buffing wheel says the guy who has done quite a few, and lost a few when they got away from me.

Not really color coded. You have to read the box. I have seen 5, 7,and 9 mil in black

At the plant we use Nitrile gloves, and the powder blue are about 5 mil. they are not very durable. We also use black nitrile that are 9 mil and longer and are more durable. Now ours don't come from HF, but i think the extra thickness is worth the extra cost. For heavy use cleaning and so forth, go with a real glove that is more the 0.009" thick.

The severe tornado outbreak in Southern Indiana was very close to me but missed my home. About 15 miles north of me however is a path of death and destruction. schools full of kids hit, several towns flattened. BIG tornado, on the ground for maybe 90 miles, followed 20 minutes later by another. Saw on the radar and TV 5 confirmed on the ground at once. I was in KY at work, putting my folks in shelter and seeing them head what looked like right at my house. Big lump, as the cell phone towers went down and could not raise the family. but mine are OK. North, of me they need prayers.

I am fond of a 4" cup brush in a 7" vari-speed polisher. Turns slower, and is way more controllable. Not as quick as some ways, but definetly safer. Harbor freight has the 7" varispeed for about $40 on sale regularly. I often use vinegar or even citric acid to pickle, follow with a good rinse and the scale can usually be rinsed off.

John N, I use a spray Moly that is basically a thin version of the GN. Doesn't dry. The drying molys are great as long as they adhere. I like the non-drying for places that won't get all over me. As part of the stem test, I tried contaminated lubes. I used a 50:50 mix of coal fly ash and spent sand blast grit. The stem tester had the stem horizontal and after appling the lube to be tested, I sifted a small measured amount of the grit onto the stem and started the testing. The GN ran about 8000 cycles if I recall correctly. The grit basically cut the lubed stem life by at least 50% in every case. The grit cut the unlubed stem life to zero, as the stem did not even make one complete cycle:) If you want the name of the spray moly I can look, I inherited a case when the valve shop shut, as well as a quart of the GN. I am pretty sure Dow Corning MolyKote products are available in the UK. I like their application charts and have never found them wrong. I also find that a little GN is great on leg vise screws. I do use way oil on ways. I use ATF in hand crank blower cases, and use a liquid ptfe/oil on my homemade powerhammer slides as they are steel on UHMWPE. Clay Spencer reccomends the liquid oil/PTFE for his tire hammer slide, and I pretty much copied that for my slides. I tried all sorts of plain oils and the spray liquid oil/PTFE works the best. I use a generic industrial version for Sprayon at half the cost of the namebrand and can't tell the difference.

My ritual: I open the doors and shutters. I turn on the radio. I light the forge to be used I make something. Then I make something else I continue making things till doen or tired. I shut down the forge. I sit in an old chair and think about the day, what went right, what went wrong, and think about how wonderful it was to be able to what I have just done

Gn Paste is very good on slow speed open gears. It will however NOT go thru a grease gun, and is a poor choice for ball and roller bearings. I have found the Dow Corning MolyKote line to be very good, and thier application charts are very good. For roller and ball bearings The Molykote BR2+ is a moly disulfide grease that is a very high performance product

For large translating screws like in a flypress, or large valves, a high Moly-disulfide content grease is the best at preventing wear and reducing friction. In testing on ACME threads for valves I found that Dow Corning MolyKote GN Assembly paste was the very top lubricant. In testing where the test rig destroyed acme 416ss stems running in 410SS yoke nots in 5 to 10 cycles with oil and plain greases, the GN paste yeilded 16,000 cycles of operation. The neversiezes, and various "Patent Madicine" oils yeilded results in that same 5-10 cycles. Granted the rig was intended to overload the threads and give results and did. No graphite lube did better than 50 cycles, no neversieze better than 15. All of the moly-disulfide lubes gave much better results. The GN Paste being the best. We switched to using the GN paste on every single valve we built unless for Oxygen or chlorine service, and that was about 100,000 valves a month. When the stems with the GN paste failed, it was because the threads rolled over and no longer engaged! they were still full thickness, and you could still see the tooling marks. Many folks use Never-seize as a lube, but it is designed not as a lube but as a long term material to prevent heat and stress galling. Some of our customers would disassemble our valves, and remove the Moly, and then paste them up with never-sieze, and then wonder why they failed prematurely. :) NOW several important notes about this unique moly grease: 1. It has about 70% fine moly. If it gets on the skin, it gets in the cracks and has to wear off:) 2. The running friction under load of a well lubed moly thread is about 40% less than just oil. This means for the same torque you get MORE thrust, or more bolting stress, so go easy on the torque till you get a feel. We also used this paste in the assembly of 316ss valves including 316 bolting. Before we started using this paste we galled about 25% of the bolts before they ever made any clamp load scrapping the valve. With we had to "Learn" the right torque with impact guns(We broke a lot of bolts through too much bolting stress) and then we lost maybe 1 in a hundred to galling. 3. A little goes a long way, use a short bristle brush and just barely coat the threads and you have plenty. It stays put in that it does not run off, and unless you heat above about 450F it stays a paste. Can be bought in 1# brush in top cans, and that is a 4 lifetime supply for most:) As an aside, the best never-seize I tested for service to 1000F was Dow Corning MolyKote Antisieze 1000. Nothing else was even close.

Ouch!!! Watch for infection, and at the first sign of same run don't walk to the doc. Crush injuries heal oddly and if infected like to be much worse. Hope it heals quickly and well. And I would offer that the wedding ring is another injury waiting to happen. Miy wife saw an ARMY poster on the dangers of wearing a ring while working and took mine away, saying she would much prefer to have me equipped with 10 fingers than to have the ring. I now wear it on our aniversary when we go out to eat, and not wearing the ring has not hurt our marriage any, since May will be 31 years.

You guys are most welcome. Much of what I learned about AC DC and so forth was on your dime as the taxpayers of the US sent me to Redstone Arsenal to the US ARMY MIssile and Muntions school in 1974. I learned a lot there.

I started my oldest a daughter in the shop at 4 and in the blacksmith shop at 6 I have a photo of her standing on a box, in her bibs swinging a 2.5# hammer with her hand and mine on the same hammer as I stand behind her and sort of wrap around her. I cherish that photo. She was in a local magazine at 13 with a trellis of her own design. She paid for 2 used cars and traded blachsmith work outright for a third before she was 20. Then she developed back problems, The back issues are a degenatrive disc diesese, and compression fractures in her back. At 25 she has the knowledge but can not do that sort of work. She can and does work as heater for me. That is when I have a production run she manages the forge, and every time I trun around a perfectly heated bilit is ready and she takes the one I had and either reheats or places for cooling. That requires no great lifting, and she can stand straight. She knows more about cars than the boys her age, and tells them what is wrong and how to fix their cars:) My second daughter was a shop rat as well and making and selling work until she decided she really liked boys, and decided being a girly girl was the path:) She excells at that:) Both of my girls are about 5' tall and 100 # and both were pretty darn good. By the way my oldest got her first official beginners class from Clifton Ralph. Now that was a sight Clifton at about 6' and my 13 year old Sarah at 4' and him teaching her with the help of 3 other experienced smiths. About 100 years of experience teaching her. I was Jealous:)

Part of where I was going, and lost track of was welding in most cases is DC. Tig is usually high frec AC. BUT a Buzz box transformer type welder will not usually be pure DC. Is is usually a "Chopped wave DC meaning half of the AC wave is removed and so you only see the positive side and so sorta kinda DC. Even the very good Buzz box welders usually have a small AC component hiding in the dc and you have to have an Ociliscope to see it. That hiding AC is the part that can hurt you. Most true motor generator DC welders are nearly pure DC and probably why the pipe welder crowd love the engine driven Lincohn "pipeliners" that give a super weld from the pure DC. Go from a cheap buzz box to a motor generator welder and you won't believe the difference. I have both:)

Beth, electricity and water are a poor mix. Most outdoor welding stops esecially if lightning is about. Usually the DC current used in welding is low enough even though the amps are high that one gets a frightning rather than a killing shock. BUT note the very important USUALLY. I am not sure of what you mean by water is about. I don't like to run any electrical equipment standing in water, My shop floor is crushed limestone over dirt and is often moist. I do not ever have a problem, But I also strive to never be a part of the circuit. AC current in very low amps and not very high volts can kill you. Interesting that 110V AC @ 60 hertz is almost perfectly suited to fry the bodies natural pacemaker and you heart stops if the current passes thru that area. The US ARMY taught us in Electronics school several safety bits that I seldom see practiced but make sense: 1. Remember that electricity has to have a full circuit to flow. The damage to a human is when the human becomes part of the path. So they taught us to use one hand only if at all possible when working with energized circuits, placing the non used hand firmly in our rear pocket to prevent a hand to hand circuit, since that tends to go thru the heart. 2. They had studied and found that most electrical related injuries in the electronic missile maintenance field I worked in were not from the shock, but rather the automatic reflex to yank back the hand that got shocked. When reflexably yanked the hand or arm tended to find a screw point or other sharp projection in the box of electronics and severe cuts resulted.

Steve, Oct this year. PM me and I will send you the exact date when I get home. You would be most welcome.

No thomas, That is Rule Number DOS :)

Some thoughts on electricity. Rule number UNO! At the factory where electrical things are made, special magic smoke is put into the device. If you take care of the device, the smoke stays in and the device functions. If you make a mistake, some or all of the magic smoke will leak out and the device will work only part way or not at all if too much of the magic smoke has leaked out. Sometimes one can send the device to an electrical repair shop and have fresh magic smoke put back in and the device is then as good as new. Sooo... If you see the magic smoke leaking from an electrical device, you are safe in assuming it will no longer function as intended until the smoke is replaced. Steve Sells put up a nice diagram of the 2 phase. Three phases has 3 of those nice sine graphs. And the spacing of the 3 sine waves is different. At most American homes, the electrical power coming in, at the main panel is 220 single phase. There are 2 wires that have power and a common. Now imagine that the you put a volt meter across the two "Power wires" you would see 220 volt indicated. That is because one wire has a sine wave the is about 110volts RMS and so does the other wire. BUT, KEY BUT, HERE, the two sine waves are 180 degrees apart. So in your minds eye, draw a nice sine wave, and then draw another exactly opposite the first one. In the center of that graph is the ZERO line. So when one sine wave is at 110V positive, the other one is 110V negative. The zero line is the common, so if you measur from any single power wire to the common you get 110, measure across both and presto 220. And remember that those sine waves are changing at the "frequency" usually referred to as Hertz. Usually 60 hertz in the US and usually 50 in Europe. So in the US at 60 hertz, the sine waves reverse 60 times a second. Remembere that RMS I had above, that is Root Mean Square, and is way of sorta averageing the distances from 0 the sine waves go. So if you put your alternating current into an ociliscope and get the time base to stop the wave you will see that 110V Rms is actually more than 110V from zero at the peak, but because of the times the wave is heading to the opposite side and is much closer to the zero line it all averages out to something like 110V Rms Now in the breaker panels every other slot down each side is say power wire #1 and the remaining is the #2 power wire. That is why a single pole breaker has one black wire hooked to it and is a 110V and a double pole, has 2 wires and has the double toggles joined together and is 220V. Clear as mud? In the US when we have 460 volt 3Ph, we often refer to each of the 3 power wires as a hot leg. Go between a hot leg and the common and you get 277V, often used in factorys for lighting. ( You have seen the 277V listing and wondered who uses 277V?) Single phase motors use more apparent power, and run hotter. 3 phase motors are much more efficient, run cooler. But if one of the 3 legs blows the breaker, or is disconnected, the motor will run at very reduced strenght, get very hot and very soon the magic smoke leaks out. And now why alternating current and Direct current. DC comes from batteries and generators. Alternators make AC. You can Rectify AC to DC and you can use an inverter to take DC and make AC. AC 3Ph Invented by Nickoli Tesla, called "Polyphase" and his Transformers have brought you the comforts you know. If we had DC only, there would have to be powerhouses generating the DC every few blocks in every city. DC takes HUGE wires to transmit very far, and the voltage drops quickly. AC is able to be run through a transformer, and is transmitted at VERY high voltages. And since E=I/R, when the voltage goes very high, the amps goes the opposite way and becomes very low,and resistance is not such an issue. That lets "high Tension" lines maybe 1/2" diameter carry the smae "Power" that would take many feet diameter in DC, since the dc can not be changed in a transformer. Once at the point of need the transformer then is used again to drop the voltage and raise the amps, And that is why you see Mr. Tesla's transformers on all those power poles where the lines branch off to the house. In a factory, often power comes in at 13,600Volts three phase and is transformed down to 460 3 phase and other useful voltages like 220V 3 phase. And then you can take say 277 and run it thru a transformer and get 220V single phase of 110V single phase to run that coffee pot on you work bench. But in the end the most important thing to remember is Rule Number UNO!

I think that looks to be very useful. Thanks

While there are indeed skilled metal workers in Afganistan, those Lee Enfield copies were made in Packistan when the Russians were in Afganistan. The Taliban and Jihadies used Packistan as a refuge then as now. 5 days of training sounds light to me, but then the ARMY way is "see it once, do it once, teach it" AND, if you teach a guy how to knock together a forge and something to blow it, haw to make even a couple of simple things, then he will naturally progress. As to translating the books, since there are many dialects and many who are iliterate, the books would need to be pictures in most cases. Teaching by a human, also wins those hearts and minds.

Having worked in the drop forged industry for 21 years, I would say drop forged. As Phil notes the wide trim line is a strong indication these are forged. The texture is probably from shot blasted after cooling. This shot blasting uses steel balls to remove the scale and if done correctly also shot peens the surface, reducing surface stress that can lead to cracks later. Beth, in England drop forging is usally called die stamping I believe. As phil notes the drop forge process is used for highly stressed parts that need minimum part size. All steel starts as a casting in the beginning. It will have all the defects that casting typically have. This huge casting usually has the end cropped off to remove the worst of the defects and is then hot rolled, at full forge(Weld) temp, and the more reductions under the rolls the sounder the steel. The hot drop forging process is the last chance to close up and weld solid any internal defects. Rolled steel also has a grain structure that is somewhat like wood fiber. It runs the lenght of the bar, unlike cast which has totally random grain, much like packed sand. Thus in drop forging you can plan the grain flow to get the grain to flow around corners making the part stronger than the same size/alloy cast part. Now a relatively new process is continous cast bar. This is a casting that is made to near finished bar, and is usually "Rotary forged" to remove the "Pipe" shrinkage down the center of the bar. I have seen continous cast stainless bar that was machined into a valve stem that would leak steeam right up the center of the stem (We had to scrap 100,000# of steel as un-usable. The rotary forging process has hammers in a ring around the slowely moving hot bar as it comes from the continous caster. We had to specify no continous cast for our machine only stock. The state of the art may now be better. For those not used to drop forges, you always put more steel in the billet than can fit in the impressions in the dies. This ensure a complete fill out of the forging. This excess is extruded out over the "Gutters" which make a controlled this section at the trim line and also help control how close the dies come together as the steel cools at the gutters more quickly and slows down the dies. From the forge the forging is placed into a trim die and pushed thru by a press, somewhat like a punch press, but usually with more stroke. Some trim die will have several openings, the first to trim out an internal hole then pushed thru the outside trim to clear that flash. The giveaway between a casting mold line and a forge trim line is the direction of the marks. A casting will have been ground with a big snag grinder and the grind marks will not all be in the same direction. Forge trim lines will run perpendicular to the raised trim band. I would also guess that straightening these should be a hot process, and should be fine.

I have run into the exact opposite here in Southern Indiana. Not juried shows mind you, but a very nice craft festival in Cannelton Indiana, on the Ohio river was fine when I brought another smith along last year that the organizer asked if I could get more. I asked my sattalite group, and the October meeting will be the Saturday Demo. The organizers have promised us a city block of street space and will be advertising the evnt and the "Horde" of blacksmiths. Sometimes the organizers realize that if one blacksmith is a draw, more are more of a draw.

To all my friends who have posted and prayed, I offer my deepest gratitude. They past 6 months since my son took his life have been very hard. We continue to heal, but it is very very slow. I have not posted as often as I should, and have not been able to read the good thoughts you sent often as it is still very very raw. From the bottom of my broken heart, thank you. With good friends sorrow is divided, and joy multiplied.

May God continue to bless you and her. Prayers from S. Indiana.