Alan Evans

Well there's an offer you can't refuse! A picture is worth a 1000 words A demonstration is worth a 1000 pictures Doing it yourself is worth a 1000 demonstrations!

Herewith a quick sketch of the back blast arrangement, I will take a photo of the heat shields when I go over to the forge later. The note about drying the breeze on the front is basic fire control, you have probably already experienced the joy of a bit of wet coke exploding and the hot bits sticking to your lip! You can see the prop stand system, really handy, works best on a packed earth floor. Alan

I was given the remains of Alan Knight's hearth when we moved the forge to Hanbury. He bought a new one and the first thing he did was cut a new hole in the back plate and raise the tue up. I am really sorry I did not start reading your thread until you had already got so far and can well understand your reluctance to ruin your lovely metalwork on the word of some faceless cove on an internet forum. Alcosa have always made them to that design I can't understand why they never changed, presumably most of their customers have coped! You can always do it later if you find it a problem! If most of your work is on the end of bars you may never need to get at the centre. You can just log my configuration away in your "to solve a future problem compartment"

I understood that the "deep hole" was to create a sleeve to hold the punch securely but enable the O.P. to see the position of the punch's business end clearly. Even with such a holder I would still reckon to use a guide rail clamped to the work piece to keep the punches inline and oriented. Alan

I will send you some photos of my Mk. 3 hearth. It is now used mainly to support my gas furnace. It has hinged flaps hanging off the hood which reduce heat and fumes from big fire. I was always on the lookout for a glass oven door to hang off it so I could see through. A tinted one would be best if it could cut down the glare. I will sketch a really handy stand which I copied from Ivan Smith's hearth. it hinged up off the hearth with a loosely atached prop which could take up any height, great for longer bars. The only thing I would do with your hearth is to lift the tuyere so the hot spot of the fire is in line with the top edge of the tray so you can heat the middle of the bar without taking out those beatifully made but horribly impractical panels on either side. You will need either some castable /fire bricks or my earth and ash mix under the fire. Whatever you go for you will need something to create a "swans nest" to contain the fire. You can imagine if the tray is just full of coke the fire will just keep moving around and spreading out across the whole hearth. Alan

I have just revisited your earlier images and note the direct bosh tueyere connection I managed to overlook before, sorry. Every time you put a bend in the pipe you restrict the flow so the slower the curve the better. For very similar lack of space reasons to yours I mounted my fan on the back of the hearth with the motor tucked underneath and the air delivery pointing up which meant only a 90 degree bend if I remember correctly. The slide valve was bolted to the delivery flange of the fan with an extension handle to bring it out to the side of the hearth, and I made a sheet metal funnel reducer to the diameter of my flexible pipe and another to reduce down to the air pipe. My first forge was in a 3.8 x 2.8 metres (12' x 9') od shed which was extended to 3.8 x 4.4 (12' x 14') when I put in my second power hammer. Talk about tight squeeze, it finally had three power hammers a treadle hammer which could be swung over the 3cwt anvil a hulking great 5+cwt anvil and an old cast iron pillar drill apart from the leg vice tool racks and hearth! On the 50kg Reiter and the 1cwt Alldays I was standing out in the rain if I was forging anything over a metre. Happy days!

Looking very professional...almost like a real one! You could just mount the fan directly onto the bosh, either just bolts through the tank wall and cut off the pipe flush or weld on a plate to the end of the air pipe, any particular reason why you are thinking of rubber? The advantage of having a slide valve somewhere between the fan and air pipe is well worth the time to make one up. I have one of those lovely old rheostats as well, identical, I make up electronic controllers now, but it is still in the shop as a standby. The only things I have done to my F20M over the 35years I have had it (bought second hand from a school) is about ten sets of brushes and a pair of bearings. Be careful that you do not over grease the bearings, I had to have my 35hp hammer motor rewound due to over zealous greasing! £600 of Ouch! The big advantage of using a bit of flexible tube for your air would be to put the fan in a box to cut down the noise. Makes a huge difference. I now use my F20M for my gas furnace and have put it in a box with an offset air inlet and connect to the burner with a vacuum cleaner hose. I just happened to have a bit of 25mm plate offcut which I propped up for the fire back. but I think that arrived a couple of years after I had started using the hearth. The Alcosa cast "cape" was higher and narrower than yours, but they were only fitted to the 36'' square hearths AFAIK. We had a saying around here along the lines of "anything'll do, nuthing wunt" go with what you have! Alan

Definitely the high temp one out of those, but I certainly would not buy one. I have always made my own out of aluminium sheet (reclaimed from a caravan)... cut out a 25mm undersized hole and turned up the flange with a mallet. You can also make or buy a clamp on rain-collar but given the open shelter it is in it is probably not necessary. Alan

Ha Ha! I don't believe it! I started reading your thread this morning and thought Blimey! deja vu! You have been reproducing my first hearth building history to the weld fillet! The only thing I thought I could add was to tell you that I had a remote bosh made up from a 25 litre oil drum with some Morris 1000 1/2inch bore heater hose connected to a blanking plate on the back of the tue and the air blast was connected with a bit of vacuum cleaner hose....and then I read your afternoon post`! The answer to your question is there is no reason why you can't, it works okay-ish. I have not understood how you are making the bosh / tue connection. If you do that with rubber hoses like mine....the water flow went from the bottom of the drum to the lower connector on the tue and the return went from the upper tue connector to a copper tube which hooked over the top of the drum. It used to boil like crazy on a good day but I found I could unhook the return and drain a bit of hot water out and refill with cold. I tried anti freeze to start with but it got expensive when it boiled away. I did have the pipes freeze a couple of times, the first time I only realised that had happened after the tue water boiled and blew the pipes off! I used to unhook the return pipe and drain it out if I remembered in the winter. My tube and hosepipe tue lasted for a good few years. I think the tinplate oil drum bosh lasted as long, five or six years at least of full time operation. I eventually replaced it with a bottom blast hearth which I built with a long bed so I could heat 600mm lengths when I got my power hammers. The sheet work of the hearth lasted over ten years and I eventually rebuilt it with stainless steel and that is still going on 20 odd years later...still using the old original Alcosa back frame angle irons! The fire back I use is a bit of 25mm mild steel plate. I would not waste time with the castable. The tue was set high so its air pipe was at the level of the hearth sides. The bed of the hearth was a mix of earth and ash the whole box was filled to within an inch of the top edge but formed a mound above the level of the air pipe in the centre, with a "swans nest" bowl scooped out to contain the fire. An arc of wagon tyre was laid across the front to create a removeable coke retainer and was a solid rest for hearth tools. If you have the tue set low it means you have to have an unecessarily huge fire to heat the middle of a long bar. Setting it high obviates the need for the removable side plates...which if used invariably mean half your coke goes on the floor! As others have said the tue only needs to poke into the hearth enough to keep the fire a bit forward of the back plate say 150mm at most on that size of hearth. I was looking for a drawing of the configuration of the hearth that I copied originally, have not found it yet, I will do a sketch for you if it is not clear from my description. Alan

I hold the punch with fingers or tongs or snap clamps...whatever is required or comes to hand What I find a problem is to align the characters. I usually clamp a piece of bar under the line of characters as a guide rail and rest the punch tip against that. It does two jobs; keeps / puts them in line and keeps their orientation (twist) correct. If you still had problems with the spacing you could always mark the guide bar up. Sometimes I like the higgledypiggledy look though!

I always calculate the volume of the finished piece and divide that by the cross sectional area of the parent bar like most of those above. There are fudges and nuances of course. I find that the 5% allowance for scale can often be compensated for by just running the hammer along the arris to create a chamfer. If I am towards the limit of my hammer capacity I will allow a bit more to compensate for the extra number of heats. When forging tapers I calculate for a straight line taper using a formula for calculating the frustrum of a cone or pyramid and then make an allowance either way if I want a full sided (cigar shaped) or hollow sided taper. I rarely forge tapers to a point so this formula calculates for a frustrum (flat topped/truncated) rather than a full cone or pyramid. It also usefully works on hexagonal, octagonal, rectangular or any other polygon that you can calculate the top and base area of and even gives a great starting point on combination tapers. Start square run into octagon for instance. I just enter the top and base surface areas and the length and it gives the base bar length. I tried to upload my Excel Frustrum volume calculator spreadsheet to iforgeiron.com a few months ago but the system only allowed for image files. You should be able to do a search for the thread and see the images. Let me know if you can't find it and I will email it to you. This is the operative cell equation:- =B3*(B1+SQRT(B1*B2)+B2)/3 B1 = top area B2 = base area B3 = height I have this formula in all my digital devices though nowadays in the forge it is mainly used from my mobile phone. You can probably find a similar on online. While on the subject, I have also found it useful to remember the basics when dealing with volumes:- Halving the linear measurement will quadruple the length, true for round or square. In your example above for instance if you wanted the reins to be 3/8 diameter you would use a quarter their final length of 3/4 diameter. There are four 1/2 inch bars contained in a 1 inch bar! Alan

A potter friend had a cone drive/clutch/speed control on her wheel that would vaguely fit your description. Bill Gichner told me to "always buy the first one" and then modify design your own if you must! Along the lines "of a wise man learns by his mistakes...a lucky man learns by the mistakes of others" Be lucky!.... Ah I see you already are!

What do you need that is different to a Goliath type? They have a small footprint and would appear to run at about the same speed as the one on the video. Or is it that you just fancy making your own? If you do a Google image search on Federhammer, the one I saw at Matthias' was similar to the smallest one of those shown but even so they are quarter or semi elliptic leaf springs / helve style so the anvil is about as far away from the wall as a small air hammer. The Goliath and similar Little Giant format have the smallest footprint front to back that I have seen. Could you have the helve off to the side? I often wondered about mounting a motor and crank on top of a fly press and using the ready made frame and slides for the tup guides...

Years ago I remember visiting Matthias Peters in Stolberg, Aachen he had a feder hammer (toggling leaf spring) in his forge that his blokes all preferred over the Rieter/Kuhn style because of the speed. You might try him for info...

Green shoe polish, it will wax and colour in one operation.

Here in England there is a dangerous surfeit of humidity, especially when using a gas forge :) I always understood that for every kilo of propane you burnt you put a kilo of water vapour into the atmosphere.... "because your worth it!" I trust you get the same Jennifer Aniston cosmetic adverts over there.... I realised a few days after I posted about making a mister back in March that I already had one...I had stuck a bit of 10mm (3/8") plastic tube onto the draw pipe of a cheapo sand blaster in order to suck the water out of the hold down bolt tubes of 150kg hammer, works fine as a mister. Was able to lift the water well over a metre. Alan

Obviously they must be referring to the origins of the hypodermic needle!

Funnily enough as soon as I pressed "post" on post 13 I thought of the image of you forging your sculpture and you were presenting from the left. But I was actually thinking of hammers which have hand controls used by a team of smiths. My 250kg Massey (not yet installed) for instance has a "J" shaped foot treadle and a hand control, my 150kg and 50kg Alldays have "U" shaped foot treadles and hand controls, all the hand levers and the "J" are on the right hand side. On a few occasions I could have done with a hammer driver, after almost doing the splits to keep my foot on the treadle I ended up resting a plank on it and standing on that, effective but a trifle Heath Robinson! Talk about an analog remote control! Edit 20.Nov (I have just had another look at your Aileron forging images and see that you employed a similar remote control there!) Ah pictures, I did look some out to illustrate my theories but got sidetracked doing presentations for the French Conference in Provence. I will have another go. But don't hold your breath!

I will have to mull over your comment before responding

See my post no. 32 on page two of this thread. They just make that same mistake over and over! May be they only get their blacksmithing imagery and techniques from other films and the first one got it wrong. Given the number of films where the art of the blacksmith is so badly portrayed, I wonder what other crafts /disciplines are equally trashed or misrepresented or is it just us metalworkers?

I can advise you that over here in the UK we only call them Leg Vices. The other name I believe is post colonial. But who needs or wants (or vise versa) my advice? I would argue the toss but I don't have a leg to stand on... Get a grip

As stated above it appears that like a lot of things we can cope with it in small quantities, and it is the acidic foods dissolving the copper in a cooking pot that will maybe mean we have too much. To put the toxicity of copper in perspective, all of the water pipework in my house is made of copper and that has soft soldered joints. Soft Solder for potable water connections is lead free, unlike that multicore stuff I used to use for electrical joints. The vessel you saw may have been soft or hard (silver) soldered. The hard solder comes in different grades relating to the varying percentages of silver. The industrial ones (non silver hall mark standard) over here were called Easy Flo and Easy Flo 2 they have slightly different melting points. They have recently been taken off the market and replaced with a cadmium free version, I still have metres of the old version :( What is not going to be found carcinogenic/toxic/lethal/hazardous I wonder? Of course some apparent cooking pots are modern antique reproductions used to hang on the wall and look jolly. The genuine ones will have tin interiors. Ah well, I am off to stand by an intense heat source and hold onto a piece of metal which is white hot at one end...must remember that the white hot bit is dangerous to health....

:) we all do eventually :)

He certainly gave me a few pointers! Wonderful man! The only part I disagree with is the half and half dies. I think they are awful. A set came with my Reiter hammer and after an hours use and much cursing they have been on the shelf for the last 30 years! I hand ground my cheese fullers and they have not been off the hammer for the same period of time!

I guess it very much depends on the work and what size and sort of hammer you are using. It is true the ideal would be to have a different hammer for each form of dies, to certain extent that is what I do, but the advantage of flat pallets and spring tools means that mid-heat you can swap to a different tool, you can't do that with fixed dies. On balance I find the flat pallets and loose tools more flexible/versatile. On my 50kg Reiter I have only ever used a pair of cheese fullers with a drop on table. Could be dropped on and taken off mid heat. I used that system for ten years for virtually everything I forged. On the Alldays hammers 50kg and 150kg I have flat pallets and use either fixed spring or hand held tools in conjunction. I have made up some drop on specials which combine a series of tools and spacers for specific projects.