Alan Evans

I think that would be closer to a trip hammer than a treadle hammer which is what GNJC is researching. I am really surprised there is no earlier record of oliver or tommy hammers from the nail and chain making forges of the Black Country. There must have been thousands of them from the basic ash pole return spring and plank treadle on the floor linked together with rope to more mechanically sophisticated ones. There is one with a makers name on it I have seen in the Saint Ives museum but I would have dated it between the wars. @ GNJC did you contact the avoncroft or blackcountry museum curators? I am not sure in which guise it still exists but back in the seventies when I used to go to the Jewellery Quarter regularly, the old Birmingham Museum of Science and industry had some superb exhibits; tilt hammers and an amazing bottling machine and loads of bits of industrial equipment from the area. It might be worth trying to contact them in your quest. Whilst thinking of the BMoSaI, in the gunsmithing section was the finest example of technical blacksmithing/fire welding I have ever seen in the form of a demonstration of how a damascus barrel l was forged. It was one piece, a metre or so long and started at one end with the individual strips of iron and steel fanned out and then proceeded through the process with a couple of inches per stage until it finally reached the machined and etched breach. I must get in touch with them and see if it would be possible to photograph it sometime.

Interesting, the noise must have been awful, I hope his neighbours watched the same shows! I never tried steel shot in my tumblers, it may have been the solution. When I was doing jewellery I made up a tumbler from an old record player turntable tilted to 30 degrees and a plastic screw top pot held on by a clip. I used offcuts and beads of silver in washing up liquid and used to chuck in stuff and leave it going. It worked really well to take off the Easyflo flux and give a soft sheen. 33rpm was best! When I was doing a lot of domestic ironwork I invariably finished it with a burnished, armour bright surface which was either lacquer-and-waxed or latterly just Renaissance waxed. I started off with a Phosphoric Acid Pickle, soda rinse, water rinse, dry, rotary wire brush. Thought I could improve the process and reduce the labour so.... I tried various tumblers for ironwork, making a 600mm AF 1220mm (2' AF 4'long) hexagonal drum mounted on a frame with a reduction gear drive....Slow belt slip problems, took too long to load /unload. I also used a concrete mixer....Too noisy and too small for firetools' length. Eventually I bought a commercially produced rumbler which had a rubber lined trough on springs, and a motor hung underneath with an eccentric weight to provide vibration. That produced a good finish. But. The trouble I found with the rumbler for steelwork and the reason I went on to dry blasting was that you needed a wet system otherwise the granite chippings or ceramic media just pulverised itself and mixed in with the rust/scale to produce a mud. That meant that you had to rinse the drum to get rid of the slurry...I do not have slurry separators and drains suitable to deal with it. The ironwork also needed rinsing after rumbling and then of course drying, any lamination or tong joint was a potential rust area if you did not manage to get the moisture out. It added more stages than the original pickling system. The dry blasting and wire brushing did work out the most effective for the objects and quantities I was producing.

Wow, apart from the sheer mastery of the material, I kept looking at all those halving joints and cringing! I must experiment with your electrode in the weld pool trick, I managed to get a lot of spits and bangs when I last tried to TIG some brass so I gave up and reverted to Easyflo silver solder.

!-! Sand bags roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose.... :) The chilled iron grit that would save you the toasting labour and cut back your oxide, scale, rust, paint quicker comes in different grits. I used a fairly aggressive one. They range from G05 to G55 the higher the number the coarser the grit. Vixen's current price is £27.50 sterling for 20kg I convert that to US$42.8 for 44US pounds. Initial outlay a lot more than the sand but saving hugely with longevity, recylabilty and crucially less labour time. The link should get you to a data sheet for it. You could always blag a bit from a local blast shop to try it out. http://www.pytheasgroup.com/sand-blasting-abrasives/chilled-iron-grit/?gclid=CMbwrtLM8bACFcYmtAod7i7xug

A wise man learns by his mistakes, a lucky man learns by the mistakes of others!

I am sorry I have just realised looking at that link that I do not use Chilled Steel Shot. I think the stuff I use is Chilled Iron Grit and it looks like the surface of the asteroid that Bruce Willis drilled in that wonderful disaster movie. I did have a look for it on the vixen.co.uk site where I got it from but they don't seem to list their media. The oppo company guyson.co.uk does list a couple of iron based media. I will telephone Vixen tomorrow and find out the cost and spec. now you have got me interested!

Yes yes absolutely, I used it for many years before I discovered the chilled steel. But I even used to recover and reuse that in my polythene bag recovery system. Cost wise I don't know, I have not bought any for a decade or so, I bought half a dozen sacks and still have some left, I was not joking when I said it lasts a long time!

Have you tried forging without the sand? What sort of size and wall thickness are you working? ....or twice in some idiots' case who shall be nameless. (I gather) there was an awful "time standing still" type moment between putting the tube in the water and the blast whilst a nagging thought crossed the mind that there was a reason why that should not have been done! Hey Ho! A really nice tale about tube forging I heard from my friend Andy Rowe. He did a working journey around the states a good few years ago. He worked with Clifton Ralph who was tapering round tubes using a vee shaped bottom tool which stopped it from squishing flat. He then went down to (Texas and Joe Pehoski I think it was) who had allowed one week on a job to cut out triangles and reform and weld tubes up to taper them. Andy showed him Clifton's trick, they did the work in two days so Joe said right we've done our work for the week I'll take you round and we'll go sight seeing!

I cant remember where I first heard it, but I do remember remembering the tip the the next time I put my hand over the end of a piece of pipe that had its other end in the fire...ouch!

I would advise you not to use the lead bearing brass. As I found to my cost it introduces another problem with getting the heat right. When the lump in the story below broke, you could see tiny beads of lead on the break surface. I am very happy to be corrected by a metallurgist, but I was told that the lead is used to help the chips break when the metal is being machined. It enables this because it does not alloy with the copper but remains in suspension and forms a series of weak points throughout the brass on a microscopic level. Because it has a lower melting point than the copper, at the bottom end of the temperature range when you could normally work non-lead-bearing brass the problem is at its worst because the lead is almost molten but the copper is still relatively hard and it shears across the lead. The only way you can forge it hot is at the top end of the brass forging temperature range when there is less of a difference in ductility between the two. My story....Back when I was more adventurous than I am now and nobody had told me I couldn't, I designed and made some church door pulls in brass. In my happy state of ignorance I ended up buying 100 pounds worth of standard free machining, lead bearing brass for a job I was getting 200 pounds for. I bought enough 100mm x 25mm (4"x 1") to make three of them in case I screwed up, took most of the morning trying to draw out the first one. Despite being so careful to work it not too hot or cold I managed to get a crack and it fell apart, disaster. My friend and colleague Mike Roberts along the road had a TIG and welded it up for me and I spent the whole of the next day teasing out the next one, using the repaired bit as a handle. My nerves could not take another 8 hours of that, so on the third day I threw caution to the wind and forged out the last one by getting it to dull red and hitting it hard in 20 minutes flat! The coincidence in this and reason for the tale is that I came across the 27 year old broken bit the day before this thread started and had cut the bit off and had started to machine up some tube plugs, see photo. The door pulls were okay but you can see the difference. The one that took ages has a fold line running up it and the one that went through proper is much better formed. Brass forging subsequently I have used Delta metals DB4 when I could get it and more recently Coldur A which is Columbia Metals silicon bronze...almost as easy as steel to forge!

It was the speed and efficiency of chilled steel shot that made me use it.....at the risk of being cheeky and deliberately misconstruing your post... you don't have to "use it all the time"! :) I hate the process and want it over as soon as possible, on a particularly dusty job I will use either and air fed mask or respirator even when its in the dust extracted cabinet.

+1 The concentricity of your taper is what I was complimenting, and is the reason I remembered the advantage of welding a capping plate on the end which had a tong grab stub, bit of 25mm (1") square 50mm (2") long) it helped to keep everything in line. A couple of foot long stub equals your porter bar and you have the advantage of solid feel. Not wanting to teach Granny to suck eggs, but if you do try plugging the end with the wet rag or plate watch that you don't get carried away and end up with three with a texture slightly different from your first one!

There is good reason sand is no longer used (apart from the referring to the tool as a sand blaster). It is slow to cut, breaks up fast and the dust is bad for your lungs. I use chilled steel shot for mild steel, Aluminium Oxide for Stainless and non ferrous, and glass bead for surface peening and cleaning. I tend to use the aluminium oxide and the glass bead in a little suction feed gun rather than bother to clean out every trace of the chilled steel from the cabinet and pressure pot system. I use the suction gun on an air line in the cabinet so I can utilise the light, dust extraction and the containment it provides. I tend to use the Aluminium Oxide and Glass Bead sacrificially and do not recycle it...you only need a couple of bits of contaminant to really mess up an bead blasted surface. If you do not have a cabinet or the workpiece is too big for the cabinet, I have had a lot of success using a large polythene bag (find a Farmer friend making Haylage) or making up a polythene envelope using polytunnel or builders clear polythene. Leave a small hole to poke the gun and your hands in. You can see through the bag to the work piece and all the grit and removed material is contained instead of spread around the workshop or yard!

How much did you forge and how much did it grow out of interest? Oh and I forgot to compliment you on the taper!

On an aesthetic note will you be squaring/chamfering up the 3" end to get rid of the radiused tube corners or leave them alone and celebrate them? Or are you cutting it at the spring line of the taper?

I found you can speed up the process by plugging the end of the tube with a rag or sometimes its even worth welding a plate over the end. It speeds up the heating and slows down the cooling. If you leave the tube open it acts like a chimney and the air passes through chilling the surface. Huge surface area with little thermal mass if you count both inside and outside surfaces. Plugging it you can halve the heating time and double the forging time per heat. The weld on plate does not need to be continuous welded just needs to reduce the flow. I have a few plates with square stubs welded on which enable me to use smaller more comfortable tongs concentrically. On some bigger tubes (around 200mm (8") diameter 10mm (3/8") wall) which we were heating and working on the last 100mm (4") we made up a plug from 40mm (1-1/2") ceramic insulation board mounted on a piece of studding so we could poke it down the tube till it was around the level of the furnace wall, that stopped the heat from travelling up the inside. I have filled lighter tube with sand when bending hot and had no problem with it melting, you must make sure it is dry and I preferred to use wooden plugs rather than welding caps just to be safe. I 100% agree that the thicker the wall the easier to work. The time you spend chasing your tail correcting cock ups and kinks seems to quadruple every time you halve the thickness!

@Beth, Well if ever you are coming up to feed the Parrots do pop in you are always welcome! It was also good to visit you, I felt very much at home in your shop...if that makes sense.

Glad the trip wasn't a total washout. We have been ravaged by further drought problems since you left. Our spring collection tank in the field above the cottage has been overflowing for the last couple of weeks and a lot of trees came down over one particularly squally arid 24 hours! corrections... The hammer you described sounded like a 'Blacker Hammer'. 'Blackersmith' is the name I use on blacksmiths' sites in memory of my first hammer! Who is this Allan Edwards bloke then? (Alan Evans perhaps?)

Hi Ian, I see you are posting again, presumably back home? Did you see anything exciting after you left here? Any luck in Dublin on your way through?

He was a welder/worked in the Glasgow Shipyards, so he may hold out for authenticity. Do you remember in the early part of The Full Monty where they are looking at Jennifer Beals arc welding in Flashdance and one of them says "she's not much of a welder either, her oxygen is too high"!

I did not pick up on this first time around, could you enlarge on your smelting process? I was having a look and I suppose I have a builder's wheel barrow full, what sort of quantity out for energy in are we talking?

Like John B says it depends on the circumstance. The way I would go about solving the OP's dilemma of how big to make the hole for a hot rivet is back to first principles. Heat up the rivet you want to use and measure its diameter. If your work piece is to be cold when riveted do a similar experiment and measure the hot hole to see how much your hole will shrink and then drift the actual hole to size to compensate. I have found that most of the time you can predict the outcome very accurately provided you are consistent in your process. Wierd things happen to visual heat assessment when the sun comes around and shines in the door! If I am using the rivet as a pivot for tongs etc then I want good bearing surfaces, so I tend to drill and used a slide fit rivet, put a healthy chamfer on the end, rivet cold with the flat hammer, heat the whole joint and quench while working the reins. The quench and wiggle seems to give just the right tolerance without slop. I found that if you use the ball pein to mushroom the end ,thats all it does, it does not upset the shank to fit the hole. Much stronger to use the flat of the hammer, the chamfer does two things it transfers the energy/movement further down the shank and prevents the splitting mentioned by John B. The other bad thing I found using the ball pein is that invariably I would bruise the surrounding area, which looked amateurish even if I was getting paid for it! The disadvantage of too big a hole for the rivet is probably the cause of Franks bent rivet tongs, some of my old tongs were so well worn that at some time in their life the rivet had been replaced in a hurry with the wrong size and similar bends occurred. I have to confess to driving over a set with my forklift the other day which made a useful set for working around corners! I used to use rivet snaps/sets to try and make matching round heads, but after a few years I decided that for aesthetic and philosophic reasons that a hand hammered head was more appropriate for most of my work. I either leave it from the flat hammer or after setting with the flat hammer, use a flat head punch to give a 5 clout facetted head, or when in frilly mode decorate with ball and centre punch to make flowery things.

Mithsmiths surely? ....try saying that with a frozen beard!

My favourite worst film and film blacksmith managed to get just about every thing wrong, with smithing and English History. Alan Ladd in the Black Knight. Opening scene is the glowing fire and out comes the orange heat sword straight into the slack tub; lots of steam; out onto the anvil ting ting; hold it up to the light and it is...mirror polished, hilt and all; set up a beaten breast plate (which probably represents a weeks work for a few people) and slice it in two with one blow. Priceless. The rest of the film got better and better combining Vikings, Saracens, Druids and finally the destruction of Stonehenge by Alan Ladd tying his lasso to the his saddle pommel backing up and pulling over the sarsen stones, better than priceless! "What do we remember from English History?.... Oh yeah chuck that in!"

I am not sure I agree. Possibly true in the examples you cite, and I guess it hinges on your meaning of "modern". But I would see the reason to invest in the materials and time as being much the same as today. I have never really gone along with the idea that labour was cheap from the point of view of the labourer! Sure if you were the patron funded by a ten percent tax on the population you could afford to hire a lot of labourers and build big churches, but it was still more economic for the master craftsman to employ the least possible number of workers to get the job done. They used Pole sprung Tommy or Oliver hammers in the Black country chain smithies precisely so that the kids and the wife weren't standing around but they could all be equally productive! Many of the chain shops were set up as one woman or man shops, only made possible by investing in foot operated hammers.