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gmbobnick I believe I understand what you're talking about with respect to difficult customers. George and JHCC covered this pretty well. One thing I might add is that in my experience, viable markets can be conceptualized as mesas and buttes. While both have flat tops, a mesa is wider than it is tall, while a butte is taller than it is wide. Metaphorical market mesas have a lot more surface area for competition, the opposite is true of buttes. Please note that they can both be at the same height. In practical terms, this means that you might sell the exact same thing, for the exact same price, only you've got more competition in one market than another. The internet has done wonders for "leveling" in this sense. Here's the thing. To get from one place to another, you'll have to descend, traverse, and climb up from the dark valleys that separate otherwise "equal" areas of opportunity. In practical terms, this movement looks a lot like capital investment, staff restructuring, physical relocation, marketing, research, downsizing, networking, upsizing, hustle, endurance, starvation, and sleepless nights. The reason for this, is that the "local" competition wherever you're headed will most likely have the upper hand, and you're changing whatever made you a competitor in the old market. If there isn't any competition when you get to the butte, you can rest assured that you will eventually discover the very good reason for that. The "build it and they will come" business model ignores many basic elements of human nature. People do not spontaneously go on vision quests to purchase unspecified goods simply because some entrepreneur hung up a shingle. I suspect most people live their entire lives passing the same public buildings without ever crossing the threshold of some business within them. In most cases, simply existing is not enough reason to compel sales. This is why real estate is so costly in areas with a strong history of commerce. You might be wondering what all this has to do with avoiding difficult customers. Well it all goes back to Mesa's versus Buttes. Buying customers will be more plentiful on the Mesa's, which in turn means there will be more competition. This has the effect of pushing everyone towards commodity thinking, where we see really dumb stuff like equating cost with value. Buttes on the other hand, are a lot harder to live on because you don't have as many customers to go around. People settle on Buttes to escape the culture of the Mesas, without necessarily giving up their "height" which is a stand-in for status. These are the customers who specifically seek out vendors qualified to perfectly deliver a painless transaction. If they change their mind, they open their wallets first. Now all that sounds pretty great, but there are some significant challenges that come with the "butte" market. First off, they're incredibly hard to find. My firm has worked for almost 500 General contractors in a major metro area over the last 17 years. I've got three clients like this. Out of the remaining 490 odd contractors, there are perhaps a dozen contractors that aren't great, and the remainder are so corrupt, mismanaged, and/or incompetent that we lose money working for them. Second, one failure to deliver is all it takes to lose them. How do I know this? Well, I got my toe in the door because a competitor had been shown out. Third, major economic forces affect everyone. There have been many times where my best clients had nothing going on. Fourth, major economic forces affect everyone. There have been many times where my best clients had so much going on that it was almost impossible to keep up. When I started here, we chased "commodity" market level work. All mesa's all the time. Since focusing on the "buttes", I've dropped our revenue by half, while doubling our profit. We do half as much work to earn twice as much profit, while working for people who genuinely appreciate what we do. The biggest challenge is maintaining our ability to deliver high-end work, even when times are slow. See if we laid people off when things were slow, we wouldn't have the quality manpower to instantly jump on projects that are so demanding. We also have to thread a cautious line on what we take on, so that we never come up short. Work in this market is equal parts commitment and sacrifice. I hope my experience can help you to be successful.

George, you really nailed it with that one!

gmbobnick, I'm not sure you see the point I was trying to make. You started this discussion by focusing on three things which might make your business stand out. I suggested that you consider how specificity can actually expand your access to buying markets with zero dollars spent. If your site came up in an internet search because you were selling damascus wire strippers, you'd almost certainly capture the attention of electricians who were looking for ordinary wire stripping tools. That's significantly more direct than hoping on word of mouth to carry you through. Even if word of mouth was your main conduit for sales, why make everything harder on your customers by making yourself difficult to find online? In 2021 the word "forge" does not convey "craft" so much as it communicates pretentious fraud. "Old Forge Dairy" is a real business that makes cheese. Go have a look, their marketing is a pitch-perfect example of trendy pretentious nonsense. Chalkboard menu Twee calligraphy "Farmstead Cheese" As opposed to what? None of this has anything to do with their product, it simply conveys a mindless adherence to marketing uniformity. There is a design movement aesthetic called "flatness" where the actual goal is to make everything so two dimensional and "frictionless" that a customer would struggle to tell the difference between competing businesses. "Forge" is a meaningless marketing term that properly refers to the tool, not the business. In most dictionaries, "forge" will be first defined as criminal fakes, second as pushing through a difficult process, and then as a tool. "Forge" as a business isn't an accepted definition in most dictionaries, unless you're five or six definitions deep. It's simply not descriptive, memorable, or advantageous to customers trying to find you. "Pronghorn" is very descriptive, indicates the American West which helps people to know where you are. Everyone loves nature, so there's no chance that your name will inadvertently deter customers. "Furniture" actually indicates what your proposed business sells. If you want to convey craftsmanship in your name, I would suggest something like "hand made" or "Bespoke"

Earlier I mentioned that getting found on Google is a very, very, big deal in terms of customers knowing you exist. The word "Forge" is incredibly popular with marketing people who mostly use it for a rustic flourish in a business name. Here are two examples of how ridiculous this is. Googled: "Forge lemonade" found a company making lemon shaped pins, as well as a lemon flavored moonshine. Googled: "Forge umbrella" found five separate companies making umbrellas, one was for vampires! It's also a word with multiple meanings, the most common of which is criminal, i.e. forgery. For these reasons, I would be hard pressed to name another word that is less advantageous to a new blacksmithing business than "forge". Even if these two reasons weren't enough for you, consider the fact that virtually all entrepreneur blacksmiths and knifemakers name their businesses; "XYZ Forge". It's not original, meaningful, or memorable. "Iron Pronghorn Furniture" is easier to remember, and it would stand out from the innumerable "XYZ Forgers".

Earlier today I encountered an article compiling a Gent named David Perell who wrote a series of paradoxical truths. One that applied well to your post is "the paradox of specificity: In the age of the Internet, when everybody has Google search and social media, differentiation is free marketing. The more specific your goal, the more opportunities you'll create for yourself. Narrow your focus to expand your horizons. " From that I take two main things. First, don't name your business something common, because you'll never get found on Google, which means you'll never get found by your potential customers. The second, is that you might find it's significantly better to avoid well-trod markets for whatever you do. By way of example, consider the following. If I wanted to buy a "rustic hand-made looking door knocker" I could have my pick from imported cast pot metal nonsense to historical artifacts wrought by some of the greatest smiths who ever lived. Now in contrast, if I wanted to find an electric guitar knob that had similar aesthetics, I'd have to commission it myself because Googling "hand forged electric guitar knob" leads to absolutely zero correct results. Same thing for "Hand forged damascus wire strippers". "Faster, better, cheaper" doesn't necessarily apply to emotional purchases.

For those who aren't following the markets, it might come as a surprise to learn that some material prices are rising at an alarming rate. Common commodities that have barely any price changes for years at a time, are currently doubling and tripling in as many months. PVC pricing is through the roof. This has triggered a lot of panic-buying which has made materials scarce, which only compounds the problem. Contracts are typically written based on the assumption that materials pricing will be "locked in" upon signing. Indeed there are lots of risk-averse companies that will place a material order for everything they need immediately. Other firms will make strategic purchases when markets appear low, so as to maximize their profitability. Sadly, the bulk of contractors tend to hold off on buying materials until they're actually needed, hoping that the market shifts will even everything out sufficiently to make the books balance. Some of these contractors will not be granted any additional funds to cover the price hikes, which is going to hurt. I'd like to address this challenge from two perspectives, what to do about ongoing work, and what to do about securing work in the future. Starting with ongoing work, it's obviously critical to take stock of your situation. Nothing less than honesty will do here. If you've got a problem, define how big a problem that is. Take the opportunity here to learn from your mistakes by accurately defining what the mistake was. Keep in mind that some contracts will require quality assurance processes/bureaucracy before the contractor is given approval to place an order. This means that you may have been under contract according to the terms of your bid, but not actually permitted to place a material order until such time as the market increases took effect. One lesson that should leap out here, is that it's good policy to do a material pricing check at every contractual inflection point. Let's say your proposal was good for 30 days. If the client calls to accept the project on day 31, check the material pricing before you accept. Now, let's say you get a "notice to proceed" letter because the client needs time to process the contract stuff. Do a material pricing check. If things are trending upwards, you might find yourself in an untenable position before your contract is ready. Communicating early and often will give everyone the best opportunity to make smart moves. Along that same line, it's significant to note that market volatility can work in both directions. If the project will run for a long time, there may be a case to be made for a "wait and see" approach. Material prices often decline just after the seasonal rushes. One of the most common logic mistakes I see in this business is when entrepreneurs consider the price hike on a project against the contract value for that project. This leads them to overlooking some significant facts. For simplicity's sake, let's say that material is half the project cost, and labor is the other half. Now I wrote cost, not contract value, because we haven't added for overhead or profit yet. Keeping things simple, let's say overhead equals 10% of cost, and profit equals 5% of cost plus overhead. OK, now for the first of many things that people routinely screw up. Working from 100% of contract value, what percent is left when you remove the overhead and profit? See, a lot of people would respond with 85% because 100% - 10% -5% equals 85%. That's wrong. Starting from 100, we must back out profit. 100/1.05 = 95.24, now we back out overhead 95.24/1.1 = 86.58%. Divide that in two and it's now obvious that material is worth 43.29% of your contract value. Lots o' math there. What's my point? Let's say your contract is for $100K, and material prices for that job have spiked by $10K. Many knuckleheads will focus on the job getting 10% more expensive. They're not wrong, they're just looking at it as though they're not the one actually doing the job. Keeping all my percentages from the original example, we know that material was worth 43.29% of the contract, which means the material budget went from $43,290 to $53,290. That's a 23.1% material price hike. This difference in perception is important because the scope of work didn't change. Comparing the change against the contract total spreads the material price difference across material, labor, overhead, and profit. That conceals the real truth of what's going on. Now let's say you're in a situation where nobody will help to cover that difference. Where does that money come from? See material, labor, and overhead are all costs attributed to the job which hasn't changed. You're still going to have to pay for all of that. The only thing left is profit. Now let's consider profit in the bigger picture. Revenue is the sum total of all the sales for a year. At 5% profit, there's a 21 to 1 ratio between revenue and profit assuming everything goes to plan. Let's say you have to pay that $10K out of your profit. At a 21 to 1 ratio, you'll need to complete $210K worth of revenue to earn that back. Staying with the simple theme, let's say that most of your work is at that $100K contract level. Getting stuck paying for that $10K material price hike is equal to all profit from two+ jobs. Circling back, can you see why "the price went up 10% over contract value on this job" sounds very different from "this 23.1% material price hike will cost us all of the profit on this job, all the profit on the next job, and 10% of the profit on the one after that, assuming there will be any work to pursue, now that prices have spiked." Moving onto securing future work, we can build on the lessons regarding ongoing work, to make better decisions in pursuit of securing new prospects. Right off the bat, anyone who was left "holding the bag" on material price increases is likely to be in bad financial shape. "Make it up on the next one" bidding tactics don't work unless the market is booming for whatever you sell. Competitive markets encountering price hikes will typically lead to a decline in demand. This often means that there will be less work to go around, with an ever increasing number of competitors operating on the brink of survival. Desperation is a poor posture against the lowest common denominators operating in readily accessible markets. The key to survival, is to find quiet market sectors where your business is viable. This is easier said than done. But bear in mind that you've got more time to find a solution before you've made a mistake, than after. Many firms would be better off by "hibernating" than to do business at a loss. Where that's not possible, adapt to what is going on. Honesty is huge here. I've been in plenty of situations where the only paying work I could find was with dullards and scoundrels. Demanding cash up front, and putting everything on the record, kept us solvent while we made our way through difficult times. Dishonesty is a huge warning sign that is best heeded. Most contractors don't go under because of a job they lost, they go under because of a job they won.

Deimos, That's absolutely true. When I was incredibly sleep deprived by my colicky firstborn, I was a college student who absolutely couldn't remember a lot of stuff. I had engineering exams that would have been a lot easier if I could have remembered the formula. I passed them by deriving what I needed. I had a family member with Alzheimer's who felt stupid for forgetting things. They could solve complex problems, and render accurate snap judgements about things around them. Intelligence isn't exclusively about memory, reading comprehension, or sequential reasoning. Thomas, there's a great wisdom in being open to changing ones mind. Frosty, your comment reminds me that a lot of stuff is a work in progress. Most of the time, it's too soon to tell. Twigg, there were "sycophantic fan clubs" for terrible professors at my college as well. Encouraging cutthroat mentalities in education is a pretty primitive way to swap quality teaching for the mythos of exclusivity. Killing one prisoner per day doesn't make the survivors better people, it only feeds the depravity of the jailer.

I'll throw in a few. If your teacher/instructor/professor is proud of how many people fail their class, they're telling you that they're a terrible teacher. Believe them, and find one that actually wants students to succeed. Same kind of thing applies to experienced managers who boast that they've never given an employee an excellent review. This is defining the manager's limitations, not the employees. And finally. You don't get to choose the form of your rescue. I've been helped by unlikely people more often that I can count. A lot of my knowledge came from rough people who had little patience for my struggles. They were there when I needed them. Now that I'm able to pause and lend a hand, I've lived to see young people turn it down because they don't see it for what it is. How about you?

BillyBones, I've got a couple of dogs that produce a lot of "fuel". Might be interesting to know if one makes more btu's than another. I seem to recall that black powder makers would seek out the urine of wine drinkers because it made better salt peter.

Building a bit on George's point about economics, I think there's evidence to suggest that contemporary business models lead to very different economic conclusions than our ancestors might have made. For example, many components in construction have adhered to the "just in time" business model. The textbook explanation is that a business doesn't invest in materials or storage to maintain stock for their consumers. Everything is built to order to minimize the money, material, and space, tied up with inventory that hasn't got a buyer. It made sense, so everybody started doing it, including the raw materials/commodity firms. There was a lot of attention paid to stuff like throughput and logistics, not so much to alternate material sources, economic fluctuations, new market segments, and advancing technology. Most modern business majors would scoff at the idea that a company could heavily invest itself into making their products affordable and ubiquitous during an economic downturn. No, no, better to shutter resources and dim all the lights. Wait till times are booming again, then stoke everything back up. The only time anybody talks about modernizing, or expanding a business is when doing so would interfere with the current output. It's virtually unheard of for these firms to open another facility, most would prefer to buy out a competitor. Investors prefer the quick return on investment via pump and dump , not the long term gains in market share. The end result doesn't increase productivity, but it does increase the price of goods sold. The "old" way to empire building was to continually trim the fat in your operation to where your competitors couldn't keep up. Make it fast, make it cheap, make it available. The goal wasn't to align yourself so equally with poorly performing competitors that everyone ends up offering an equally bad value to the consumers. That's corporatism, which has found kindred spirits in globalism. As a result, we continually find ourselves in situations where our client can't move in, because we can't finish the job, because we can't get the light fixtures, because the factory can't get a part, because their parts supplier doesn't have enough orders to make it worthwhile. Mind you, absolutely everyone here get's paid before they'll even record your order.

Red Shed, I really wouldn't recommend trying to hot punch them. I would imagine that your drift would need to have a punch sized hole in it to shear the slug. That might be tricky to align perfectly with it stuck in the middle of the slot. I'm recommending that you assemble the whole joint before worrying about the pin at all. At that point, if you wanted to install a hinge pin, I'd recommend drilling through the whole joint, then chamfering the outer sides of the outer bosses. That would give a bit of room to lightly upset the pin on each side, thereby keeping the pin from falling out. With a box joint, there's no need to tightly rivet with large heads like a half-lap joint.

Red Shed, I forgot to mention that I didn't even try to hot punch the bosses for a rivet. My plan was to get both halves assembled, then drill it. Although my bosses were far from perfect, I discovered that the tongs didn't actually need a rivet to work properly. If I did install a hinge pin, I'd probably drill a hole, then chamfer the outer bosses, so I could lightly upset a pin to fill the chamfer on either side.

Red Shed, Sorry, I don't have any pictures handy. I did realize that I forgot to mention something. Once the slot is formed for the outer bosses, the whole thing needs to be opened up to allow the other jaw to pass through. I forged everything out of 1/2" square stock, so I took a short section and ground two tapers on it such that the "sharp" end was across corners, and the tapered flats ended at the other corners. That pushes the opening to where parent stock can fit through diagonally, which makes a passage that's bigger across than the jaw, or the central boss. My "opening drift" was tapered over three inches or so in an attempt to reduce the friction on the inside of the outer bosses. The goal is to open the slot, not forge the interior. In hindsight, it would have probably been smart to heat the outer bosses and drive the jaw back towards the handle like I was upsetting them as I used the opening drift. Once you've got the four tools; Slitter, drift, set punch, opening drift, it's really not too difficult to forge. That being said, I'm basing that on square parent stock, which is large enough to forge, yet small enough that slot punching is feasible. Again, mostly for tongs and pliers used for twisting. If any width dimension to the jaws is bigger than the parent stock, you'd probably have to join halves by passing the center boss part through handle end first.

Building a bit on JHCC's point, I experimented with forging a box joint instead of the overlap hinge. Scrolling pliers / needle nose are a natural for this because the jaws are generally slender and tapered which makes it easier to slide them through the punched slot. The resulting joint has three planes applying shear force against the rivet, which makes them very strong for twisting applications. I was very surprised to discover that a sorta-well formed box joint will work without a rivet. Forging the box joint is a bit more complicated than the half-lap. For my experiment, I used some mild steel to make the slitter, and drift. The drift wants to be 1/3 the thickness of your hinge joint. I used the drift as a forging bolster when setting down the center boss. I didn't have a set hammer, so I just used some short square stock as a substitute. Aside from the "special" tools, the box joint wasn't too hard to forge. I was pretty stressed about passing the inner boss through the opened outer boss, but it wasn't as difficult as I imagined it would be. If I had to do it again, I would have used a lighter touch closing the outer bosses because the cold central boss acted like a drift.

Sorta related, but I've noticed that corrosion on metals tends to have unique scent. Rust smells different to me than copper verdigris, which smells different than corrosion on lead. Last year I learned that there are two things that not all people share. The first, is that not all people have an inner monologue. I'm told their thoughts appear to them as written words. The second, is that not all people can voluntarily control the muscle which closes the part of their nose which connects to their throat. I can, my wife can't, one kid can, the other can't. My wife was mesmerized by the notion that I could breathe through my mouth without pinching, or plugging my nose. We had a particularly flatulent dog in the car when this discovery was made. Unfortunately for me, the dog's talents were such that I could still "taste" the cause of our commotion.

Amazon is actively undercutting market leaders in any product that sells. Huge multi-national firms with efficient infrastructure throughout their supply, manufacture, and delivery chains are getting price gouged. If you can't open a bigger factory to make it cheaper, there's no point in pretending that the Amazon price applies to your work. Internet asking prices can operate in the opposite direction. We've all seen the ebay advertisements for a "Rare antique" anvil that turns out to be a new pot-metal ASO of uncertain quality. Consistent trends for selling prices, not one-off asking prices are what set the market value. Farmers markets and art/craft shows aren't necessarily aligned with bargain or trophy hunters. I've seen Farmers markets where people will pay $25 for a bag of peaches, but they won't pay $50 for a handmade basket. A few years back I learned that quite a few of the "farmers" at the market were reselling supermarket produce. Apparently, the public won't reliably return unless the "seasonal" produce is available for six months out of the year.

George's comments about the contract remind me of a few moments we've had on this project. There's a semi-hostile design team on this project using submittal review to change the project scope. Submittals are cut-sheets, shop drawings, and product samples that subcontractors are contractually required to submit to the design team for approval. Back in the day, this process was intended to be a quality control measure. The specifications are part of our contract, and the specs say you're not allowed to progress with any portion of the work requiring a submittal without receiving a "no exceptions taken", or "make corrections noted" response. If they reject a submittal, you can't do anything other than send in a replacement. The spec's don't appear to require the design team to actually approve submittals that comply with the specified standards. This allows the design team to reject my submittal on the grounds that it doesn't comply with what they now want. I can't move forward with the work, so I send in a revised submittal for the new standard, and about ten percent of the time, they reject it because they've decided to change the standard again! The really devious thing about this is that the submittal review comments aren't technically "contract documents". So the General Contractor has to follow up with a Request For Information, (RFI) trying to get the design team to admit on the record, that they've changed some aspect of the job. This generates three documents, each of which has a ten day period for the design team to respond according to their contract. So every time they do this, I'm stranded for a month. The RFI response is no guarantee of clear direction either because the engineer might write one thing, and the architect might write another, all on the same response. Five years ago, design teams would have stamped my submittal "make corrections noted" then followed up with Architects Supplemental Instruction which formally changed the design (and allowed contract changes). Now, every design team is abusing the submittal process to basically play "keep away" with permission to actually build anything. I surmise that they're doing this to make last-minute changes to the project without broadcasting to the client that the resulting change orders came from their decision. Contractually speaking, RFI responses can be valid grounds for a change order, most of which are due to field conflicts. Another new angle for abuse is coming from design teams that exclude "coordination" from their contract. Ostensibly, this transfers that responsibility to the General Contractor. In practice, these design teams are free to reject virtually everything for lacking "proof" of coordination between trades. See, they're not getting paid to review things for proper coordination, including any proof of coordination that might be sent to them. However we're still not allowed to build anything without their approval. When we do finally get permission, it's via "make corrections noted" comments which specifically deny any design team responsibility for the accuracy, veracity, utility, or suitability of the submittal comments.

First off, the title is from an excellent book by John Kennedy Toole. Anyone who's read it will quickly pick up on why the title fits my story. So we have a project where we're finishing out two floors of a high end office building. Several of the other floors are completely finished, however the tenant is not occupying them. This building has an attached parking garage which is completely empty. Building management provided some parking passes to the contractors so the workers don't have to walk blocks from the nearest parking lot. Our passes only apply to parking stalls in the sub-basement People who aren't in the construction industry may not realize this, but most projects include landlord regulations which stipulate that construction workers must use back entrances to the project. This means that even if we're building the front lobby, we're not allowed to come in the front door. As part of the required safety protocols, we are expected to sign in at a desk outside the ground level back door before entering the building. Three of our workers parked in the approved stalls in the sub-basement and entered the stairwell to get to the ground level, where they signed in before going back in and up to our site several floors up. They barely got their tools on before the project superintendent kicked them off the job. Said superintendent called our Project Manager and demanded that these three individuals be barred from returning for three days, before going on to demand that they should not be permitted to work anywhere else for those three days. Apparently building management felt it was important that these people be punished severely so as to "send a message" to everyone else on the site. So what did the guys do wrong? Simple, they didn't use the designated construction entrance to the building. At this point, I should point out that there are no pedestrian pathways out of the sub-basement level aside from the interior staircase they took. The only way to use the assigned parking spots, and get to the designated ground level entry, would be to walk back up the vehicular ramp which would put them in the path of vehicles entering and leaving the garage. After a lot of negotiating, the superintendent "settled" for the three workers to be sent to a different site for one day, provided we profusely apologized to the building engineer, surrendered our parking passes, and supplied the superintendent with a cold can of Red Bull. Much like many of you, these three workers are providing for their families. It's difficult for me to understand the sort of detachment necessary to imagine that over half a weeks earnings should be lost to a family whose father was taking the safest path to work. Now, we're expected to count ourselves lucky that our workers must park half a mile away, when the temperatures are seldom above freezing, and building management can't be bothered to clear snow off the sidewalks. After all, none of the building tenants are coming in.

Steve, I saw something online yesterday that I though you might consider. "Putting a watermelon on someone's doorway at night is an inexpensive way to occupy a portion of their mind forever".

While I suppose it's possible that the original poster has a power hammer, I figured the lack of a decent hand hammer, and anvil for working on salvaged materials suggested that we were helping an individual without power driven forging capacity.

When I was growing up in Michigan, we'd shovel the driveway into our yard, then a few days later when the plow finally came down our street, they pushed up a wall of snow that blocked the driveways and buried the mailboxes. Same thing happened in the fall, just with leaves instead of snow. I remember the postman following the plows. I'd be digging through a 3' tall wall of snow and he'd threaten to withhold my mail because I hadn't dug out the postbox yet! Mind you, he was in a mail truck, and he could actually reach the mailbox door from where he sat.

Andrew C, When I started, I spent a lot of time and fuel trying to take unsuitable parent stock to my needed dimensions. Those brute force exercises were typically conducted during these narrow windows of opportunities for me to get out and do some blacksmithing. By the time the metal was close to dimension, I was tired, frustrated, and prone to making mistakes. I burned a lot of stuff in half because I was trying to finish the project just before I ran out of daylight. I also gave myself tennis elbow which even after very expensive corrective surgery and a year + of physical therapy is still far from 100%. New stock is cheap. Springs, especially coil springs, take a lot of work to convert into flat stock. 2" x 3/16" x 12" flat stock in something good like 1095 is going to cost you less than $25.00 If I had it all to do again, I wouldn't have let the youtube blokes with 6lb rounding hammers convince me that every project can start with the Eiffel tower, and be forged to finish in two heats.

I'm showing my age here, but when I was a kid, I used to watch a nature documentary where a coyote ordered up a fresh set of Acme magnets when he was trying to outsmart the roadrunner. You'd probably make the codgers giggle at your next meet up if you painted all but the tips red and added the Acme logo.

Angiolino, I'm not sure this is a good idea as it may make a good tool, into a dangerous tool.

I recently discovered that welders have a variant of the long wire brush where all the bristles are drilled to form a Vee shape so that all the bristle tips fit over a welded bead, or a prepped chamfer. I haven't picked one up, but it seems like it'd be handy for tight spots with stubborn scale.