Frosty

It is just an anvil

The answer to the prayers is YES this time Woo Hool! Not going to stop till you geedt back up to speed and start posting again. Be well Brother Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Bacus, glad to have you. The post you're replying to is about 4 1/2 years old. That's okay though, good information if good information. Do you have something to tell us about how to select one over the other? We're all pretty well versed in "it depends" as an answer, what it depends on is always something to store in the old files. How is summer going down there? We're in the grips of a cold snap here though it's climbed all the way to 1f for right now, we're supposed to get another good dump of snow Saturday and Sunday. It was -24F @ 1am this morning a few degrees colder last night. -20 is where the F and C scales cross. Frosty The Lucky.

If we're calling room temp 70f then it's actually 295.2611K where the atoms play. Frosty The Lucky.

Sideblast trench forge like a JBOD (just a box of dirt), the blast an inch +-off the bottom. Corn has a lot of oil in it so it'll have an odor that may be pretty strong. Frosty The Lucky.

I don't need a corn forge to brag about insanity. Frosty The Lucky.

No, boiled linseed oil is a polymerizing oil, it turns to gunk itself. Plain old moor oil 30wt is a little thick but okay. You can even use "3 in One" though its a little light. Ah! I just checked back a little farther in the thread and see you want to use BLO on the vise rather than to lubricate the screw. Protect vise GOOD, lube om the screw BAD. Penetrol is good stuff. Frosty The Lucky.

Who claimed they were rated to 2,500f and having "alumina" in them doesn't mean much of anything. High alumina has very little chemistry in common with standard fire brick. Even though they're fragile they don't break up with thermal cycling. Next time try a furnace supply / repair service. If they don't sell them they will know who does. I'm thinking you got snookered or the guy you bought them from just didn't know. You're changing too many things instead of fixing one at a time. The length of time and number of steps increase exponentially building, trouble shooting, etc. problem solving in general. Frosty The Lucky.

Plain light firebrick is NOT high alumina, that's why flux dissolves it like hot water on a sugar cube and they break up after a couple firings. The old ones are rated for about 1,500f. My old too large shop forge literally melted them. Morgan Thermal Ceramics has been around for maybe a century and the K-26 has been industry standard for a couple decades, they're actually THINK I have a few in a box in the shop if you want. Lose the firebrick on the forge floor. PERIOD! All a firebrick in a propane forge does is take up a gallon of propane to heat to forging temperature and make a nasty gooey mess if you get a borax based welding flux in it. That's a pretty fancy burner mount, I kind of like it even though I'd use my old stand buys. Tinkering and messing with metal just because is very Blacksmitherly Frosty The Lucky.

Oooh, that's cool but is it a tack light? Frosty The Lucky.

While it can work, it's not particularly good solid fuel, you'd do better to buy or make charcoal but seeing as where you live by metallurgical coal. Frosty The Lucky.

Oh just build a steel tripod and forget all the recurring PITAs. No, there is NO good reason to put a steel plate under the anvil, I used 2" angle iron flange up to make a rim the anvil just slipped into and made my hammer racks to they drove between the anvil's foot and flange. Just bare steel stand to anvil, the differences in resonant frequency damps any prolonged ring. Plain old ear plugs is plenty. Frosty The Lucky.

OUCH, the essential craftsman forge and burner is straight out of a book from 30+ years ago. I had higher hopes for NARB but it mostly makes even heat rather than HIGH heat. Save it for heat treating. You'll want something better than baling wire to mount the burners. They don't need to be (welded solid) mounts but they do need to resist movement or falling off. Having a lit torch rolling around on the bench is a B A D N E S S THING. Below is a club, clinic burner and forge build. The firebrick is Morgan K-26 insulating firebrick. it's powered by a 1/2" T burner with thread protector step flares. The door baffles would've been K-26 but they were special order and like al projects planned by committee there were a lot of WTFs? in the finished forges. Just for reference the volume was around 170 cu" and the forge in the picture has burning for less than 5 minutes. I don't recall but the cost was about $100 including the propane regulator and hose. The club got a great break when we bought 30. We kiln washed them with a zirconium ceramic product located and purchased by the same guy who got the regs. Frosty The Lucky.

Beautiful blades Daniel. Yeah, somebody has to come up with another buzzword to make their products stand out. I tend to disregard marketing hype and noise. Tactical seems to be the hot buzz word, I can't buy a small LED flashlight or head light without half a dozen tactical settings. Seriously, WHAT ON EARTH do I need a head light that flashes rapidly. Nobody has ever accosted me in my wood shed or looking under the hood of a vehicle. Maybe if everybody on Iforge and elsewhere started using "Practical" instead it'd catch on? I know I'd much rather have a practical knife than a combat knife unless I'm facing combat in which case I want a Practical Combat knife. How are things going for you in Thailand? I haven't heard much about the country in the news. Been below zero F. here for a couple weeks, then it warmed up to 12f above and snowed about 14" over 2 days. It's below zero again and supposed to snow again Friday and Saturday. Forecast says it'll be -20f or colder Saturday and Sunday. Copd makes cold air especially hard on me, I have to put a double thickness of scarf over my mouth and nose or I'm hacking for a couple days. Deb and I have been thinking of moving south for a few years now but Alaska has so many good options for living here. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky.

Sorry if I came across so short, I had a lot going on when I replied. -20f, Dead pickup w/plow, snowing hard and a fretting wife. We were supposed to get 2-4" of snow, then 3-5" and this morning I've got about 14" with the promise of serious snowfall today / tonight. Woo HOO! It's been a good 4 years since we got enough snow to need plowing, now It's looking like a 5yd loader would be nice. Heck the current weather said we have 2-3 more low fronts blowing in from over the pole. I might not be spending much time online for a while. I don't mean to be making excuses but weather makes them for you. Later. Frosty The Lucky.

All the burner mount is, is something to hold it in position and support the weight of the propane supply line, bracket is sort of what folk started calling it whatever it is. IIRC Mike showed folk an adjustable burner mount made from a piece of pipe larger than the burner's OD with 3 threaded holes equidistant so the alignment of the burner can be adjusted. Me, liking the simplest device that does the job disdaining bells and whistles, used a clamp and short length of 1" angle iron, positioned the burner where I wanted and welded the angle iron to the forge shell. Later I discovered I had a stick of 3/4" angle and a length of flat stock would've served but required 2 clamps to prevent it shifting. And the clamp itself, I made it with a U-bolt and piece of flat stock welded to the angle iron. I'd aim your flame down a LITTLE bit more. When I said level I should've said close or about level. There are few absolutes when making your own propane burner though lots of guys lose themselves "researching" scientific papers on flame chemistry, induction, jets, bla bla bla. I spent too many years as an exploration driller for Ak Highways making bricks without straw or frequently clay. When you're 30 miles from the closest road and something breaks you start looking for things you can scrounge, cut off the drill abandoned equipment, etc. to make a splint. Gets to be a habit though Dad got me started being almost driven to figure out how a thing does what it does. About the refractory and warping shell. Wrap the refractory farther on the end as far out as reasonably possible. When you put feet on the forge so it's not resting flat on it's bottom make the bottom lip of the opening high enough you can extend a 3,000f split brick laying flat for a front porch. it's length across the whole bottom of the forge. You'll use it to support fire brick for a thermal baffle (Mike's bailiwick) and a place to rest longer stock. I probably won't be spending much time online for a few days, yesterday's 3-4" snow forecast is currently at least 14" on the ground and still snowing with todays forecast saying 10"+ with more fronts blowing in from over the pole. Woo HOO! Later, Frosty The Lucky.

I look forward to hearing how the hammer in and demo went. Frosty The Lucky.

Pretty cool Jono, I've never made anything that ambitious. Knurling or putting teeth in the bits isn't hard. If you have pliers or similar with "teeth" you like heat up a piece of stock thin enough the jaws will close on and at a medium high yellow heat give it a good squeeze with them. Then when the stock is cool, heat Your pliers bits to yellow and give the stock with the other plier's "teeth" impressed in it and give it a squeeze with the new ones. You MAY need to squeeze the outside of the jaws with tongs or something so they lay flat on the pattern and impress evenly. It isn't as hard to do as it is to describe. Of course you can buy riffling files and cut whatever pattern you like in the jaws. The upside to this is you'll have a set of riffling files for the tool box. Hmmmmm? When I was doing demos I almost never had a spectator who didn't like the smell of coal smoke so long as they weren't directly in a yellow brown cloud when we were getting a dome burning. I used to mine my own coal at an old coal mine about 50 miles north of here and the neighbors liked the smell of my coal stove. If you drive up to the Big Ditch (local's name for the old Buffalo mines) you can smell burning tailings piles and in the general area always has a coal wiff to it, sometimes all the way to the highway. Frosty The Lucky.

You're doing it wrong if the Mrs. wants to set foot in the shop let alone decorate. Maybe buy some fart spray and put a tracker on her so anytime she reaches for the door it gives a little puff. Set up the sound buzzer thing just behind where she'd be standing. I've never met a woman who'd admit to a fart, sooooo, just the chance someone might THINK she did should keep her well away. Hmmmm? Then again, is she a good striker? Frosty The Lucky.

I tend to believe the "Place for everything and everything in it's place" adage was more of an observation than advice. A tool in in-place wherever it is. Tools are like children, you don't have children they have YOU. Frosty The Lucky.

Maybe add a red and blue bulb Ridgeway. If I lived close enough I might sneak in and exchange one or two for blinky bulbs. You might want to round the corners of the plate a little Shaina, one bump and you'll have a deep bruise for a while. You don't need proper penetration for 1/2" plate unless you're making structural welds. All you want is to hang hammers, tongs, etc. your flux core wire feed will work just fine. Especially if you flip the stand upside down to weld under the plate and lay it on it's side to weld to the column. Keep the welds as flat and level as possible, they'll hold just fine. Remember to grind off any paint, rust, dirt, etc. before you weld! Frosty The Lucky.

Cut it the right length in the first place and you won't need to alter it's height. Don't try solving problems you don't have. If you'd waited until you had an anvil to measure you could've had the people you bought the poplar block from cut it to length for you. MIGHT have cost you $20 but it would save you the cost of a chainsaw bar you'll probably only use the one time. If you're going to put a toe jack under it why bother with a wood block, just stack some lumber and nail it together. All a jack will do besides lifting it out of contract with the planet is make it shaky and spongy. Don't be in such a rush, take a little time and do it right. The ONLY thing rushing guarantees is making mistakes permanent more quickly. Frosty The Lucky.

That's pretty typical for beginners. Seems everybody wants to "learn" by making a masterpiece project Forged In Fire inspired them to make a sword without knowing how to hold a hammer even. Every thing is just basics, the most complex project is a combination of basic processes. PERIOD. Putting the basics together is sequence or procedure same same. A forge weld was usually a first session thing in my shop. Don't bother to show up without proper PPE, safety glasses, NO synthetic clothing!! Then a little talk about what was on todays schedule but first session included tool abuse, you do NOT tap my anvil PERIOD. Tap your own, NOT MINE. Use the chisel plate, NOT the step. It only takes a few minutes to make a saddle chisel plate measure your anvil and we'll make one for yours next session. Until then I have a chisel plate USE IT. Etc. etc. Deliberate abuse of tools or equipment is an 86 offense. Once is a mistake twice is 86 time. PERIOD. I only ever 86ed two people and one stole about $40 worth of hickory handle material on his way out the door. He insisted I show him the secrets of making a knife first session. Didn't want to learn the basics, just the "secrets." Abuse a tool or person in my shop once is a mistake, twice it's deliberate there's the door don't let it hit you on the way out. What I learned from him was to ESCORT them out. A cold chisel and heat treating it was first session. There are NO secrets or mysteries it's all a little knowledge and a LOT of practice. Frosty The Lucky.

Yeah, the shales themselves are mined for many different uses. I had to look up "challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method," read a few hits and am lost. Why would anyone want to make digest nutrients challenging. Don't get where matrix comes in. A digestion sequence is intuitively obvious, sniff bite chew stomach time, intestine time absorbing nutrients as it goes, lastly reabsorbing moisture before excretion, most of what's left are dead bacteria "colloform I believe" that broke much down into absorbable components. What is the matrix, what is and how does "challenge" effect the method/process? Give me a handle on it, I'll take it from there. . . Hopefully. Frosty The Lucky.

Looking good, that's well within tuning range. I like it. Are you planning on using copper tubing between the burner fitting and propane hose / shutoff valve? Maybe you're planning copper tubing to a manifold then to the hose? If not, lose all the extra fittings, the closer you can connect to the hose the better. Propane is NOT clean gas it carries the waxy compounds of the mercaptan odorant and moisture. Propane is very chemically active and WILL turn the odorant and moisture into sticky gunk that will condense on all the surfaces it comes in contact, come loose and plug the jet. Rubber propane hose tends to be resistant to condensing the waxy gunk because it is naturally insulated and just isn't conducive to this type condensation. The burner position is better but debris WILL still fall in, especially when you shut it off and things cool. Brittle stuff like vitrified slag, old flux, etc. will spall as it cools because it has a different COE. (Coefficient Of Expansion) Were it my forge I'd mount the burner horizontally so the flame impinges on the top of the chamber tangentially. This gets the burner nozzle and port away from debris and farther from the hard turn at the bottom corners. The last may not be much of a factor but my thinking is flame turning a relatively tight corner develops higher pressure against the surface that is turning it. However towards the circular surface close to the top the flame is traveling along a curved surface and Mr. Bernoulli says the flame WILL accelerate and generate lower pressure on the contact surface. The same thing that makes aircraft fly. Near the top the burner port in the refractory the flame fires through is undercut where it enters the chamber so any debris that gets maybe popped off something is most likely to hit the overhang rather than enter the port itself. It isn't proof flying debris from hitting the burner but it tips the odds in the burner's favor. If I were to put the burner port in the side I'd maybe split the difference from where you show it and the top horizontal I like. On the other hand because I haven't made this confusing enough already one of the guys in our club has 1/2" T burners mounted vertical up against one wall in a D shaped forge. It's literally in the floor aimed straight up. Happily T burners are so easy to make he just replaces it when it gets gunked up with vitrified debris, flux, etc. regularly. I don't know how often, we don't see each other very often but he used to carry a couple extra burners when he demoed at meetings. I think I've yakked enough for now. Later Frosty The Lucky.