Frosty

Coffee and donuts in the break room wins good will! I don't know how I forgot that technique. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky.

I have no idea how plumber's silver solder would work in a, silver, copper, nickle joint. Strength isn't a real issue, it's a ring liner, not a tow hook. The closer the joint is matched, the thinner the solder, the stronger the bond is a general principle for solder joint, soft, hard, etc. Experiment with solders on something you don't have so much work and time invested in, just buy some jewelers solder and flux. Just making this stuff should be experiment enough. Remember one of the PRIME tenets of experimentation and trouble shooting, change ONE thing at a time and test, log the method particulars and results before you change anything else. Change more than one thing at a time and you'll NEVER know what did what or why. And just so you know I'm not a jewelry guy, I just pick a thing up here and there. I read something and the strings of words just won't go awayyyyyyyy! Has it's percs though. <wink> Frosty The Lucky.

My pleasure Sean, I like helping folk but I just need to know particulars. Heck, there are guys who are making pattern welded blades at alarming rates who I am sure will be happy to fill in details but you need the basics. Now, where are you? How do you expect an old fart like me to know where to stop in for a snack or nap if I don't know who lives where? Hmmmmm? Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Sean, glad to have you. If you put your general location in the header you might be surprised how many of the IFI gang live within visiting distance. If you read through the knife and blade sections here I'm sure all your questions have been explained and discussed many times. Before you ask questions though you need to be able to ask good ones. For instance, you say you have YOUR ferric chloride. Did you make it yourself? you have a quart can? Is it dry crystal or liquid, if liquid what concentration? It's just not possible to get GOOD answers to specific problems asking vague questions. Well be more than happy to help you Sean but you need to know enough to ask the right questions and understand the answers. It generally takes years to become even competent at the craft let alone a specialized variant. Frosty The Lucky.

Try tinning the ring with the solder, then inserting the liner and bringing to heat. It won't need to flow and if you put a teeny little dab on the inside of the liner you'll be able to see exactly when it wets and is done. Just buy a commercial paste or liquid flux. Borax works but using it to silver solder requires some preparation or the flux grains will widen the gap needing filler which is a BAD thing. To get a very close fit, flux and chill the 2-3 thousandths over sized silver liner in the freezer or better yet on dry ice. After tinning, reflux the ring and start heating but before it reaches soldering temp slip the COLD liner it. The liner will expand into an interference fit as it warms, the solder will make it permanent. Frosty The Lucky.

Ayup, we need to temper what WE think looks right to what the customer wants. I don't know what gave me the impression they were your first hooks, I even wondered about that. Paint is good, Rust-Oleum is top shelf paint and it keeps getting better. Who knows, maybe they'll invent a paint I won't have to touch up for a generation or two. Frosty The Lucky.

That sure looks like a Hearthstone, top shelf wood heaters. We supplement with wood heat so holding heat isn't what we need, we want a stove that gets the heat out, into the house soonest. This Jotul is a 3 burn zone stove and burns so clean we only have to clean the stack every couple years unless we get a load of wet wood. the new wood shed means we don't have to burn wet wood anymore so all is good. I love wood heaters, nothing warms you up like standing in front of one and letting the IR soak in, bone deep. Too warm? move farther away, cold cuddle up more. Frosty The Lucky.

You're a . . . machinist!? NAW never would've figured that. <grin> My Father was a metal spinner and machinist, I grew up working in his shop. I've always appreciated precision work, it shows in the flawless fit and finish. Part of why I took up blacksmithing was to escape living with really tight tolerances, it was like a vacation. Well, that and you gotta play with fire and hit things with hammers. Frosty The Lucky.

Beautiful! I love good contrast and the twist pattern is one of my favorites. Frosty The Lucky.

Anybody ever bring you two empty 5gl. buckets and chalk your name on the flight line? Best comeback I ever saw personally was when one of the foremen sent a new guy to get elbow grease. The new guy gave him a couple tubes of KY jelly at dispatch the next morning. We laughed about Bob's elbow grease for years, probably still laughing. I do so love a good comeback. Frosty The Lucky.

Secret stuff, we have SECRETS!? Ooooohhhh! (my best Les Nessman WKRP voice.) Frosty The Lucky.

Michael: Stiff upper lip and all that, you live in smithing tool rich country you ought to try it here, I spent years looking for anything at all. It'll come, patience Grasshopper. If scrap yards won't sell to you, they won't here either, not legally anyway. You might try gifting the office secretary with a nice hand forged something. A flower is good, letter openers work well too. If you get on the secretary's good side you're in like Flynn. Try truck shops, a broken semi, drive axle makes a fine anvil standing on end flange up. They have a tremendous depth of rebound, the lug holes are handy as all gitout and only a little grinding makes the face smooth enough to do fine/finish work. If you need a horn an axle is ALL horn, just not tapered and pointy. You can make bics to drop in the lug holes to go along with the hardy, butcher, swages, bending forks? Oh don't tell me I need to explain how wide a range of bending forks are available on an axle flange. Okay? Make an axle anvil and it'll still be a go to anvil in your shop when you hardly have floor space to walk around all your other "real" anvils. Frosty The Lucky.

Those'll work but you're over thinking the tools. Just drive a little dome in the stock over the prichel and punch the nail hole from the same side. Square it if you wish. It's bouncing and hitting you because there's a little curve between the handle and the header so it rocks on impact. Just put a LITTLE negative curve to it and it'll stay put. It'll always bounce a little but you can minimize it. You're making picture hooks, NOT nails. The audiences at demos are always impressed when I tell them how hard it is to make little picture hooks like that. <SHEESH!> Only leave 1.5 times the diameter, standing proud for the head, make the cut as symmetrical as you can and use a light hammer, a 10oz. is more than enough. Hammer control is all important, you have to drive the hammer straight down through the center of the nail, any deviation and it'll bend away from the blow. Once you have the head driven to the header flip the hammer and use the ball pein to spread, texture or fancy it up. People expect hand forged nails to LOOK hand forged even if the nails from the day were as finished and uniform as the nail maker could make them. When you're finished heading dip the point of the nail in water, it'll chill and shrink making it easy to pop out of the header. Frosty The Lucky.

Pretty nice score . . . AGAIN! I'm beginning to suffer serious swap meet envy. <sigh> Ball peins are good to pick up if the price is right, manufacturers not that important unless it's something rare enough to sell. Nice fuller. A striker is the guy standing on the other side of the anvil with the sledge hammer who hits what you direct him to with a blow from the hammer in your hand. Old blacksmith joke. Master smith to new apprentice, "take the sledge hammer and stand there, when I nod my head you hit it." The wrench is a Monkey wrench, the old school adjustable wrench like a Crescent. They make good twisting wrenches if you want to weld a second handle on it in line with the existing one. However, twisting wrenches aren't that hard to make and don't really need to be adjustable. That's a nice little drill or mill vise. Keep it in good shape, you'll use it a LOT on the drill press. If you don't have a drill press now you'll get one, they're just too useful not to have. You got it in one, a dead blow just stops on impact. A steel faced one would work nicely for setting welds, minimize rebound and shearing from a too hard blow. Lots of things a dead blow hammer are good for. It's hard to tell what the pein on the Bell systems hammer is so no telling what it might be good for. Probably a tin knocker's hammer but it might be pointed and a mason's hammer. We'd need a look at the pein end on to make an educated guess. Nice scores all round. Frosty The Lucky.

A chalk board is a great addition to a shop and painting one yourself is a lot more likely than finding a big one for reasonable. A trick I like and use frequently are graph lines. A sheet rock square and paint pen is the perfect way to turn a chalk board into a graph board. That way you can sit at a coffee shop with a potential customer and make scalable sketches which are easy to transfer to full scale on the chalk board with the old school coordinate method. If you need to go to the floor then it's snap line and rag tape time but graphing makes scaling so much easier. Frosty The Lucky.

The overall group would be UMBA Upper Midwest blacksmiths Association. What you're thinking of as local might be a different kettle of night crawlers, sort of depends on your definition of close but seeing as you said State, UMBA might be the ticket. Great bunch of guys and very active club. Frosty The Lucky.

Good call on the riveted joints Smoothbore that went right past me. They're a definite failure point. I'm thinking a length of angle riveted inside the main leg from the floor to butt against the bottom of the frame will stop shearing action, just like a cripple on a window or door frame in a wall. Something that really struck me but I forgot to comment about is the rivet header. It's turning out some gorgeous rivets, just plain beautiful. Frosty The Lucky.

Hey George, welcome aboard glad to have you. If you'll put your general location in the header you might be surprised how many IFI folk live within visiting distance. The easiest safest way to connect tanks is with off the shelf fittings, either from the RV or if you're going to be running high volume, the propane supply shops carry all the fittings you might need. By propane supply shops, the guys who deliver bulk propane, sell, install and service everything propane. Yellow pages will put you in touch easy greasy. How abut introducing yourself and showing some of the gang here pictures of your work George. We LOVE pics and I've seen your work, definitely something to show in public. Frosty The Lucky.

I suppose that would work Stewart. Heck, you could just flip the cart upside down and push the new anvil off the stand onto it. Frosty The Lucky.

No edge shapes? I have an old Lancaster pattern swage block and almost the only shapes I use are the swage dies on the edges. That's a beautiful tool, I think it'll serve you and your grandchildren well. Well done. Frosty The Lucky.

Close call Stewart! Whew! I'll be happy to put the word out in the blacksmith world, see if we can find someone to repair the cart. Hey, don't look at me Thomas started it! Frosty The Lucky.

Looking good. You're just a step away from leaf coat hooks and those are popular sale items at Demos. You'll want to punch holes though. Punch rather than drill for a couple reasons, most importantly it lets you easily counter sink for screw heads and secondly punching is faster and easier than drilling. Thirdly it's a good skill to add to your mental kit. Decorative twists are good additions too twisting is real crowd pleaser at demos. Frosty The Lucky.