Frosty

Welcome aboard, glad to have you. If you'll put your general location in the header we won't have to keep asking. Those are fine first projects ad useful so it's a win win. Coal or propane, both have advantages and disadvantages so having one each is a good thing. You'll want to start using bituminous coal, anthracite doesn't work so well, more impurities and doesn't coke up as well. You can try asking local farriers, even if the one you talk to doesn't use coal s/he'll almost certainly know who does and where to get it. Being a jack of all trades is sort of a blacksmith thing too, there's just no telling what we'll need to make, do, or just catches our fancy. Working in multi media is a natural, for instance. Cabinetry almost demands nice hand made hardware, even if they're just cup hooks under a cabinet but door/drawer pulls, hinges and latches will put the finishing touches on nice cabinets. Frosty The Lucky.

Excellent adventure! Outstanding story board piece for the Crane. Great body of work you guys produced. Well done. Frosty The Lucky.

Very nice work, beautiful fender. Ti is a stone bugger to work without the right tools and some tricks up your sleeve. Well done! Occasional REALLY BRIGHT blue white sparks means it's probably a magnesium containing alloy, probably high performance jet or spacecraft stock. Some Ti alloys are memory metals and will return to the as fabricated form if crunched then heated. You can heat it to form, just try not to get it above med yellow, if it starts to form an orange peal looking scale it's too hot. Hydrogen embrittlement is also a factor so keep the torch a little on the rich side, a touch of soot really helps keep it happy. I don't mean so rich it turns it back, just a hint of dark haze is plenty. Just a little extra feather on an oxy acet torch primary flame, a little yellow at the far end is okay but a touch much. We spun a LOT of Ti in Dad's shop and one of my main jobs was holding the torch. I'd stand behind the lathe and keep the part the right color yellow to be spun. Too little and it wasn't going anywhere, too hot and it just might go everywhere. Trimming was like living with a magnesium flare, we kept a few inches of sand in the bed of the lathe we trimmed on and made SURE there was NO oil in it. why a trimming lathe? That's the lathe a little too many Ti shavings built up in the bed and burned through it when the shavings got burning. Heck, burnt a hole 8" dia and about 6" deep in the concrete floor. It didn't go deeper because the concrete started spalling and scattered the shavings, most went right out without a bit of a pile to support combustion. Good old childhood memories. Frosty The Lucky.

Right you are but they drill and bolt nicely. They aren't mild steel so you have to use lower rpm. and oil or get good at sharpening bits. Frosty The Lucky.

NO BRASS!!!! Brass and silver make silver solder, the eutectics make for a really low melting temperature! This looks like a lot of fun to mess with and I'm not a jewelry kind of guy. Drill type shavings, narrow twisty, curly strips and scrunched up wire might make for some cool patterns. To get a more "traditional" mokume pattern I'd lay strip of sheet silver that fit the mold with equal thickness spaces and pour the copper between. Maybe stand silver wire kind of close on end and fill from the end. Frosty The Lucky.

50lb. L.G. Frosty The Lucky.

That looks a lot cleaner and more efficient. The flat bar under the tire is the brake? A little large if so but it'll work. The concept tire hammer I've been working on has the drive tire attached to the crank plate like you show. I'll be using a trailer spindle and hub rather than a shaft and pillow block bearings. The spindle bearings are automotive thrust bearings and will take the off center forces much better. I think I'll mount the motor and drive wheel on the side below center of the tire so I won't need return springs, let gravity work for me. the hinge plate the motor will mount to will have an arm above center with a friction pad to stop the hammer when I let off the treadle. Nothing new in that, what has me going slow is the crank plate arrangement, I don't like the amount of horizontally reciprocating mass of the standard crank arm, connecting rod and springs you see in most hammers yours, LG, most all of them. I'm still winkling it out but basing my brainstorming on the "sotch yoke". Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Skylar, glad to have you. If you'll put your general location in the header you might be surprised at how many of the IFI gang live within visiting distance. Check out the various forge building sections here, bring a lunch and something to drink though, there's a lot there. A few things you'll find really helpful to determine before starting are: What do you want to make? What size and or shape? Do you have neighbors to annoy with smoke or fire safety concerns. Last but not least by far are exhaust fumes you do NOT want to breath. There are more of course but those are the biggies and not in that order, safety trumps all. Frosty The Lucky.

Rusty: The burn looks pretty good, just a tad on the rich side but close enough. Two 1" burners in 770 cu/in is about 2x as much burner as it needs, lean those puppies up just a little and it'll be melting the fibrefax liner, probably do it now. A 1" burner puts out 2x the BTUs as a 3/4" burner. Your spacing is good but you really need to use 3/4" burners or you'll be burning up forges, even keeping them turned way down they're just too much club for the hole. And yes, any borax based flux will go through Fibrefax like hot water through cotton candy. Washing the interior with a kiln wash like ITC-100 will really help but it'll still erode the liner, fire brick included. Frosty The Lucky.

Nice score Rich, solid brand. don't sweat it holding at the top, so long as it doesn't just feed on down. You can adjust it at the holdback cylinder, you might have to pull a pin at the pivot point to turn the screw but it's no big thing. The coolant pump isn't an "oil" pump, oil makes a poor flushant as it tends to make the cuttings stick in the kerf so the blade jams and breaks. Most flushants are clean water, water soluble oil, or antifreeze, use Propylene glycol as it's FAR less toxic than Ethylene glycol. What the flush does is lubricates and clears cuttings out of the kerf preventing friction, galling, jamming and with that excess heat and blade wear. Oil isn't used for a couple reasons: #1 it makes the band slip on the wheels by lubing it. #2 it makes cuttings stick to everything but worst, in the kerf where it jams the blade. Of course oil usually has the blade so lubed it can't grip the drive wheel well enough to break the blade but it sounds BAD. Frosty The Lucky.

I'm thinking putting the tire at the bottom and driving the rest with a pulley is adding unnecessary mass for the motor to accelerate and unnecessary friction of the added bearings. It's not like having a flywheel that lends it's inertia to getting the ram moving. On a tire hammer the only thing that even approaches a fly wheel is the drive wheel on the motor shaft, everything else must be accelerated into motion by the motor. Making the motor work harder is my main and only real dislike of a tire hammer. Frosty The Lucky.

That looks much better than the original hanger. I'm thinking it'd be marketable if you decide to go that route. Well done. Frosty The Lucky.

Last I looked some of the products were still available but I couldn't find the company. I haven't looked since before the accident and may have just screwed up the search. The product I was looking for was "Pyramid super, air set" and now I think about it, it may be Pyramid that's out of business. Dang I miss my brain. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky. I think that depends on the doors Dave. If they're hinged I'd say yes definitely put a frame around them but if you're going to stack them like bricks to block the openings. No reason for frames. Frosty The Lucky.

Got it in one Adam, apprentice = indentured servant who's eventual pay off is the opportunity to learn a trade. I wasn't trying to say anything about you with my examples of guys wanting the easy way into the craft. I was just presenting one reason it's harder to get time with a blacksmith without learning enough of the jargon to communicate. When you run into enough guys wanting the easy way it can make you a little short with folk. That's not a good thing but it happens. Part of what I'm saying is don't give up on the local smith. Pick up a little of the craft, be polite but be persistent. Maybe show up early with a box of donuts and coffee or maybe at closing with a six pack. Before showing up with a six pack I try to find out if there's an alcohol problem to avoid. the locals at the coffee shop are usually a good source of such and usually a good IN with the locals. drink coffee, shoot the bull, get to be a known character and your odds go up. Frosty The Lucky.

ITC 100 is zirconium flour and kaolin clay, high alumina. the more silica in the mix the more susceptible it is to caustic action from fluxes. Zirconium flour can be had for pretty darned reasonable from Zircopax, sorry gonna have to search that term, I don't remember the company selling it. Zircopax is zirconium silicate but the silicate % is quite low and seems to have no effect where flux is concerned. Another place to look is "kiln wash" but you have to keep in mind the lower the silica the more flux resistant it is. You can buy brick molds at the local concrete plant, heck all kinds of cool concrete molds from bricks, pavers, flags, etc. Anyway, the plastic brick molds are standard size and easy release so all you need to do is ram or pour in the mix, let it dry and fire. With a little shopping around and talking to the guys at the local furnace repair company you can find yourself making reasonably priced 4,000f + bricks and forge liners. My really OLD pipe forge has a rammed AP Green super air set, high phosphate refractory rated to be concrete hard at 4,500f and proof against a 4,000f ammonia atmosphere. AP Green is long gone and I haven't looked for a replacement of that quality, shipping would kill me. Yeah, another long winded ramble but I've made a couple of the things. Frosty The Lucky.

Yeah, I'm back. You aren't going to get far asking about an apprenticeship, they're very rare in this side of the pond and from what I'm reading not so common the other side anymore. I just took on a youngster who's main education has been online and it took a while to convince him I don't take on apprentices. I'm NOT going to give him a room, feed him nor work him mercilessly for a couple years to teach him to a journeyman's level. Heck, it's not really even legal in the US. You'll get farther to just ask if you can watch while keeping out of the way. Offer to sweep floors, fetch and carry, whatever but most importantly keep out of the way and not pester the smith with too many questions. An important thing to learn is jargon isn't necessarily exclusionary slang except when it's being abused. Jargon is a specialized language so practitioners of a trade or craft know what another practitioner means when he uses a term. For instance "hardy" is commonly used to mean any tool that is used in a hardy hole, while in fact a "Hardy" refers to only ONE tool a "Hardy is an anvil mounted "bottom tool" used to cut stock, hot or cold. That's it, all other tools that have shanks to fit the hardy hole are "Bottom Tools". I'm not being critical, we all go through this learning the craft and a lot of "old timers" use regional terms or names and it takes a bit to winnow the meaning at times. Wading through the jargon is just another bit on the learning curve. However, some folk are sensitive about it. For instance, from my own experience, the number of young men who want to become apprentices who don't want to do the work, think I'm being selfish for not showing them the SECRETS. Etc. etc. It can be pretty hard for me to avoid sharp responses, on occasion I run into someone who deserves no better. Some, the worst are the adults who have been around long enough they should know there's no magic. Well, there are a couple SECRETS and here they are. Please feel free to take notes. Knowledge and practice. Virtually any craft boils down to knowing what to do and doing it often enough to develop the hand skills necessary. Sure some folk have a knack, call it a natural feeling and hand skills but they still need the knowledge to apply it. That's it, knowledge and practice. Neither of these things calls for special tools, any object heavy enough to back the blows, a smooth faced hammer to deliver the blows, something to beat into submission and a fire to heat and soften it. Heck, it doesn't even take a blown fire for general basic smithing, I did it for years in camp fires in the Alaskan bush after work. Never made anything very fancy, branding irons, fire pokers, toasting forks, occasional stakes, stake pullers, etc. it was mostly a way to amuse myself instead of knocking off a half rack of beer every night. Frosty The Lucky.

CC: What the flames? Is there something wrong with people pointing out possible mistakes before you make them? I don't know about you but I much prefer to learn from other's mistakes rather than have to make and analyze my own. We're blacksmiths, we live for tinkering with things, we're always figuring out how to make things you could just hit the hardware store for. Preferring diy isn't any big deal here. Most of us toss out ideas to brainstorm with the gang HOPING someone will point out mistakes or a better way to do it. Frosty The Lucky.

Getting slapped by a broken belt is nature's way to teach you to stay our of the plane of rotation. It's a Darwinian thing. Frosty The Lucky.

You're looking for a beginner anvil? Sorry but my mind is full of anvils with training horns, not so hardies and such. don't sweat it, find one in good shape you can afford and you're golden. Until you do find a good anvil, just find a heavy steel something you can use as one. It isn't the anvil that does the work it's the smith and once you've developed the skills sets you'll find it isn't all that important to have an "ANVIL". Frosty The Lucky.

Beautiful, I love it. I agree with Chinobi though, it has plenty of pointy parts and should go in a place where people aren't going to run into it. Be that as it may, it tells it's own story, really piques the imagination. Frosty The Lucky.

Nogrodoth: Lose the sheet stand thingy. Worse than not helping it's a trip hazard you could not only stub a toe and fall but just stepping on the outward sloping face could put you on the floor. Legs with stretchers and a lower shelf are not only safer but a lot more handy. they can be wood, steel, bolted, riveted or welded. The stretchers are horizontals connecting the legs to make them rigid so laying a shelf across them is a natural and you can put stuff on it. You can make an angle iron frame that makes the table rim with nothing but a hack saw and fire. Cut V slots in the flange and bend to close and make a 90* corner. for the final corner leave an inch or two tab to fold over and bolt or rivet to the beginning section. this gives you a rectangular table frame the table top will rest on the inside. If you use 4x4 lumber for legs you can two drill holes in the flange at each corner and simply lag screw the it to the legs. The stretchers and shelf will keep the legs rigid while you dismantle it for movement. If you want to use angle iron legs, just mount them to the outside of the table frame, drill and bolt together, stretchers and shelf stay and keep it all solid during moves. Of course the "V" notched and bent table frame is pretty advanced, this kind of cutting and bending is kind of tricky, not something I'm particularly good at unless I've been practicing. So, simply cut angle legs so they lap the frame and drill and bolt it all together, no precision cutting or notching necessary. Nice drawing by the way, it's an excellent way to brainstorm things and color coding is excellent, one of my favorite tricks for keeping elements straight. Nice score one the chute, hopper, whatever it was. However you've fallen into a typical beginner's trap. Trying to use everything isn't necessary, just because you have it doesn't mean you must use it. There're a lot of really handy precut pieces of sheet steel there and you only need a couple to build your forge. Using one to extend the forge table is good, larger forge tables are generally handy but forget the hinges, use them for something else. Another piece of that sheet will make a dandy little steel faced table to hold tools, stock and hot pieces of work and you won't have to worry about it. Same as the forge table though, legs, stretchers and the every handy shelf. My large forge table, not that I burn coal often enough to have a coal forge, is 14 ga. sheet with a couple 1" angle stiffeners if I want to heat something that weighs a couple hundred lbs. Frosty The Lucky.

Truth is most folk have to develop good skills before they CAN forge something besides a curve on the face. My Soderfors has a beautiful concentric (or almost) horn and I use it for drawing more than anything else. If I had a $150, 100lb. Swedish anvil only two hours away, I'd be on my horse instead of typing right now. Even if it turned out to be in too poor shape to buy, it'd be worth the time and gas money. Yeah, so I'm a huge Soderfors fan, best anvil I've ever used and I've used a couple. Frosty The Lucky.

Making a vortex in the forge is just a matter of aiming the burner tube to be more tangential to an inside wall be it square or round. I mentioned it not because it's necessarily superior but because it might relieve back pressure on the burner. My burners are aimed perpendicular to the floor because I LIKE more localized heat and propane forges are NOT known for localized heat under any circumstances. When you start adjusting the choke do it one step at a time and by measured increments. Taking notes is a really good idea so you know what you did two or three adjustments ago and what the effect was. After a while you'll get to know propane burners and be able to adjust them by eye and ear, just like the old school mechanics tuning a car. Frosty The Lucky.

Lookin gooder all the time Mike! Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks for posting these guys. It's easy to not think about compressor tanks and just expect them to work properly. By the looks of the roof top compressor carcass I'd have to say giving it it's own room might NOT be good enough. Frosty The Lucky.