Frosty

Oh I like that idea! Get the customer to haul off your waste and pay you for the priviledge. I wonder what I should call scale and how much to charge. Frosty

Another thing to consider about heat is relative power. Place your anvil and post vise closer to the forge than the power hammer. Your power hammer doesn't need the steel to be as hot as hand work does so you can take the extra step without it being a problem. I'd put it centered on a wall aligned with the door so you can work long stock. Frosty

My wife and I aren't Scadian but we like ren faires, especially if there's fire and hammers involved. The ren faire in Anchorage is pretty pathetic but it was to be expected once the municipal "arts council" got involved.:mad: It went from an event that was crowded on 50-60 acres to one that is thin on 10. The local SCA, Elizebethan club, Scottish Society, etc. etc. don't participate. There is usually a pipe and drum corps there but they have to be paid. It's a sad thing and we miss a good ren faire. Frosty

I know how you feel but you can't keep people from sending money to Nigeria either. He's probably setting the price at $131 to covr shipping to his place plus a minimum profit. It's a buyer beware world no matter where you go.

Very nicely done Nick. Frosty

If you're drawn to fire like a moth. Frosty posted

From the second picture I take it, it won't fit under the power hammer. Maybe you have fullering dies in it and can't use it for slitting and drifting? This is the definitive case of, "get a bigger hammer!" I have a 18lb. straight pein I'd let you use if we were neighbors. Unfortunately I'm too old and fat for that kind of striking so I'd have to stand out of the way and make suggestions. A little sweet tea sounds like a good idea too. Frosty

Nice set up Nick. You'll refine it as you go and it'll get better and better. You already know that though. The real reason I'm jumping in on this thread is your location. 10 years ago the 11th of this month I married a lady I met online who lived in Ironwood. On my first trip down we visited her son in Marquette. So, is the renn fair in Ironwood an annual thing? If so we may have to schedule our next visit to cooincide. Frosty

Good for you John! Getting yourself volunteered for this kind of job is commendable and a joy. I'm also happy to see 4H already has some kind of blacksmithing program in place as evidenced by the required projects for the competition. I also like the blind judging system, though I shouldn't've been surprised, it's the way it's done in livestock shows. So, are you going to get the opportunity to teach a some kids? That's super rewarding just for the look on their faces as the fire kindles in their eyes. Again, Good job. Thanks for the doing. Frosty

Are you going to give everybody the same project or are they going to make what they want? In the first case it'll be a lot easier to judge. In the second the kids will be able to make what they've practiced but it'll be harder to judge. As said, be positive, especially in criticism. Lastly, good for you for accepting the job. Frosty

I believe cupric or copper sulphate will plate iron or steel with copper. The other option I know of is electroplating. Of course you could look in the yellow pages for a plating business and ask for a quote. Frosty

Very nice Grizz. Frosty

I'm suffering a serious case of anvil envy. Frosty

The power hammer he's using is a 40kg. version of the Rusty / Dusty, he calls Krusty. Frosty

Welcome back Cooter. Sorry to hear about the accident. I know how rehab is, I took a dive off a tilt deck trailer last sept, shattering my left arm and am just now getting over the injuries. Do the PT. I'd compliment you on your new anvils but for some reason I can't see them. I can see the link in my reply but not in your original. Maybe they'll show up in my reply. If not, oh well. Nice score. Frosty

Finding a good anvil is a fine thing but not worth waiting for if the alternative is not doing any forging. Even a cheap cast iron ASO is preferable to wishing. Horns are also over rated and certainly not a show stopper. A radiused corner will form most scrolls, rings and the like. Add an interior radius like a swage or piece of halved pipe and you can do almost any turning. If you have to have a horn try searching the scrap yard for horn-like iron or steel objects. A wheel spindle makes a nice horn, as does a large hinge pin. Keep your eyes open and you'll see all kinds of really useful shapes to replace a traditional horn. Smithing is more about improvisation than it is about having the "right" tool for the job. Seriously if the "right" tool were really necessary to do the work nobody without a mandrel cone could form a ring. On the other hand one of my students wasn't able to find a "real" anvil and bought a Chinese, cast iron, ASO for his home set up. A couple years later a decent anvil turned up but he decided not to buy it as he was making the ASO do what he wanted and the money could buy him more tools and material instead. Frosty

Hey Roger! Good to see you posting, welcome aboard. I fully expect to see you dominating the "It followed me home" thread very shortly. Next year's Dig is at Lynda and Elmer's in NC and 2010 is here. I don't know about 09' but will try to make it. A number of people who'd planned on attending had stuff come up. Not surprising, most folk are pretty busy. One last thing. Anyone wanting to see how IT is done, Roger has video taped more smiths in action than anyone else and you absolutely can NOT beat the price. Frosty

It doesn't by any chance have, "CLAY BEFORE USING," cast in the pan does it? I have a round Buffalo RR forge with worse cracking that that. It has, "CLAY BEFORE USING," cast in All caps in the pan. The layer of clay prevents thermal shock and heat checking. Mine was cracked when I got it and showed signs of being fired un-clayed. Mine still works, cracks and all but I rammed damp clay about 1" thick into it before I used it. I considered welding it up and may someday but it's not my main forge so am letting it slide for now. If you want to weld it up ask around first, it's not a beginner's project and you may be better off taking it to a welding shop equipped for welding cast iron. Welding it up is doable but a by the numbers project with a very real probability of making it worse in the process Fabbing another forge pan is another alternative you might consider. It's a lot easier than welding up a casting that large. My condolences. Frosty

You got THAT right. The state stopped using orange trucks 10 years ago and the public still hasn't caught on. Frosty

Looks good Tyler. What's it made of? What's it weigh? What's. . . Oh the usual details please. Frosty

Thomas: Oil patch geologist? I was an exploration driller, taking pre-construction soils samples, placing instruments and doing infield tests for bridges, foundations, etc. We seldom went more than 200' down as all we were interested in was the soils mechanics as it related to supporting a structure. Most of our jobs were in the Alaskan bush and Alaska doesn't have much of an industrial history. I have lucked out on a couple occasions but not often. Twice in fact in 19 years drilling. We were almost never close enough to drive home after work, heck, frequently we were flown to the site or close anyway. The guys on the centerline (drilled roadbeds rather than bridges) had trailers, campers and the like but we didn't. Most of the time there wasn't a road to our locations yet. We spent a lot of time in tents, occasionally a cabin, lodge, roadhouse or hotel. I quit hunting, fishing or camping for fun after about 3 years on the drill crew. I'm really, REALLY good at camping and other outdoor craft it just isn't much fun anymore. Seriously, I can bake a scratch made pizza at a campfire. You should've seen the look on my bride's face when I did just that on a rainy evening while we were building the house. Lots of memories. I won't be making THAT mistake again. Frosty

I learned the bulk of my skills by myself in spite of the best intentions of my parents. They're depression era kids and saw no point in putting so much work into something that wasn't going to put money in the kitty. So, even though Dad was reasonably accomplished as a smith he wouldn't show me anything except occasionally heat treating something. He insisted I work in his metal spinning shop in my off time. Metal spinning taught me a feel for metal, all kinds of metal. Believe me you learn when something has been pushed as far as it'll go without breaking really quickly if the metal is a blank in a lathe spinning at a couple k RPM! So, I built fires, poked various pieces of metal into them and beat the crap out of them. I say metal and them because coming from my background I didn't think "Iron or Steel" when I thought about heating and beating. If you grow up in Southern California you learn quickly you can't just build a fire without having all kinds of official unpleasantness descend on you. Sure, all I was doing at first was playing with fire and hitting things with hammers but nobody'd let you get away with THAT! If on the other hand you said you were "blacksmithing" they'd smile indulgently and tell you all about their blacksmith, father or grandfather. So, that's what I did, I pretended to be blacksmithing while I played with fire and hammers. My first forge, "real forge" that is, came about because Mother got tired of me heating things on the kitchen range and using a brick or rock on her counter for an anvil. I remember what she said pretty clearly even though we moved out of that house shortly after I turned 8. She said, "GEORGE! Build the boy a forge and anvil. If you want to eat again you will get him out of MY kitchen!" Or something to that effect. Dad gave me a little chunk of steel for an anvil, maybe 25-30lbs. tops and made me a "forge" by giving me a reject steel pan spun in his shop. It had no legs, no air grate, tuyere, etc. Just a lousy steel pan. I propped it up and used it anyway but couldn't get much going as I'm sure you can imagine. We moved from that house shortly after I was 8 and the new house was on a commercial acre so there was room for me to get out of sight and do my own thing. My first REAL forge was a brake drum set into a washing machine door that was packed to the drum's rim with adobe clay. It was powered by a hair dryer of the old plastic hood and hose variety. It was laid on a stack of cinder blocks and burned charcoal. . . Once the wood burned to coals that is. I was maybe 10. My anvil was 2" x 4" x 24" +/- a piece of mild steel bar stock I lifted from Father's shop. Mounting it on cinder blocks wasn't too successful but wood worked once I figured out what was wrong. This basic set up lasted me for a long time, with mods through high school in fact. After I got out of school I found myself butting heads with the real world and had to get a paycheck job. Smithing turned into a back burner thing. A couple years later I moved to Alaska and smithing really took a back seat to making a living. It took a few years in AK to get established in any sort of stable way. Then I got a job with the State and shortly there after found myself working for the geology section and living a good deal of the time in the bush. I was never very good at being an off duty driller, a half rack of beer was just not much fun. After a couple years of trying I started packing a pair of tongs and decent hammers along to play in the campfire. It wasn't long before I made a RR track anvil and that was my kit for years. A home made track anvil, a couple pair of tongs and a couple hammers. I used tools off the rig for the rest, chisels, hacksaw, pliers, visegrips, etc, etc. I was talking about smithing at the materials lab one day and one of the guys said his neighbor was selling his anvil. WooHoo! A REAL anvil at last! That's where I got my 125lb. Sodorfors Sorcoress #5 and a pallet full of tongs. Well, I was still just pretending to smith but getting better. One day I was wandering through a local book store. . . (I tended to read a lot instead of drink when I was off duty, I was such a PITIFUL driller. ) Anyway, as I was walking by the clearance table I saw an interesting title. It literally reached out and grabbed me! "The Art Of Blacksmithing" by Alex Bealer. Seemed the book store ended up with a dozen copies by mistake. I grabbed one and after thinking about it went back a couple days later to buy another copy. They were all gone; boy what a mistake ordering such non-selling titles was! Reading "The Art" cover to cover a couple times was a real eye opener for me, it told me WHY some of the things I'd been trying didn't work, told me how to do them "right" and in general made me into something similar to a blacksmith. I now have a pretty complete library of smithing books and have read them all cover to cover sponging everything I can. The web has been a font of information and interaction with smiths and other metal workers. It's undoubtably the source of the bulk of my knowledge. It's a lot like a book except it has lots of opinions and you can ask questions. You still have to experiment on your own and unlike a book you can't have it laying open on the bench to take quick looks while you work. My second best source of learning is watching other smiths, swapping techniques and lies. It's a quality over quantity thing and really sharpens the old learning curve. This doesn't happen nearly often enough around here, unfortunately. Number one on my list of education is teaching. NOTHING has taught me more about the art than teaching it to someone else. There's NOTHING like having to explain why I just did it THAT way to make me THINK. Okay, that was REALLY long winded. . . But you asked. Frosty

There's nothing wrong with the Sears cross pein a little dressing won't cure, they're not much different than any off the shelf hammer. One of my long time favorites is a 3lb. Craftsman Driller's hammer. I only had to dress the faces and use it to make it nearly perfect. A driller's hammer is something I recommend all my students acquire. They're short handled for good control, reasonably heavy and small faced for good effect. Still, there're a lot of places to find good hammers besides stores. Flea markets, garage, yard, farm sales, pawn shops, etc. etc. I always have my eyes open and every so often find a gem. I pick up any ball pein I see for under a buck, they're easily reforged into straight, cross or angle pein hammers. They also make any number of good set hammers. A few weeks ago I came across an odd little hammer head for a buck at a garage sale. I don't know what it was for but the proportions are different. It's long at 6" with faces just 1 3/8" across and heavy at 3 1/2lbs. So it'll be putting quite a bit of mass into a smallish area of impact. It's going to make a good shaping or roughing hammer if it swings well. So, you don't need to buy a "blacksmith's" hammer, heck, you can't really BUY a good hammer anyway. You acquire hammers and if you use it long enough you MAKE it Your smithing hammer. Sometimes you literally make it, somethings you just dress, reshape or rehandle it. No matter what you find, forge or modify, the only way to make it YOUR hammer is with use. Frosty

Thanks all. The cup holder is gimbal mounted because I MIGHT have to move, seeing as I don't work for the state anymore. You can NEVER be too careful you know. I made this during a gathering of metal artists in Elk River Mn. over Father's Day. We were supposed to make an "Artist's Book," whatever that is. I've had a paycheck job for the past 35-40 years and am not an artist. Anyway, the "Book" was supposed to say something about the person, their art, etc. I flew down early to give my good friends a hand setting up for the Shindig and after it got going I realized what my "Book" should be. There's a long standing bunch of jokes about what a state employee does. I'm sure you've heard most of them like, "What's orange and sleeps four? - A state truck." And so on. The one I was repeating at the time the muse spoke to me was, "What's this high (holding your hand about shirt pocket level) and smells like an armpit? - A state shovel handle." So, there it is, my "Artist's Book". A brand new, stickers intact, shovel, with foam padded handle, that'll NEVER scoop anything, ever. It's permanently mounted on a stand with DOT - RET in forged letters welded to it. Also to show just how versatile a State Employee has to be, the cup holder will hold not only a beer but soda can or coffee cup safely. The real story of this book is of course that it's the end of that story. Time to open a new volume and move on. And YES your wheel barrow should have a cup holder! Good grief is it even a QUESTION? Frosty

Darn I hate having to reply to my own posts but the pic of me and my shovel didn't attach to the last one. With crossed fingers. Frosty