Frosty

Period not traditional. The true tradition of the blacksmith in the 21st century is sitting in a clean room wearing comfy clothes, sipping a refreshing beverage and watching the CNC machinery on a monitor. Virtually every serious improvement in metal working technology over the ages was made by a smith trying to save time, money and his/er back. Period on the other hand is the time frame you wish to limit your practice to. Not a thing wrong with it as long as you kep it in perspective. There are only a few serious sins for the smith: Not charging enough being #1. Being honest is in the same league. There's nothing wrong with chucking 21' of 1/2" sq in a power twister as long as you're not claiming it's hand twisted. Arc welding was invented by a smith name of Miller who was tired of losing built up pieces to failed forge welds. Samuel Yellin's shop arc welded much of the work they did. Just don't BS the customer about it. Frosty

Mig tips are 1/4" - 28. Frosty

I thought I answered this one yesterday but it didn't show up on my end. There are pluses and minuses to any particular design. The vertical takes up less floor space and elevates the hot iron more so the radiant reaches more places. A vertical won't hold as much wood because you can't put the door very high or you let the smoke out stoking it. Radiant vs. heat exchange. The upside of radiant is it doesn't heat the air, it heats objects in line of sight and they heat the air. This means a room with a radiant heat source will feel warm even if the air is outside cold. A downside is radiant is line of sight so anything out of sight of the stove will be in the cold. There is a downside to putting lots of exchange tubes in the stack robber and that's creosote buildup. It's going to form almost no matter what but the more tubes the harder it is to clean out and the faster it forms. Typically you make a scraper that slides over the tubes inside the robber. It's attached to a rod that extends through the front of the robber and you clean the tubes by sliding the rod out and in every so often. The more and smaller tubes you have, the harder it is to move and the more often you have to do it, up to several times a day. Some friends and I made a number of these things when they took them off the market. We didn't do any comparison except in gross customer satisfaction. The grease barrel in the drum made more people happy as it's about zero maint, works well and with a little bit of grill makes a wonderful glove drier and leftover warmer. If you use sq or rec tubing weld it in on the corner or creosote and crud will accumulate on the flat really fast. Also, most sq or rec will be a lot heavier wall than say exhaust tubing. The thinner the steel the better a heat exchanger it is. Thick steel HOLDS heat and you want it to give it up fast. As a rule of thumb in a shop a single 55gl. drum is plenty for 500-700 sq/ft in sub zero. A double barrel is plenty for up to maybe 1,500 sq/ft if the ceiling isn't too high. Putting the grease barrel in the second barrel will speed the shop warm up considerably and heats a larger space or higher ceilings. It also allows you to blow warm where you want it. Frosty

I wear ear and eye protection for most processes in the shop and lots outside it. I was an exploration driller for 19 years, standing about 5' behind the exhaust stack of a Detroit Diesel. Even wearing earplugs AND muffs a day on the drill stand would leave my ears ringing. Protect your hearing and anything else you may want to use later in life. Frosty

The mig IS known as the lawyer's welder for a reason. It doesn't matter what machine you use you have to know how to weld. Mig is famous for making a pretty weld with no penetration on one side; cold lapping. Anyway, I don't recommend mig unless you already know how to weld, they can really get you in trouble. Frosty

A good trick for the double barrel is to cut holes in the ends of the upper barrel large enough to fit a 15gl grease barrel through, you'll need to splice two to make the length. Weld the grease barrels into the upper barrel and put a fan in one end. It makes a super stack robber. I'm going to make a variation for the new shop. The 55 gl drum gets cut down to 24" so it doesn't overhand the can pile I'm using for the stove. The stack will be centered on the stack robber so I can aim it around the shop where needed. Lastly it gets some louvers so I can aim the heat down at my feetsies. The can pile is a section of 24" piling from a bridge project some years ago. I salvaged 53" of it and will build it as a vertical to save floor space. Frosty

Get the largest capacity name brand welder you can get for the money. Check with the local welding suppliers to see what they have in factory overhauls, rebuilds, trade ins, etc. I did VERY well buying my Lincoln Ranger 9 portable a decade or so ago buy buying a factory overhaul. It was a demo welder and Lincoln had to sell it as used but sent it to the depot for a complete rebuild. What I got had 27 hrs. on it but cost less than 50% of brand new. Try to steer clear of the unknown makes, I had one once and it worked just fine till it needed a part. Then it was a door stop. Frosty

Write the patent # down and search for it on the Google Patent engine. Be warned though most of the patent drawings aren't terribly good for telling you how it works. Still, they're better than nothing. Frosty

Words of experience. Frosty

Dress for it naturally and stand between the heat stove and forge. I'll be venting my propane forge to a downdraft exhaust system that'll give up it's heat to the floor slab. CO monitors are a given in closed door season. I already have a big honkin piece of can pile to make the wood stove from and will be making a stack robber I can aim. So, those are the secrets of ding it in AK, gear up, insulate, and heat your area. Frosty

What kind of hammer, hand, power, drop, treadle? Frosty

Good haul Steve. We almost never see smithing tools and equipment here abouts. Still, garage/yard saling can be fun and rewarding. (If you can keep the wife from spending your half the budget on GOOOOOD deals!) This spring I found a couple jack shaft grinders and the guy made me take an old carpenter's box full of misc wheels, brushes, arbors, rests, files and such. $15 took it all though I would've been happy to leave most of it. Most of the summer Deb and I spent a pleasant afternoon after church hitting garage/yard sales. While I'd find the occasional hammer head, etc. she found all kinds of MUST have stuff. Then a couple weeks ago I found a Loretone rock tumbler, grits and a bunch of polished rocks for $25 and got them to throw in a gas powered weed whacker that'll take blades as well as string. The tumbler is around a 20lb. capacity and sells now for around $400-450. Frosty

I was thinking something similar myself. Milling or otherwise forming the swages would be problematical, rail is typically 1085-1095 HC steel. It'd mostly be a matter of what method to use rather than figure something out though. Having a third shape horn and a different set of swages on the third face would be better still. The heels could be different fullers as well or perhaps two fullers and a hot cut. Using RR rail would get the weight up if it were made to a decent size and one weren't interested in packing it on their back. Weighing somewhere around 75-100 lbs would make it a dandy multi-use portable. Anyway, you're not the only person thinking about this thing. Frosty

I got to play with Bob Bergman's 3B a couple summers ago. After seeing how gently I could hit the bar I gave it one peddle to the metal hit. Turned 1 1/4" sq to a large flat spoon shape less than 1/8" thick. Looked a lot like a cartoon thumb. I'd really like to try a 4B or larger. Don't know if I'd want one though, I'm much too lazy to lift iron large enough to need a hammer that large. Still. . . Frosty

There are a number of risk factors you need to consider before putting a propane forge in a basement. As said, propane is heavier than air, will settle in low spots and launch portions of the house if ignited. The other really serious danger is CO. (carbon monoxide) A propane forge produced prodigious amounts of CO gas, it is odorless, colorless and toxic in the sense that CO attaches itself to the hemoglobin in your blood displacing oxy. It's also pretty insidious and will creep out of the basement and into the rest of the house. At the very least you'll need a serious ventilation system to remove unburned propane and the CO. Co isn't as much heavier than air as propane so it'll rise if heated as in the forge. When it cools it will settle but not before finding it's way into upper floors. CO detectors are a must. If I were in a position to have to use a propane forge in a basement I'd build it a booth with exhaust system above and below the openings. I'd plumb the propane in from outside directly through the wall into the booth. I'd have so many CO detectors visitors'd think I was decorating with them and a propane sniffer. (whatever they're called) You can find the gas sniffers at boat suppliers or call the local propane guys. Given any choice I wouldn't do it. I'd rather borrow money and insulate the shop or build a big honkin wood stove. Frosty

Forge a new one. If you're new to forging spring stock hit the local spring shop for an appropriate sized drop. While you're there ask them about heat treating. Don't forget to tell them what it's for and all, most spring shop guys LIKE playing with fire and hitting things with hammers, many talk smithing fluently. Frosty

Carving steel isn't hard, especially on a touchmark scale. Just use small SHARP chisels and a light hammer. Carving your own also provides you excellent practice making chisels. Frosty

Using cast iron isn't going to give you particularly good results in the first place and it will have a pretty short lifespan in the second. If you carve the master / mother die from steel it'll last you many times longer. Making a die also means you don't have to carve it in reverse. Frosty

Fire clay. Mix about 1pt in 8 portland cement and 1pt in 4 sharp silica sand. Cement: 1pt. Fire clay: 8 pts. Sharp silica sand: 2pts. Elmer's glue: 2-3 drops per quart of water for the mix. Add only enough water so it'll make a clean breaking lump when squeezed in your fist. If it's crumbly add a LITTLE more water, it it's sticky add a LITTLE more clay mix. If you've ever done green sand casting you know what properly tempered sand is like, that's what you're looking for. Once you have the correct (or close, this isn't rocket surgery ) ram it in place with a wood mallet or similar. Burnish the surface smooth with wood, burlap or such. The smoother the surface the better; clinker won't stick as easily and sharp irons won't mar it as easily, checking will be easier to control. In short the smoother the better. Lastly use a butter knife, etc. and score the surface to control shrink checking 1/8" deep is plenty. It is going to shrink no matter what you do but it can be held to a minimum. Only using as much water as absolutely necessary to bind it is #1. Scoring the refractory is #2. It WILL shrink check, (crack) but it will do it along the lines of least resistance which are the score marks. You'll need to prep the firepot so the refractory will stick. Probably the easiest and fastest would be to tack weld some expanded metal to the pot so the clay can grab it. (This is how metal lath was invented) Another method is to just rough it up good, using a ginder or welding chicken tracks on it. A more time consuming method would be to drill lots of holes and run screws in from outside or maybe from inside and leave the heads showing. Heck, tack weld nail heads to the inside. Anything as long as it doesn't protrude through the liner. You get the idea, the refractory will last longer if it's stuck well and good to the inside of the pot. Mixing Elmer's and water at about 1 : 20 and painting it on the firepot will REALLY improve it's sticktion. Don't let it dry completely, it works better when a little sticky damp. So, in short: Give it a good surface to grip, use as little water as possible, ram it as hard as possible, burnish it and score it and it'll last a long time. Of course it's pretty simple to replace in any case so don't get too carried away trying to get it perfect. Frosty

I bought a 5/4 hickory board and cut handles from it. Quarter sawn is supposed to be much better as the growth rings are aligned with the swing and it makes for better energy transfer and shock absorbtion. If you want to reshape the rubber grips simply freeze in dry ice and alcohol and rasp. Or use a belt sander with a really course grit with good ventilation or outdoors. Let us know how the FG handles work for you. Frosty

Varied and perhaps checkered. Our branch of the family tended to move around quite a bit while others still live in the same house built at the turn of the century or earlier. It wasn't a big adventure or anything, my brother used to live here and the summer of 72' I packed a bag and caught a plane for a visit. I was more than half hoping I oculd find work and stay. Dennis put me up for a couple weeks and helped me find work. I did odd jobs and such for a couple years till I got established and known. Anchorage was still small enough in the early-mid 70's to become known around town for good or bad. I had vague plans on getting a job on the pipeline and making a bunch but was still naive enough to think things should be fair. I wouldn't pay a union a kickback for a job so didn't get one. Stupid me it was only one paycheck but at 20 I had principles. Yes siree I did! Found a job in a service station instead. After a couple years of the pipeline siphoning off skilled operators, labor, etc. other places started opening up a bit and I got a job for the state. Up till then about the only way to break in on a state job was to know someone or have a necessary skill. Well, that was 30 years ago and I retired last june 1. My first state job was taking speed surveys with radar. When that played out I went to wok in the soils lab and that got me in touch with the geology section. Within a year or so I'd developed a reputation for being able to fabricate most anything from materials in the scrap pile. The next thing I knew I was going out with the drillers and the next fall I was asked to transfer to the Foundations Drill crew permanently. Spent 19 years all told drilling holes and the last 10 working for highways maintenance. Lots of things happened while I was traveling on the drill crew but the job was boring in the extreme. So, who else has a moving tale to tell? Frosty

Never heard of tapping the anvil for luck, etc. but I live way far away. I occasionally give the anvil a tap but it's usually an unconscious thing. I've heard people in the audience say all kinds of things about how a "real" blacksmith does things. One of my buddies is demoing at the ongoing state fair and a couple days ago a couple youngsters, 19+/- started telling him ALL about smithing. They started off by telling him his 48kg. Kolswa was an ASO and as such not a "real" anvil and finished by telling him it "looked" lighter than the marking claimed. Mark finally just ran them off by pointing out they'd at least look smarter if they kept their mouths shut around professionals. Anyway, I don't hit anything but the work on purpose. Frosty

Bob Bergman is a super guy and has quite a selection of tools and equipment for sale. Old World Anvils, Blacksmith Forges, Fly Presses, Post Vises and Tools Frosty

That's the kind of score that might make me hate you. If I were the kind of person to hate anyone. Congratulations big time for the score of the (month at least). You might want to try restoring the post drill before you donate, sell, etc. it away. There's a lot to learn about how things worked in the day and if you look you'll see there is a rectangular hole in the shaft opposite the drive pully where the handle fits. (Assuming on this one but I have one very similar and I have yet to see one without hand crank capability) Lastly what is the model # on the drill. Mine is a Champion Mod# 200 1/2. Frosty

That is one of the nicest looking home made forges I've seen in a long time. Check Google, the people who bring you ITC-100 make a product designed to shiled steel and other metals in high heat environments. Another more complicated method would be to build a plenum around the firepot so incoming air from the blower cools the sides of the firepot. Personally, I'd just rough up the sides of the firepot and clay it lightly. Frosty