Frosty

I strongly suggest you take a little time off for yourself Steve, you must be buggy cross eyed after all this work. Going back to work to rest up from vacation time is supposed to be in jest. (I just wish it were.) Frosty The Lucky.

Maybe you should make a sketch of what you want to try. The way it looks you want to weld a couple tie plates together as an anvil or maybe a stake plate? Frosty The Lucky.

The evil devil weed was decriminalized during the pipeline here, mid 72-73 IIRC and when the feds tried pressuring the state gvt. about it the state filed suit to make the feds pay the bill for enforcement, arrest, trial, jail, etc. and they decided not to know about it. Even then you'd have to be caught selling or in possession of more than an ounce to get busted. A pound or more might get you jail time. Now there's a pot shop on almost every corner, even service stations out on the highways have quantities. Do NOT give up BMTU! Stick with the basics and one day soon things will start making sense between your imagination, eyes, hands and the steel. From then on you'll be picking up new tricks. Learn the tricks to learn the trade as they say. You'll get there and we'll be honored to help. Frosty The Lucky.

You need to take more breaks Steve, you're making more double posts as the day goes on. I don't know about them making sense, I don't think they ever have, have they? If you do get them organized maybe even (be still my heart) searchable we'll have to take up a collection and throw you a cyber party! Frosty The Lucky.

Good to see you posting Angiolino, you always give me something good to think about. Have you looked at many images of "tower cranes"? The tower vertical section is usually square, for full length members with cross bracing in a triangular pattern similar to the horizontal piece in photo you show. The Boom, "horizontal" component can be different structures depending on the uses. Triangular in structure is pretty typical. The basics would be pretty easy to make, a wide stand would be a must unless you tie it back to a wall. Put a cap on the tower with a lazy susan turn table and mount the boom to it. If you extend the boom behind the tower and weight it to counter balance the boom and light you have the next important component. All tower cranes have a large counter weight that turns with the boom and a control cab either on the boom side next to the tower that turns with or travels with the winch drum back and forth on the boom. I see lots of possibilities depending on how realistic I wanted it and how much I wanted to spend. The tower and boom are pretty straight forward, run the electrical cord on the inside of one of the tower members. Inside would make it way too complicated. A simple box on the back end of the boom for a counter weigh, holding a counter weight of course could also have indirect light sources, say reflecting ff the wall behind and ceiling above. I'd model one with a mobile control cab containing THE spot light or with the light hanging from it on a gimbal so it could be aimed. Maybe put more indirect lights on top of the carriage and cab. This arrangement would allow the cord to be held on a spring loaded spool so you could move it back and forth on the boom without having cord hanging or feeding the cord through a pully in the tower with a weight on it to keep it neat. If I didn't want that much realism I'd mount the boom to the tower like above with a counter weight to keep it stable and mount a suitable light fixture on the end of the boom. Simple and industrial would let me make it very light weight and still serve. Provided I only wanted to light things under the end of the boom with the fixture. Thoughts? Frosty The Lucky.

Good music happens where it grows. I live stream quite a bit of the music I listen to anymore myself but marketing has gotten to having to put up with a long commercial or several every stupid song. I don't listen on my Iphone and listen to audio books on my Kindle. Worse I'm too cheap to pay to subscribe to minimum commercials. It makes me miss the days when most of my friends were musicians and every evening was a jam session. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky.

I've had luck with some of the links by copy / pasting them into my browser or search engine. Frosty The Lucky.

I'm going to not talk about my experience in S. Cal. public school anymore, other than metal shop it isn't metal related so . . . What shocked me a couple years pre-covid ago were the number of young men who wanted to learn smithing but couldn't calculate the area of a square and one couldn't do arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction. High school grads all! And I thought school was only okay when I went. Back to iron and having our way with it. I've saved the 366 hooks link, it had my head spinning looking through it. Thanks again Randy. I've been busier on IFI than usual, Steve's been transferring the blue prints to a new section and I've been skimming along. Talk about spin your head! Frosty The Lucky.

Dad insisted I take Drafting so I did it helped that I enjoyed it. I don't even remember what I drew as my final, other than it was silly complicated. HAH, I remembered trying to describe parts of it! I drew an Allison V 12 aircraft engine. I coasted through high school with a C average, no fails but . . . I was part of California's first year of "no fail" policy. Their funding was and is based on students completing semesters, so you automatically graduate anything you sign up for and they get the $. I gotta stop I have too many gripes about . . . it. I took a few trade school courses and got a job. I've almost never run a certified bead let alone welded on a reactor cooling system! I let my certs lapse decades ago. Did a lot of fabrication as part of a couple jobs and am set up in my shop but . . . Didn't take me too long to discover that if you're competent with the basics your employer will teach you THE job. I ended up operating equipment for the state, great retirement and bennies so I did a full pull, 30 years and out. Generally demanding work with plenty of variety and excellent security. Probably too secure. Frosty The Lucky.

Thank you again Steve I spent a couple hours looking through many of them and seeing old names kind of choked me up. Once you figured it out you were really moving them, I was just looking and skimming and you left me in the ink dust. Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks for the link Randy. My head's kind of spinning now. Frosty The Lucky.

That's the stuff Trey. When you make your liner the walls and roof don't need to be more than 3/8" thick though a number of guys like 1/4", it's really tough stuff. Do NOT forget to rigidize the ceramic blanket! Encapsulating the fibers is more important to control the breathing hazard than making it stiffer. Though stiffer makes things easier. Yeah, I'm THAT Frosty. <sigh> It's my pleasure. Frosty The Lucky.

I've never drawn a plane print, way out of my ballpark. Frosty The Lucky.

My what a brief status report after 3 months! I know you haven't been around in a while but you know how we are about believing wild claims without photographic evidence don't you? Don't be such a stranger will, we miss you here. Frosty The Lucky.

Uh huh, you'd pay me if you heard me sing. . . To stop that is. Not to change the subject but after watching some knapping videos I came back to find my inbox FULL of blueprints! Sorry, I'm just feeling a little giddy right now. Frosty The Lucky.

That's very listenable too. It really sucks that no radio stations around here play anything but the same play list, over and over and over. Talk and news radio seems to be the only ones with a live person in the studio. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky.

Me too, fame like this ain't easy. Frosty The Lucky.

When you read about the knuckle height recommendation bear in mind that is for shops where strikers and top tooling was an every day practice. For the single smith and or hobbyist wrist height is more ergonomic. Striking on an anvil that doesn't fit YOU will eventually cause elbow issues. Once in a while, say at club meetings I can work on almost any height but the anvils in my shop are at MY comfortable working height. Testing by striking a piece of wood is a good indicator. You may need to adjust if you use a lot of top tooling or do lots of fine work. Wrist height is a good rule of thumb but it is not set in stone everybody is different and your jobs and tooling all need to be taken account of. Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks, I'm just passing the benefits of my mistakes along so hopefully you newcomers will make new fresh mistakes we can all learn from. Refractory cements and mortars are for fireplaces and ovens, furnaces, etc. that don't reach temps nearly as high at a well tuned propane forge. Good mortars have COEs very close to firebrick hard or insulating so any difference is absorbed by the brick or they wouldn't stay stuck long. Places like fire place hearths and large furnaces don't heat up as quickly as a propane forge. My forges come to forging temp in maybe a couple three minutes and welding temps in about 5. Standard IFB (Insulating Fire Brick) crumbles at temps above about 1,800f and rarely last two firings in my too silly large variable geometry shop forge. Morgan thermal Ceramics K-26 IFBs are rated for a sustained 2,600f and will take a bit more. They are also very resistant to molten borax based welding flux. The old hard firebrick dissolves in contact with molten borax in any form. ITC-100 has changed it's formula in recent years and is now a GOOD kiln wash, if you can find it for a reasonable price. It contains zirconium flour in a proprietary binder. Zirconia is just a tad softer than diamond and has a vitrification temp around 3370f which is WAY hotter than an oxy propane burner can generate. It has low conductivity and is chemically pretty inert. Put all that together and it serves as a VERY good final layer of armor for the flame face of our forges. The low conductivity means it absorbs energy from the burner but doesn't conduct it to the next layer very fast so it gets REALLY HOT and because it is such a poor conductor has to shed it in the best manner available, as IR radiation back into the forge chamber. Kiln washing a Kastolite 30 lined forge will convert it from an easily yellow hot chamber to an eye searing bright high yellow/white temp chamber. On top of this primary goodness in a propane forge it laughs at molten borax fluxes and is an almost diamond hard coffee cup hard fame face. (yeah, I know I used the same adjective twice in one sentence, sue me I'm a blacksmith) An IFI member in the Nederlands,Marten, developed a very good home brew kiln wash that with modifications could make a good flame face liner. He uses approx. 3% bentone (a variety of bentonite) to 97% zirconium phosphate in a tooth paste +/- consistency as a flame face wash to great effect. I've made a version and it's been living happily in my latest NARB forge. I gotta stop, or I'll go on for ever but that's the basics oh hard inner liner and flame face kiln washes as I do it. Frosty The Lucky.

A sand box makes an excellent anvil stand and damps the ring nicely. If the anvil wants to shift because you used alluvial sand rather than crushed, stapling it to a plywood base solves the issue nicely. It also prevents dropped tools or small pieces from disappearing in the sand. A sand box stand is surprisingly easy to move, pull the anvil out and dump the sand into buckets, load it in your rig and reverse the process where you're going. Frosty The Lucky.

Ayup, there they are! Thanks Steve. Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Trey, glad to have you. If you put your general location in the header you'll have a much better chance of meeting up with members within visiting distance. We aren't going to remember you mentioning it in one post after we open another one. Honest, we're blacksmiths not mentalists. I hope you didn't already buy it. A quick search shows it to be refractory CEMENT, not a fire face refractory. It is meant to cement things together like firebricks. It is unlikely to survive long in direct exposure to a VERY chemically active propane flame. The current consensus on Iforge for probably best castable refractory is, Kastolite 30-li a water setting high alumina bubble refractory rated to 2,600f constant. The bubbles are evacuated silica spherules that are intended to make it physically lighter but also slow thermal conductivity. Insulates. Better for our purpose it is calcite bonded and being high alumina it is very resistant to caustics like molten borax at forge welding temps. It is GREAT stuff. I believe but haven't checked there is a "Distribution International" in Spokane, if so give them a call, it is where I buy all my refractories and the Anchorage store carries Kastolite as well as Morgan Thermal Ceramics, K-26 insulating fire brick which is rated at a solid 2,600f and is borax based flux resistant. Frosty The Lucky.

That's an interesting read, thanks for the link Scott. Frosty The Lucky.

If you look at the time stamp you'll see the original post was almost 5 years ago. He may still be on the forum but last visited July 26 2019. Frosty The Lucky.

This is how I mount anvils now, it's solid as a rock, being dissimilar steel it damps the anvil's ring and it is stable on almost any surface. I won't go back to a wood block. Below is my Trenton on it's tripod stand, I have pics of my Soderfors on t's tripod stand but can't seem to find it. <sigh> The first is the stand and anvil, it wedges tightly enough to lift it into the pickup with the engine hoist as it's rigged in the pic. The second pic is a detail of how the hammer / tong racks wedge the anvil in the stand snuggly enough to lift with the engine hoist while damong the ring of my two dangerously LOUD anvils. Frosty The Lucky.