Frosty

Don't kill yourself Steve, it will take as long as it takes. I tried "articles" earlier, found the link but it looped back to the article section. I decided to leave you be then and will wait quietly unless I think of something I can do to help. Frosty The Lucky.

I followed your sketches easily David, not what/how I would've drawn but I followed right along. Must be Dad teaching me to read blueprints before I was 8 and then taking something like 6-8 semesters of drafting. Draw a cow in a flat pasture? HAH! Draw dimensioned prints of a 2 story house on a daylight basement with wiring, plumbing, heating, well, septic, etc.? Took a little time but no problem, I spent more of the time looking up the right codes and symbols. I do virtually all my shop sketches on graph paper. A friend gave me a big white board that's divided like 3" graph paper. I was surprised how seldom I even think of it let alone use it. I guess for now BMTU take it slow and easy, speed will come AFTER you develop the hammer control and eye for the movement under the hammer. All trying to hurry is guaranteed to do is make your mistakes permanent more quickly. "Your patience WILL be rewarded." Alton Brown. Frosty The Lucky.

I can listen to those, Black Bullet, "Kidney Thieves," didn't do anything for me but I may have to watch some of the anime series and see. Amazon Prime has it's advantages. It's funny Das but as soon as Covenant Bullet finished this one popped up and started. New videos, etc. always take time to start but not this time. I'm not really a country western guy but this is one of my favorites. Weird huh? Frosty The Lucky.

No picture Mike? You know how we are about believing wild claims without photographic evidence don't you? Hmmmmm? Frosty The Lucky.

The learning curve can get to us, especially when breaking into a new craft. One of the reasons many of us hang out here is to lend folks a hand past that sort of thing. I really like the drive hook, nicely done. Next time try making the shank of the hook longer and the hook a little smaller. That wide things hanging will put excess leverage against the drive point. A longer shank will put most of that force against the wall. And lastly if you bend the drive point a BIT sharper than 90* weight on the hook will want to push it deeper into the wall, post, etc. Nice job on the coil how does the impression in wet clay look? The screw hanger is kind of straight out for my taste but it looks well enough made for a Frosty "good job." I don't see anything lacking in your products, my least favorite is just a design experiment, keep it to compare with what you had in mind and to see how far you've come down the road. I have some really old UGH things I made. . . Somewhere. Right now I think making drive hooks is a good exercise, you're already good enough at making one you shouldn't be disappointed and there is a world of variations you can apply. Say twisting the shank. Even if you use round stock you can flatten 4 sides slightly and twist it for a little fancy. Maybe put a fish tail or "reverse scroll" finial on the hook end so heavy coats aren't resting on a thin steel scroll. You can make large drive hooks, small ones, indoor, outdoor ones, etc. It's even marketable so you can defray the cost of smithing and gift friends and relatives galore. Hmmmm? Frosty The Lucky.

I may be able to listen to more than one thing at a time, background music is always welcome but my headphones just make a muddle of different sound tracks playing at once. Roll off the low side of the bed. <SHEESH!> Kids today, what can you do with them? Keep it up Scott, I'm warming up the rubber chicken. Frosty The Lucky.

Good to see you have quality control well in glass. Nice looking opener Tommy, it's cool seeing something different. Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard JC, glad to have you. Sounds like you caught the bug alright, welcome to the club! Please don't do any more grinding on your anvil, the pits and such will smooth out beating HOT steel on it. Grinding removes steel forever and there wasn't that much there new, MAYBE 3/4". If you need a pristine surface to finish projects on, say a blade, make a bottom tool from say 3/4" or 1" plate x 3"-4" on a side that fits the hardy hole but rests closer to the center of the face. You can grind various radii on the 4 edges and keep it shiny and smooth for finish work. Make sense? As she sits there is still a couple generations of good work in her. Nice job on the fire pot though it looks kind of deep from here but that may be the photo. What are it's dimensions? You've done a nice job on the forge all round though the fire grate will burn out distressingly quickly. When It does, hopefully a couple years from now, I suggest you replace it with 1/2" dia. round bar bent in open hair pin shapes, about 3/8" of space and lay enough of these to cover the tuyere. They're effective as an air grate and very easy to clean best of all cheap and easy to replace. Not being attached to the flange where the tuyere is bolted (another suggestion) they're free to move when you rake them to clear clinker, just rattling them back and forth does a good job of breaking stuck on clinker loose so it can drop through or be raked out. Might want to shorten the ash dump a little, it looks like you could hook a pants leg or apron on it. You may not need to, you'll find out these little details as you use it. So, what else did you get? Frosty The Lucky.

How am I supposed to listen to Dr. James Dilley talking about knapping flint and the paleo-archeology of knapped tools when you post this tasty a selection of things to listen to? Good listening for an old fart like me, thanks. Frosty The Lucky.

Nice door pulls Gewoon. A little dab of paint will match the screws up nicely. Using what is at hand is very much blacksmitherly. Frosty The Lucky.

Glenn hadn't gotten them all sorted into the blueprints forum before the OS change lost them did he? I think he just lumped things that fell into his "blueprint" definition into the forum and was working his way through organizing them. At least I seem to recall him asking the forum for suggestions to help organize things. I recall the blueprints section being kind of hard to navigate though random selections could be fun. Frosty The Lucky.

Didn't the blueprints disappear in an update maybe OS change a few years ago? Taking a month or two longer than you anticipated would've gone unnoticed when they came back. You know what they say about absence making the heart grow fonder? Having access to the blueprints makes my fondness levels cross giddy! Thank you all for the hard work you've been pursuing so diligently for the last few years and congratulations for a job well done! Frosty The Lucky.

How memorable, thanks for bringing it up Scott. I don't get a spell check notice for that one, I wonder how many times I've signed that way? Frosty The Lucky.

Handling holes in anvils were used to grind the face against BIG grinding wheels too. Frosty The Lucky.

YIKES, you won't catch me proofing any firearm like that! I only double charged when I proofed my old marble gun. 2 times the 3x power and 2 marbles. The duplex charge was impressive when I proofed it with a double load though. I made my own shot by carrying a pot of molten lead to the top of our 2 story barn shaped garage and slowly pouring it into a pan of water on the ground. It wasn't properly metered or high enough for the lead to form proper spheres but they were close enough. Made interesting patterns at 30' and was a true scatter gun farther out. I stopped using fuse to fire it and made a simple bridge in the cut end of an old extension cord and used jumpers and the car battery. A fresh 9v transistor radio battery worked fine too. For a few shots. I'm SURE Deb is happy I stopped doing that sort of fun years ago. <sigh> Frosty The Lucky.

Good for you Chad! Involving new folk in the addiction is a fine thing! Maybe suggest she join the IFI gang, hmmmm? I've been called worse Nat, I couldn't count how many times I've signed posts Forsty to be caught by spell check, I flagged it as never good. It's actually blinking at me in a most annoyingly attention getting way on the screen right now. Frosty The Lucky.

MAN, that must've been good steel, filling the bore with sand like that should've caused it to explode! I used to shoot pop cans of ice or plaster of Paris from a home built cannon using oxy acet as propellant. The one I built for the 4th of July at the hatchery in Prince William Sound fired cans close to 1/4 mile. Empty cans or those filled with water got turned into chaff. . Frosty The Lucky.

Goodness BMTU! I'm going to make a couple suggestions that may fly in the face of some of the good advice given so far. Hmmm, I'm saying this again, twice in two days! ARGHHHH! I take exception to you saying you lack "TALENT", you lack skill. Talent is or isn't, like eye color. Skill on the other hand can be learned and is the combination of a little knowledge and a lot of practice. PERIOD! You're making a couple bad decisions as to expectations too. First, forget about perfection, I don't care who the smith is if you look closely you'll find imperfections. Forget timing yourself and worse still competing against video demonstrations. Good grief do you compare yourself to soap opera "hunks" or TV heros? Stop trying to make complicated projects. On the how to list. Every complex project is nothing but a series of simple pieces or processes joined together. Believe it or not there really are only a few basic processes: drawing out, upsetting, bending, punching, cutting and joining. Welding, riveting, collaring, etc. being sub categories of joinery. Combining them yields your products say, a mortis and tenon joint is a punched and perhaps drifted hole, a bar drawn down to round for a specific length, heated, inserted in the mortis and peined. 3 basic processes to make one join. Do that half a dozen times and you have a grate, trivet, etc. Make 4 of those long and narrow, join them together and you have a door. etc. Discounting measuring, cutting and such really basic skills you can dress an entire house with 4-5 basic processes. Mastering the craft is nowhere near as complicated you've convinced yourself. Honest, it's pretty simple. Frosty The Lucky.

That and just because it's dry doesn't mean the ingredients can't react and degrade the whole. Frosty The Lucky.

Nobody's born knowing this stuff or anything, we all began at zero, welcome to the club. I take exception to your "dumb stage" comment though, not knowing something isn't dumb, it's ignorant. Ignorance can be fixed easy as learning but dumb is forever. To paraphrase R. A. Heinlein, "Ignorance can be cured, stupidity is it's own death sentence." Something like that. Most of us took up the craft because we like making things with our own hands and creativity is a MUST to be any good at it. I get a little ego boost from being able to shape steel like modeling clay and have always been comforted by knowing I could make most of what I need with a fire something hard and heavy to beat against, something to beat with and whatever steel I find. As a young kid I saw Paladin on "Have Gun Will Travel" stranded by bandits on the prairie with nothing. He came too and started searching, he finds the remains of a wagon train and sets about making survival gear, fire, makes pancakes from flour and water, moccasins from canvas and forges himself a knife and dart points from scrounged iron from a wagon. He makes an atlatl a few steel tipped darts and goes hunting for his horses and gear. I've never liked the idea of being helpless. Frosty The Lucky.

You're welcome, it's my pleasure. Often burners will pop or sputter when you shut them off, this is normal. What is happening in a naturally aspirated burner is they are tuned to produce a neutral or SLIGHTLY rich flame in operation. The primary pressure, propane jet, is inducing combustion air be causing a low pressure zone around the expansion cone, just like a truck driving by. When you contain the jet in the mixing tube a couple things happen, as Bernoulli states a fluid flowing over a curved surface causes a low pressure boundary layer between the flow and the curved surface. The most common demonstration is a piece of paper in your fingers and blowing over the curved top, the paper lifts because the pressure below is greater than above. An airplane wing is an every day example. Back to the propane jet in the mixing tube, It begins expanding as soon as it leaves the jet it begins expanding taking up a larger volume but not slowing much so the pressure falls and combustion air is induced to enter the intake ports to fill in. The jet is also inside a tube which is a curved surface which causes more pressure loss. Okay, all that said, the fuel air mix is flowing down the tube driven by the fuel jet and all's well. I assume you turn your burner(s) off with the tank valve on the propane tank. Tank psi is roughly 200 at room temp from the valve to the regulator, it's reduced to your operating psi over typically 6' of propane hose a couple fittings to the jet. It takes a little time for the propane in the circuit to bleed off. While it is going down the velocity of the flame will be dropping at one point the rate of propagation or flame front velocity exceeds the mix's velocity so the flame travels back up the mixing tube and she sputters or POPS and goes out. Make sense? I've never cared for torches popping when I shut them off which is my least favorite thing about owning an oxy propane torch, the rosebud sounds like a rifle, a loud one. The easy way to eliminate well . . . minimize sputtering or popping on shut down is to install a 1/4 turn propane valve on the output side of your regulator. The circuit still needs to bleed down but only from the regulator to the jet, the reg doesn't bleed down and more importantly it takes a few seconds to close the tank valve. propane bleed down goes from a few seconds to maybe 1/2 a second and she's off. Frosty The Lucky.

The reason flash back / back flow preventers aren't seen on propane forges is simply because they are fuel air torches, there is NO high pressure oxidizer in the circuit. Without an oxidizer NO fire CAN flow up the hose let alone into the tank. NO oxygen NO FIRE. Yes? What you describe above can NOT happen. What can happen is a cut or burned supply hose and a flame monster flowing BADNESS breath in your shop. This won't happen with modern propane tanks because they have internal safety valves to prevent high gas flow. Makes it hard to use new tanks, you have to turn them on gradually or they shut off. If you have an oxy fuel torch backfires used to be a danger, drag a cutting torch on the steel you're cutting and you could get a backfire going and literally melt the tip if you don't shut it right off. This is possible because the oxygen is at a higher pressure than the fuel so a blockage of just the wrong type and oxygen could be forced back into the fuel hose potentially turning it into a detcord analog. We heard lots of stories about acetylene tanks exploding. I started hearing them in my first metal shop class in 66 but have you EVER seen pics? And to be honest I've never seen a pic or talked to someone (I'd believe) who saw a fuel hose explode. One instructor said he'd seen one do a fast burn for a couple but that's it. That said, I'll be the first to admit I do NOT know even a fraction of what's to know. If you find examples of propane or acetylene tanks exploding do to a back fire I'll be on the "PREVENT THIS" bandwagon immediately. Frosty The Lucky.

I couldn't find a way to reply to Steve's announcement that the Blue Print section is back online for our use. And dog GONNIT Steve and probably Foo deserve a hearty THANK YOU for opening that old door again! WAY TO GO GUYS!! Frosty The Lucky.

12 psi is a reasonable pressure, on my 4 burner forge I had to match burners so I could run two at the same psi and get close to the same flame intensity. I don't turn them down much below 11 or so or back pressure starts effecting them. Unless I'm mistaken your intake ports are larger than I make mine so they will induce more air and to balance the mix you'd probably have to move the gas net closer to the throat than I do. It's to be expected. I used the same T-inducers to drive NARB and they perform far better, they're stable from stop to stop on my 0-30psi regulator. The problem running NARB at low pressure is the heat build up in the burner head starts pre-igniting the mix inside the burner. Running it a higher psi than about 8-9 gives you close to 6 hrs. work time before overheating. I haven't tried improving NARB, I don't spend much time at the anvil anymore and certainly not 6hrs at a stretch. Frosty The Lucky.

Spoil sport! I LOVE a good typo but you're pretty new here so I've been letting them go. Frosty The Lucky.