Frosty

I love it when you let your Geologist self come out and play George. Having to collect my own coal is the main reason I burn propane. I am looking at the Talkeetna mountains out the living room window a range of coal seams 200 miles+/- wide 400 long and -2,000 to+ 4,000 elevation on average. It's about a 45 minute drive to decommissioned strip mines but remembering which side of which ditch is metallurgical coal and which is one of several other kinds of heating coal left me years ago. I can't even find my old collecting ditch. The coal being mined near Healy is virtually all going to China and only a very limited supply of so-so stove coal is being sold by the sack here. 

It gripes me to have world class smithing coal visible that I can't access without mounting an expedition to collect enough to be worth it which unfortunately violates the agreement by which private citizens can collect coal for personal use. <sigh>

Nice if modest score Scott. I love my curve-o-mark even though I don't need it very often. When I do though! I don't know what it is about calipers but I see them in pawn and second hand shops all the time by the bin full and when I go garage, yard, etc. saling they're everywhere.

Frosty The Lucky.

Depends on the anthracite and you're ability to manage the fire. Charcoal is much cleaner in general and bituminous cokes more easily but isn't necessarily clean or lower clinker. The ONLY way you can tell if you have a load of anthracite you can use is to build a fire and learn how to manage THAT load. 

Coal that is half clinker weighs significantly more density wise because of the carbon goodness that was replaced with mineral dirt badness.

The anthracite we were collecting at the old Jonesville mines burned more cleanly than the store bought "smithing" coal available at the time and.

Frosty The Lucky.

Glad to see you didn't take the reusing everything to the level of kitty litter sand.

Still looks good GTF and gun bluing won't care about hot pans on it. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Ah HEM, I assume that is the tradition specified Kitchen sink?

Frosty The Lucky.

DANG I got myself hung up in semantics again. <sigh>

Frosty The Lucky.

I see can folks devoting a life's pursuit of the tryintific method. You are the Father of Tryence Trevor! I'll be honored to be able to say I knew you back when. 

I'm thinking we need to come up with something new that nobody understands so we can explain and describe it to folk. How about a coal gun burner? Guys would need to make crushers to powder it and feed mechanisms before they could start on the burners themselves. Hmmm?

Frosty The Lucky.

It's funny, as tired as I got of answering the same questions over and over the recent slow spell is kind of sad. Reading the recent posts I see we have a fellow in Ymber who has indeed read past posts and only needs a little clarification. 

Kind of cool eh?

Frosty The Lucky.

Shower exhaust!? I'm pretty sure you mean bathroom ventilation exhaust. Yes? 

I might accept aluminum as a super sucker stack IF you can lay your hand on the hood with a max size fire going, without discomfort. Say no hotter than a cup of cooling tea. 

That doesn't leave you any safety margin so I strongly recommend against anything but steel or masonry.

Frosty The Lucky.

That was interesting. Then I opened the video about making stainless steel tubing. It only looked marginally dangerous like any job handling lots of sheared sheet metal then it got to the part where one large roll of sheet SS had been sheared into LOTS of small rolls and the guy tack welds the free ends to the rolls without a welding shield. Audio was interesting, lots of machine and sheet metal sounds with chipmunks chittering in the background.

And who do we blame for this rabbit hole? Why . . . NOBODY of course.

It is a cool rabbit hole, thanks.

Frosty The Lucky.

4th pic down, rectangular open top box. There is a long lever type arm pointing downward connected to a ram on the lower left side. Looking more closely, there is a foot switch between it and Chambersburg on the right. It appears to be in front of and almost directly below the opening on the forge and to the hammer operator's left on the floor right next to the floor fan. It is in almost all the pics of the front of this hammer's operator's position.

Frosty The Lucky.

Looks like a nice place to tour. What is the device with the pneumatic(?) cylinder on the floor in front of the forge? It appears to be plumbed or wired to the hammer on the right.

Thanks for sharing your visit.

Frosty The Lucky.

35 minutes ago, Ridgeway Forge Studio said:

but it fell into the “tomorrow” pile

My you fit right in here don't you?

Frosty The Lucky.

I'm afraid that isn't something a couple thousandths of most anything can do. Case hardening is generally for abrasion resistance and or friction reduction. Any difference is compressive of rigidity it made would require pretty delicate instruments to detect and measure. 

I think it's a thought we've all had at one time or another.

Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Paul, glad to have you. To go along with Randy's suggestion to put your general location in the header I'll add. Please do not use TEXT SPEAK on the forum it has members in about 150 countries around the world most using translation programs so speaking simple basic English saves many of the 60,000 members bandwidth and time. 

Frosty The Lucky.

He did and also said the amount of steel cuttings was enough of a higher % than the bits of broken garnet, silicon carbide, etc. from the belt as to make little if any difference.

We had a good discussion about it a while back. It's in the sections. . . somewhere.

Frosty The Lucky.

Looks pretty good though if possible it's gooder to bring a mandrel to a sharper point if possible. If you have a belt grinder they're easy to clean up and sharpen.

But as forged you done good!

Frosty The Lucky.

Welcome aboard Craftsdwarf, 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 living within visiting distance. 

I strongly suggest you spend more time reading some of the archived subjects before you start pointing out things you THINK are wrong with the site or deliberately misunderstanding them. You DON'T want to make "troll" your first impression do you?

Not building a box so you don't have to think outside it, is about as straight forward as it gets. But because you are new and sound pretty young I'll explain. 

If you do not limit your thinking to things you know, you will not have trouble considering new ideas. 

Frosty The Lucky.

AAAmax: Please don't use the  @  tag it messes with Iforgeiron's operating system and the mods have to repair what it does. 

Will you post more of what I said please, I don't know what I was talking about more than using a lever. I don't know why I was describing something specific. I was probably trying to illustrate the basics of figuring how much lever to use in a shop situation.

The saw horse was just an example of an expedient fulcrum and where to put the lever so as it won't break the sawhorse or tip over. It was just an example.

The basics of leverage is a straight force multiplier. Work side of the lever, fulcrum (pivot point) and input side. a 60cm work side and 180cm input side = a 3:1 lever. For 1kg on the input side the work side will lift 3kg. The travel distance is reversed. The input side moves 180cm for every 60cm the work side moves. 

A good way to experiment is with a ruler or meter stick and known weights. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Nope, more clueless than usual but this is an international forum so maybe a member out there will speak up.  

Frosty The Lucky.

Nickel eh?  Search . . . read . . . read. . . read. Ah, Old Nick but not for any devilish properties, more for being a metallic joker. Cool, thanks for the vocabulary update. 

Frosty The Lucky.

I wonder what else we have in common?

I was pleased to see at everybody wasn't barefoot.

Frosty The Lucky.

1/3" isn't bad shrinkage over that length. Do NOT make the al much hotter, a LITTLE bit should do it. If you switch to molasses or other hardening sand binder you can preheat the mold SLIGHTLY too. A couple few burning charcoal briquettes along the length under it can make a good difference. Think 100f+/- a few preheat.

Getting there.

Frosty The Lucky.

Cool beans. Give it more time to cool than you think it needs!

Frosty The Lucky.

Bending hot is normal enough in a Hossfeld, Case hardening only effects a couple thousandths of the surface and doesn't add to stiffness in any meaningful way. Maybe buy stronger steel or send it to a professional heat treater? I know it flies in the face of DIY but sometimes it's the best and most cost effective.

Lola has seen the vise stand, I don't think she'll show more interest in something new or yummy.

Frosty The Lucky.

It's also much easier to wrap 1" into a tube than 2". 2" wrinkles and requires work and extra quantities and thickness refractory to make a smooth interior so the flame flows smoothly. 

Frosty The Lucky.