Borntoolate Posted September 24, 2012 Share Posted September 24, 2012 IF you can get the previous post ingrained in your head you will have just completed a near full semester of Trigonometry. Don't get in a rush. It looks hard but isn't that hard. And can be really useful. THough a lot of times you can eyeball and do many other things to avoid it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Gaddis Posted September 24, 2012 Share Posted September 24, 2012 the best part about having angles from 8 to 10 degrees means that the length of the leg is. ..for blacksmith purposes...the same measurement as the height...unless you wanna cut a silly millimeter. this is one step before rocketeering. I do however appreciate the well designed example. Carry on Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Borntoolate Posted September 25, 2012 Share Posted September 25, 2012 Agreed the best part about having angles from 8 to 10 degrees means that the length of the leg is. ..for blacksmith purposes...the same measurement as the height...unless you wanna cut a silly millimeter. this is one step before rocketeering. I do however appreciate the well designed example. Carry on Agreed! Absolutely. And the math at 0.99 and 0.98 support that! I will still persist that for us do it ourselvers that some trig is learnable and valuable. We can always mock up, lay out, use mutliple people to hold things at various angles and so forth that get us out of using trig but there are times when it is... well.. A simple blessing to know. I also see it in many of the old blacksmithing books. I am thinking that Trig was a blacksmithing basic perhaps back in the day? The nice part is that it is not nearly as hard as Rocket Science! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K. Bryan Morgan Posted September 25, 2012 Share Posted September 25, 2012 Measure from the floor to your mid fist or knuckle. Subtract the height of the anvil. Cut a stump to the remainder. Worked fine for how long? Or bury it in the ground with the anvil at knuckle height if you have a dirt floor. KISS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Borntoolate Posted September 25, 2012 Share Posted September 25, 2012 Trig, not just for anvil stands! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SamT Posted September 26, 2012 Author Share Posted September 26, 2012 Lol. Borntoolate, I've been trying to say that since the first post. Somehow the subject of trig and the example of the stand got swapped around. Title of my post was even changed. The point of this was supposed to be the trig formulas.The title was changed to better reflect the subject of the post, how to use trig to set the legs of an anvil. If multiple examples were used, the original title would have been sufficient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Borntoolate Posted September 29, 2012 Share Posted September 29, 2012 Measure from the floor to your mid fist or knuckle. Subtract the height of the anvil. Cut a stump to the remainder. Worked fine for how long? Or bury it in the ground with the anvil at knuckle height if you have a dirt floor. KISS. Yo, I am curious how you finish your stump such that it lays flat on both top and bottom. Just with chainsaw or what? My main anvil is on a stump. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thingmaker3 Posted September 30, 2012 Share Posted September 30, 2012 I think trigonometry scares a lot of people simply because it's a pentasyllabic word. It just means "naming the angles" though. It is a potent tool for a good many things. Want to insure your hot-cut is less than 15 degrees? Use trig to get the 1/4" per inch answer. Want to know how far the middle of your cheese fuller needs to project beyond the chord to have a radius matching the base of your anvil horn? Trig again. Any smith who won't use trig and geometry is absolutely doing things the hard way. (Whether they know it or not is another topic.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K. Bryan Morgan Posted October 1, 2012 Share Posted October 1, 2012 Yo, I am curious how you finish your stump such that it lays flat on both top and bottom. Just with chainsaw or what? My main anvil is on a stump. Yes I just used a chainsaw. I used a framing square to mark a line then cut a 2 x 4 and used that as a guide. I measured from the new "bottom" of the stump to the proper height, in my case this is 17", and made a parallel cut. I checked it for square with a level and was right on the money. I think it took me about 5 minutes. Trig doesn't scare me, it has nothing to do with what kind of word it is. If I were engineering something I would use it. I did for many years as a civil engineering draftsman and designer. I heard a very telling story once about an engineer and a blacksmith. The engineer wanted a one inch hole in a piece of plate at a certain point. He was using lots of math and figuring how to get a drill over the hole and how to make it all work out. The blacksmith asked how far from two edges he needed the hole. The engineer told him the dimensions of the hole and the blacksmith marked them out. Taking a torch, he cut a hole at the location leaving it just a little bit small. Heating the edges with the torch he then took a one inch drift and drove it through the hole. The engineer looked at the blacksmith and then walked away. For me, this little tail, true or not, tells me that practical experience should not be discounted. Nor should should the power of keeping processes simple. Over thinking a project can doom it to cost over runs and stagnation just as much as under thinking it. Your milage may vary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam Salvati Posted October 1, 2012 Share Posted October 1, 2012 the easiest math is no math at all, just build it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Theintegrator Posted October 5, 2012 Share Posted October 5, 2012 I just found a stump....then put the anvil on top sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (Sigmund Freud ) Me too. English major. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Borntoolate Posted October 5, 2012 Share Posted October 5, 2012 Me too. English major. the easiest math is no math at all, just build it. It is a potent tool for a good many things. Any smith who won't use trig and geometry is absolutely doing things the hard way. (Whether they know it or not is another topic.) I shortened the last quote above. Lots of good points about practicality, "getting it done", over thinking as opposed to just getting it done... Actually I resemble all the above. So there is a balance between "engineering" something and just doing a more simple direct action that get's you to the same place sooner. I can get frustrated with myself when I try to overthink things. I think that is partially why, as an engineer, I have gotten into woodworking and blacksmithing. I try to combine some engineering skills with some practical skills to actually produce something. Then there is the combination of the mental and the physical. That is one thing that some engineers miss. In my day job there is little physical work so at home I have the shop for that. And what could be more physical than pounding hot iron! But also there is a huge mental, thinking, planning, eyeballing aspect that is very absorbing and enjoyable. Then the feel of it and the use of the object when it is done. So what is my point? I am not really sure sometimes... but I think it centers around the general joy of using knowledge, experience and physical effort to produce something of value. but also on a thought that... Some folks are all practical / common sense. Some folks are all analytical and want to calculate something on paper. IF I had to pick between the two and it was all or nothing I would go with the practical / common sense. But. Since I can have my druthers I prefer to try to combine the two. I am convinced that if the Engineer and the worker on the floor can combine their knowledge and work together that a great deal can be accomplished. If either totally rejects the other than we are all diminished. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Gaddis Posted October 6, 2012 Share Posted October 6, 2012 years ago I was helping a friend work on a cotton gin. He had not nearly the education I had but was he was crafty and a well trained valve fitter and boiler maker. He taught me to weld properly and a whole lots more. On this particular job we had to rebuild a bunch of air flow tubes 30 feet in the air, cahanging all their directions, etc. How are we gonna do this? TRIG...Try In Git It Trig he replied. Before long a plumb bob from those exposed tubes (outlines) we determined the original dimensions and some.7071 calculations for the angles to get the latitudes and departures. Some here will understand that .7071 is a mathmatical proportion to that very same triangle. Go look it up if you do not know. So that man and i as a young helper installed many thousands of dollars of new tubing, ordered from a supplier, and everything fit...with the use of a prybar and alighnment tool. Moral of this story is you may learn something from a lesser educated person...if you are willing to do so. appreciation....you bet I will never be able to repay him the real math I learned. The math that was down in the dirt from a plumb bob! Carry on Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Borntoolate Posted October 6, 2012 Share Posted October 6, 2012 On this particular job we had to rebuild a bunch of air flow tubes 30 feet in the air, cahanging all their directions, etc. How are we gonna do this? TRIG...Try In Git It Trig he replied. Before long a plumb bob from those exposed tubes (outlines) we determined the original dimensions and some.7071 calculations for the angles to get the latitudes and departures. Some here will understand that .7071 is a mathmatical proportion to that very same triangle. Go look it up if you do not know. So that man and i as a young helper installed many thousands of dollars of new tubing, ordered from a supplier, and everything fit...with the use of a prybar and alighnment tool. Carry on You just explained actual Trigonometry. 0.707 is the Sin and Cosin value for 45 degrees. You were correct in that all Trig is is the mathematical proportions of a triangle. With trig you can just look up the proportions for any angle you choose or happen to know. BUt I agree with the rest of the post as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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