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Hardie adaptation reality check


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Not to long ago i picked up an 'auto body half-football dolly with grip' from a harbor freight parking lot sale ($4.99!)

 

i bought it with the intent to use it as a bottom fuller/psuedo horn becaues the horn on my little ASO is pretty flat on top, like a round edged triangle.  trouble is the blasted grip is far too large to fit the 1" hardie :(

 

ideally i would like to reforge (handled top fuller over the horn and a striker)  the shank to bring it down to about 1" square, or at least close enough to where a massage from the belt grinder will finish it up without wasting too much material.  i cant forge the entire shank (around 5" long) to be 1" because the increase in length will bottom it out against the foot of the anvil beneath the heel.  that being the case id like to only forge the top end of the grip until i get about 2-3" of 1" square and the remainder of the grip still at the full size beyond that.  at that point i would cut the 1" square part in half, leaving me with the football on about 1.5" of 1" square shank, and the remainder of the grip also on about 1.5" of 1" square shank.  then it becomes a matter of deciding what kind of tool i want to make out of the grip remainder, be it a hot cut or who knows what.

 

i could also forge the football flat on top, basically turning it into a hardie anvil block, which will give me a more solid surface to work on, and probably a more reliable set of edges as well.  the grip remainder could be bent over and forged into a hardie bick too.

 

has anyone worked with one of these, or similar products from HF? do they have a propensity towards using particular steels for particular tools?  i should have sparked tested it the last time i was at the belt grinder but i didnt think about it.  hardening questions will wait until i have something more than a W.A.G. as to the composition, but they are still there :ph34r:

 

or am i just being stupid and should shape the shank on the belt grinder, cut it off on the band saw, keep the football as is, and maybe take a shot at reforging the grip remainder?

 

to make matters more irritating, this is aparently a discontinued item that they were clearing out in the parking lot sale, so i cant buy more as a hedge against failure, or a platform for lessons learned, or to repeat if successful :angry:

 

i appreciate any input you may have!

 

this is it

its about 5.5 pounds of who-knows-exactly-what, black paint on the underside which will need to be stripped.  the other side of the grip has FORGED stamped into it, and theres a very pronounced shear/grind/saw looking seam line running the length of the whole thing.

post-26562-0-36781000-1364413438_thumb.j

 

minor edits for clarity and skipped words.

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I don't know if I'd trust the stamp saying it's forged, the surface looks an awful lot like a casting but I'm way far away.

 

If it is forged just forge the shank to fit your hardy, THEN trim it to length. You could use it in a vise as is or make a holder or a block.

 

Nice shape and at $4.99 it's a LOT more attractive than forging one yourself/myself.

 

Frosty The Lucky.

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Thanks for the reply Frosty,

 

heres a shot of the edge/seam i mentioned and of the 'forged' stamp, i dunno if its more indicative of it being drop forged and then trimmed, or sloppily cast and then trimmed.  the 'stamp' does actually kind of look cast in....  ill run it past the instructors at Adam's Forge and see what some more experienced eyes can see.  if it turns out to be cast and i try to forge it thats probably going to be a disaster of some sort right?

 

id rather not forge out the entire shank to the correct size and trim, if i just forge part and cut that i am left with an already shouldered hardy tool blank on the other piece, or at least thats how it works in my mind....

 

post-26562-0-09498900-1364426194_thumb.j

 

post-26562-0-10828800-1364426205_thumb.j

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Greetings,

 

Take a close look and it looks like a casting seam...  I feel if you try to reforge this it will crumble...   Tap the head with a ball pien and if it sinks and pock marks it is probably cast....   You can also spark test the stem...  You don't get  much for 5 bucks.... 

 

Good luck    Jim

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@Glenn:

some misguided notion of trying to conserve whatever mass i could on it, and be able to recycle the cut off handle as a secondary tool without a lot of waste.  if i just grind to fit as it ill still have to cut off a good inch and a half or so of the end to keep it from bottoming out on the anvil foot.

 

plus if its forgeable then i can reshape the top to taste.  but if it isnt then ill just have to eat it and grind away, maybe grind the leftover end to be some other shape, though shorter.

 

@Jim:

ill thump it with my ball pein when i get home, wasnt expecting too terribly much from HF, but at 4.99 its worth the learning experience.

 

Thanks both of you.

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It's a drop forging. That seam /parting line is where the dies came together in the drop hammer and the small lines running perpendicular to it and the shank of the tool are tell tale signs of the shearing action from removing the flash in the stripping die.

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thanks doc, its still got the lip on the tail end of the shank where they didnt trim it and it looks pretty uniform.

 

i just took my ball pein to it and with moderate strikes (didnt want to really whack it hard) the dolly really didnt care.  it left a little circular mark but no meaningful dents

 

i figured sparks are sparks as well so i used a little grinding wheel in my crafstman rotary tool (15,000RPM on the edge of a 3/4" diameter wheel, if that changes anything) and sparked the dolly, a chisel forged from sucker rod, and a length of mild steel bar stock from lowes.  the dolly spark travels and explodes into a little 5-8 streak starburst, much like i have seen higher carbon steels spark.  the sucker rod chisel spark looks very similar to the dolly, same starburst, roughly the same magnitude.  the mild steel spark had very little secondary splitting, if at all.

 

so if thats exemplary of anything, theres more carbon than mild, or something else in the alloy that mimics carbon sparks.  didnt have enough hands to take pics, and apparently spark testing is a touchy subject around these parts to start with, so no loss :)

 

i was thinking if it ends up still being too difficult to judge with any amount of certainty beforehand i could cut off a bit of the shank tip on the band saw and just see if i can forge it before i commit to forging the entire thing.

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When you think about forging it flat on top and using it for more top surface for working on....keep in mind that tools in the hardy hole are not over the sweet spot on and anvil,,look at anvil from the side and you will see where the greatestes support is under wot part of the face.....If you are not doing any heavy forging pay no attention to wot I just said!

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thank you for your words of caution Rich

 

its a 55lb ASO, and i will likely be fielding a single brick forge, or at the most a 4-6 brick enclosure forge fueled by a propane plumbing torch.  'serious business' is going to be 1/2" stock, if that.  if i do end up needing to work on something heavier that needs to be done at home i plan to make the shank fit in all directions so i can rotate the longer end to lap over on top of the main body of the anvil.  the hardy is laid out so the waist side edge is only about 3/4" offset from the waist of the anvil, so there will be overlap onto the side of the sweet spot, nothing to write home about, but present.

 

edited to add pic:

post-26562-0-05179600-1364484082_thumb.j

 

glad you called that to my attention rich, its a little less overlap than my minds eye was giving it credit for, but still there is some.  and this is going to be a pretty light duty setup.

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Francis, that certainly would be easier to neck down a piece of pipe to fit the hardie than the solid shank, id rather have the flat of the football be able to rest on the face of the anvil though, better supported that way.

 

Neg, i cant field a proper post vice yet (dont have one, and no place to mount it!) so best i have in the vice dept is a little 13lb machinists bench vice.  i have used it in that vice before, but i want to get some more mass beneath it.  and i have definitely been waffling on if i want to keep the top as is, try to forge half of it down to flat (dunno how good an idea that is, but the resulting hybrid would be superbly useful), and forging the entire top flat.  i might be able to swing by the larger harbor freight south of me this weekend, maybe they have one squirreled away in the back =/

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could, itd be way too low though, stump is on its way to the can though as soon as i can find some good scrap lumber to make a built up stand with, might be amusing to get a 4x4 and stand it vertically with just that little dolly on top :)

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  • 1 month later...

so i decided to go with the angle grinder route, spent a couple of afternoons with a 36 grit flap disk and flattened up the sides. left it a high for now to see how that works out, if it seems like its starting to damage the hardie hole ill drop it down to the face.

 

on a somewhat related note, i think it was only a day or two after Neg recommended using it as is in a vice that i actually found a vice and bought it :) but that topic's over in the vice aisle.

 

post-26562-0-36030300-1367803354_thumb.j

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  • 4 months later...

so I eventually worked it over on the belt grinder at the school and got the shank down to 1" square for the entire length.  it sits flat on the face of that little anvil and in the anvils at the school that have 1" hardies.  it also works GREAT as a large/variable radius bottom fuller, it can be a little tricky to work off the sides of it (as opposed to the center) but that's mostly a practice issue with my swing.  I have used it several times and it has taken the beating like a champion so probably one of the best 5$ iv spent :)

 

well worth the buy if you see a pile of them in a Harbor Freight parking lot sale!

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