New with smithing (and any kind of hand-craft)

[AnBello]

Hello, everyone on this forum

I'm Andres, from Far Far Away (Argentina, actually). I've always been interested in this kind of work, but it was just a "platonic" kind of interest, until I've finally decided to get started with this, and here I am, getting the parts for my first temporary forge and anvil.

I have never really done any kind of hand work, I'm just good with PCs and electronics, so it'll be quite an ordeal. But I've been reading quite a lot, so I hope it's not as tough as it seems. I'm gonna be starting with the very basics, just learning to work metal itself (heating it, hammering it, shaping it, heat-treating it), and slowly I will move into knife-making, which is my real target.

I'm quite busy (work all day, University all night, free some weekends), so I will try to read all I can during the week, since I'll only be able to practice on the weekends.

I hope to get some good advice, and eventually be able to give my own, but since I'm just starting I'll be asking a lot of quesions around here, so please bear with me.

[Alan Evans]

Welcome Andres, all skills and crafts require much the same approach, whether electronics or metalwork, you just start and learn make mistakes and learn a lot more!

The main difference being you get blisters in different places. :)

You will find that working soft metal cold with a hammer is not that much different than working harder metals hot, so you can practice with a hammer and a block of steel with aluminium, copper, zinc, tin, or lead on the kitchen table. I used to do work with silver and when I moved on to steel I basically just picked up bigger hammers and and worked the metal while it was still hot, rather than annealing it and waiting for it to cool down. Lots of bits of copper wire in heavy electrical cable with which you can learn the basics of bending, spreading, tapering...

If you can find someone local to watch/help learn from or with it will be the quickest way to get going.

Good luck with it. Sadly it is quite addictive.

 

Alan

[Frosty]

Welcome aboard Andres, glad to have you.

I'm running into more and more young folk who don't have any hand skills to speak of so don't feel alone. Alan's suggestion to start with a soft metal like copper or aluminum is good advice though I advise you NOT to use lead. Sure it's soft but it's not very healthy to handle much.

For starts you need to learn basic hammer control on a reflex level, "muscle memory." I discovered having students start with making nails worked pretty well. They're small and easy to handle letting you use a smaller hammer so it's easier to control. A  nail involved drawing a nice even taper and leaving enough untapered to upset into the nail head. This works nicely using heavy copper wire and with a little innovation the header can be as simple as a pair of vise grips ground smooth or with a little slip on jaws. A header is also pretty easy to make for soft work like nails.

For tools you can get by with a small ball pein hammer or any smooth faced hammer. Your anvil can be a sledge hammer head, forging copper wire one weighing 4-5lbs. or 2kg. is plenty heavy. A pair of wire cutters and vise grips. If you use vise grips for a header file or grind the teeth off and using a triangular file cut matching grooves in the jaws. This is to hold the nail shaft so visualize the nail laying in the jaws as you file.

If you want to make a nail header you'll get to learn to punch and drift a hole. Only slightly more advanced than basic drawing and upsetting. You'll need to find a piece of steel say 3-4 mm. thick and wide enough to lay across the eye of your sledge hammer head anvil. Next you'll need to draw a steel nail into a longish taper the same size as the copper nails you'll be making. Once it's drawn to a taper it's a punch, heat one end of the strip of steel in a BBQ, camp fire, etc. till it's red or better yet orange hot. Don't worry you won't need a bellows, blower or even someone blowing in a pipe, bright red or orange is well within a charcoal BBQ fire's range.

When it's hot take it out, lay it across the eye of your anvil and drive your punch right through it with your hammer. Placement is pretty important, you want the header hole centered so it's evenly supported by the hammer eye. Go FAST or it will cool off, you need to do this while the steel is HOT. If it cools below red before you get your punch through, don't worry you can heat it again.

Once you have the header punched it will be deformed into a dome shape on the other side centered on where the punch went through. This is a GOOD thing. If you have a file clean the burr on the dome side, you'll see how the steel curled as the punch came through from the other side, just file the burr off it doesn't need to be perfect or pretty. Are you having fun yet? Now the last thing to do to finish your nail header is to heat it up again and lay it over the hammer eye dome up and drive the punch in just a LITTLE. You want the hole to be slightly hour glass shaped inside. The taper from the top (domed side) matches the taper of your nail's shaft so it's stopped in the hole. The long taper from the under side keeps it from jamming so tightly it won't come out.

to make a nail you draw an even taper on the end of a piece of thick wire, here 10g. is easily available so that's what we use, you'll make your header to match whatever thick wire is available to you. So, draw the taper to a long point. Test it by inserting it into the header and adjust it till it fits well and stops about where the wire is full width. Close is good enough. Cut the wire just above the header, about 1.5 times as long as the wire is wide. Close is good enough too long and it'll bend over into a decorative picture hanger.

Once it's cut lay the header with the soon to be nail over your anvil's eye and use the hammer to flatten the wire into a nail head.

Believe me with just a little practice you'll be able to make a header and a hand full of nails faster than I wrote this long winded post.

Have fun is probably the only non safety related rule I know.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Charles R. Stevens]

You have started out on the right foot, welcome to the mad house! It isnt as hard as it looks, but it dose take practice to master the skills involved (and their are  many) but honestly not any one of them is particulary dificult to master with practice. 

[Alan Evans]

Good advice to avoid the lead Frosty.

I guess the overriding advantage of not learning your craft from a series of précis-ed internet posts is that there is often more unsaid than said.

The obvious hazard of lead I equated with the hazard of hot metal, neither is particularly finger or skin friendly. So PPE gloves and or pliers / tongs to hold it is advisable with either. Good practice for avoiding burns from hot metal?

Whilst copper wire will be the best and most readily acquired, lead does have the advantage of annealing at room temperature so does not require periodic heating.

Personally I sometimes react to copper and aluminium on my fingers, doesn't stop me working with it but I touch it directly as little as possible and try to avoid the grinding and filing dust.

Alan

[Frosty]

True about lead and it's not as hazardous as popular hype would have us believe. Still, there are healthier things to practice basic eye hand skills with. I don't know how good it would be to reinforce basic safe materials handling though. There's a lot stronger incentive to remember not to just GRAB things once you've raised blisters on your hand. Unfortunately toxicity that isn't pretty acute don't so a person isn't as likely to avoid exposure. I think by now everybody knows smoking is pretty toxic. Hmmmm?

My hide tends to react a little to zinc if I handle it too long and sometimes to aluminum. I'm good with copper, brass and bronze so far though.

Here's a characteristic to recommend copper alloys as a basic skill builder. One practice I find it takes time to get through student's heads is to MOVE it. Don't pull the steel from the fire and think about what to do. Don't tappy tap it. And know when to stop. Copper alloys can be forged a LONG way with the first blow, almost as far with the second and pretty far with the third but they work harden quickly to the failure point after the third pass.

This is especially true of the old school brass alloys. We could spin a brass sphere 1/2 tight to the die IF we could do it in 3 passes, the 4th and it'd fight the tool and if you got all the way through 5 without it failing you werejust plannishing it. Yeah, learned about working brass in Dad's shop. It works the same way on brazing rods, we used to make little tools for the hand build girls in the rubber plant. They needed to be able to sculpt the silicone rubber to make seals and needed little blades, spatulas, gouge shapes, etc. made from brass. I could cold forge a piece of 0.125" brazing rod almost foil thin with one serious smack with a 3lb. sledge on a polished block. Try taking it easy and it'd crumble like a green stick around blow 5 almost every time.

Copper wire doesn't work harden as suddenly nor catastrophically as brass but it does work harden with all the cues. You can feel it through the hammer and  your holding hand and hear it. This is good training. Besides 10g. copper anneals just fine on one burning charcoal briquette and you can either go right to work on it or quench it in water.

Oh, did I mention I like copper for basic skills building? As heck I LIKE forging it myself, I have a couple bars, 5/8" rd. & 3/4"rd. I play with once in a while. Those you have to anneal pretty often or REALLY HIT them. <grin>

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[AnBello]

Well, wasn't expecting to have so many replies in so little time. Thanks for the warm welcome!

Where I live I haven't been able to get in touch with anyone in this branch of work, but I'm still trying. It doesn't seem to be very common here. And it's also very hard to buy "known" steel, at least for someone unfamiliar with the market.

Frosty, thanks for the advice. I'll try to do what you explained. I think I can even do that in my spare time in-week, and build my skills with that. I'll see what soft metal I can get my hands on. Probably copper, or maybe aluminum. Once I feel a bit comfortable with the hammer I'll move to hot metals.

 

Luckily, I have come across several elements that will be of use for when I start working with steel (apart from a whole set of PPE I got from work).

So far I have a piece of about 60cm (2ft, sorry, I'm only familiar with metric system) of railroad track that I plan to use as an anvil. I also have a nice gas burner that came from a mud oven (it looks like this), and a good hammer (though it's a bit small). I still have to build a forge, though.

And I also have a whole abandoned truck in my backyard to scrap from, so I can get quite a big assortment of steel to start with.

 

Thanks everyone, and I will be asking questions around the forum from now on.

[Frosty]

 

Don't worry about converting to or from metric, the internet has conversion software a click of the mouse away. We have it handled. That isn't "scrap" in your back yard, that's a stock yard full of useful steel and you don't have to go looking for it.

The rail will make a fine anvil, many of us started with a rail anvil. I don't know about the burner though it looks more like it develops a lot ob BTUs rather than high temperatures. Don't worry about it, it's easy to make a burner or so I've heard.

Don't forget to send pictures, we LOVE pictures.

Frosty The Lucky.

[AnBello]

About the burner, yes, I believe it is prepared in that way, given its design objective. I guess it will work for heating metal, but will consume a lot more gas than a better burner would, right? I think I'll have to test it. And if it isn't useful, at least it can make quite a good mud oven for a nice big "bbq".

I'll ask in more detail in the "Gas Forges" section, I hope I can get more info on that, then.

[Frosty]

I believe the burner is more like our "weed burners" they make a LOT of flame that isn't terribly hot, it only has to burn weeds. Drying mud is probable the same way, LOTS of hot air but not real hot.

There are a lot of burner designs in the gas burner section. What a forge burner does is mix just the right amount of fuel and air together to make a close to neutral flame. It uses all the fuel to consume all oxy in the air. There isn't a large volume of extra air being drawn in the way the mud burner looks to do.

Forge burners typically bring the furnace chambers to high yellow heats, in the 2,600f+ range. They don't put out a large volume of flame but what volume they do produce is really HOT.

There are plenty of good burner designs, once you decide on one let me know I'll give you a hand if you need.

Frosty The Lucky.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Frosty

[Charles R. Stevens]

So you have an anvil that can be used in multiple ways (verticaly for heavy and general forging, and horizontal to flaten longer items to start) how heavy is the hammer? 600-800g is a good place to start, most don't use much over 1kg regularly. Forges arnt hard to build, coal, charcoal and propain being the major choices, charcoal and coal being the least expensive to build. (You have an abandoned car you have most everything you need to build a coal or charcoal forge). My advice is to not build a brake drum forge, look at the simple 55 and side blast 55 forges thet Glenn posted in blueprints. Gas is good but you have to sorce hightemp insulation, and for solid fuel adobe is sufficent. Do a bit more asking around, blacksmitthing isn't dead in your part of the world, some parts of south america the vilage blacksmith is verymuch alive and well, in others its just a generation or two ( up untile the first 1/3 of the twentieth century in the US) so ask the local welding shop, and old automotive shop, some ones grand father or greatgrandfather is or was a smith, and his tools may be colecting dust in the back of the shop. Another person to ask is the local ferrior/horseshoer, many still make their own shoes and tools. Keep reading and asking questions, but move forward, mount your "anvil", build your first "forge" heat metal and hit it with your hammer. As to steel, steel wasnt always the consistant quality stuff we are used to (and rebar and A36 structural steel isnt either) sk testing each sample of steel to see what it is good for and how to treat it is all part of the blacksmithing art.

 

[AnBello]

Right now I'm cheking a lot of posts in the "Gas Forge" section. I'm looking for a viable design that I can make for now. I'm not sure what would be best for me yet, but I'm checking different designs and what their making prices&time would be. Once I decide on the forge, I'll look into the burner.

I chose gas because here real coal is hard to get by, we only have charcoal. And charcoal is quite expensive, because it is of very high demand because of our "asado" (local kind of BBQ). Gas, on the other hand, is a lot cheaper, especially with 10kg propane bottles that are government subsidized, and therefore quite cheap. Also, it seems to be quite cleaner, right?

I hadn't thought I could use my "anvil" vertically. That's opens up a lot of possibilities. Thank you!

I will try to ask if someone knows somebody who is or used to be a blacksmith. I'll get in touch with any related shop I can think of. Maybe even asking local forge material suppliers could help. Thanks for the tip.

 

 

PS: Just to clarify: This "mud oven" is not intended to cook mud. It's intended to cook food inside of an oven that is made from mud (nowadays, mud+refractory powders mixed), like this one or this modern one. It is usually heated by charcoal and wood, but some people prefer to use gas. Once it's hot you turn it off/remove the leftover coal (paper should catch fire as soon as it enters, with the burners off), and then add the meat to be cooked with the leftover heat. In the second one you can actually see a burner similar to mine. I will probably use my burner to build one of these, if I can't use it for metal working.

Edited June 3, 2015 by Andres Bello

[Charles R. Stevens]

The clasic horno. Lol. 

Check out the anvil section for ideals for mounting and using a rail anvil, carving a london patern anvil out of one is a PITA. 

Look up the "T" burner, never know Jerry might even help you sort one out his self. Do you have a potery supply or a foundry suplply to sorce refractory? Soft fire brick is probbably the easyest for your first forge, this is an insulating refractory about the consistancy of styrofome, easy to carve with a bread knife, a 1" pipe burner, and a 12" ouside diamiter forge 9" deap woks prety dang well for about anything you want to take on. With brick you can carve it so it fits to gether like an arch 

[Frosty]

How variable do you want your forge? I assume you mean the shape/size, yes?

A great place to start is a brick pile forge. It's just a fire brick table top and enough fire bricks to make a chamber the right shape and size for what you need. The volume of the chamber will determine what size or how many burners it will need.

Frosty The Lucky.