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I Forge Iron

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I'd rather be lucky than good any day. I know that feeling. I work in a parts department of a fairly large car dealership.  I get all the coil springs I could ever need and a good many leaf springs and axles as well.  Nice score for sure.

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Nice score Nub but do you have ANY IDEA how much work using that much will be? I have a few hundred lbs of coil and leaf in the resource heap and don't do much looking anymore. I use coil a LOT more often than the leaf.

That's just me though YMMV. B)

Frosty The Lucky.

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Oh Its gonna be a ton of blades and whatever else I can come up with, I'm running out of storage space with all the springs I already have at home.  Coil has been fun/easy enough to work with, learned not to work it too cold pretty dang quick...stupid stress cracks.  I've got 1 full leaf pack at home plus about 6 other coils so I think i'm probably set for quite some time.  Figure though, I'll take it when and where I can get it especially when its being delivered to me for free.  As a newbie black/bladesmith I have way more metal than I know what to do with but it's been helping me learn quite a bit.  Working leaf spring, has proven much more difficult than that of working down a coil.  I'm just excited to be able to have more spring steel to work on making more blades and figuring out technique while I'm at it.

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My mechanic offered me a HUGE leaf spring pack a couple of months ago, which I had to turn down at the time. Of course, I just thought today of a project they would have been perfect for....

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I love being the young Jedi on these forums. Re-Label your materials and the force will come to you!  Though lately i've really only been attempting blades, learning the basics of drawing out, widening stock still giving me trouble but getting better.  I plan on using the springs for refining my blade smithing abilities till I can start to potentially make a few side bucks.  I really enjoy watching a coil spring go from its coil state and transform into a weapon/tool.  Eventually I would LOVE to be able to forge some ancient japanese straight sword patterns as well as mid-late European style blades.

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It's not hard to get yourself buried under such things.  I try to have a couple of pieces to hand but let my Mechanic and the local scrapyard store commonly available stock for me.  Living in a rural area I was able to lay down old galvanized roofing and store my scrap on it and only need to pitchfork the tumbleweeds off it once or twice a year...When I lived in the city I had to keep my scrap pile indoors to keep code off my back...

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Yeah I have no where near that kind of versatility in storage, heavy duty garbage can for all the bits and pieces and a 40 gallon water storage drum for the bigger stuff and they are both full coils sitting in front of them and three leaf packs sitting in front of those next to my forge, forced to just start reducing all the coil into workable size cuts to make better use of space, but just got some roof racks with hand cranks to be able to make more room exciting stuff figuring out how to forge successfully with a small space

 

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I like to have one that has been cut down a diameter to make a bunch of ) pieces for folks learning bladesmithing---it gives them a lot of pieces of the same alloy to work with and learn it. (and they don't get as upset when you tell them "Now break it and see how you did".)

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That's EXACTLY what my goal is with all the sections of spring I started cutting last night not afraid to ruin the stuff I'm making in fact I've been trying to break everything, can't really get edge geometry down and sharpening I can't quite get shaving sharp, heat treating hasn't been an issue (I don't think) seems my quenched have all been solid so far

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When you work that coiled round stock, straighten out an extra piece or two so you can store it as straight material. Takes up less space that way.

The idea is to process the coiled into usable material. So do not use the straightened material until you have run out of coils. Different could may have different alloys. You may want to use tie wire and keep the straight material from an individual coil all together. That way you know all the material will act the same when forging.

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