IForgeIron has always been about LEARNING, about sharing the artistry, inspiration, and techniques of this noble craft. What lessons did the iron teach you today? What do you know now that you didn't when you stepped into the forge? What did you learn about the material, the craft, even about yourself? No matter how earth-shattering or mundane, this is the place to note the waymarks on your journey to mastery.

I had a particularly good session last night, so I'll kick this off with:

• I learned how to make a penny scroll (with thanks to @Lou L for passing along the technique that he'd just learned).
• I learned that sealing off the leaks between the blower and the tuyere means that you really need to turn the air down.
• I learned that when your fire is way too high, it's good that your workpiece that got burned up was only rebar.
• I learned that clinker sticks to sand-and-clay adobe a whole lot less than it does to straight clay.
• I learned that rubbing a piece of brass rod over a forged leaf at black heat gives a lovely golden highlight to the raised parts of the design (more subtle than what you get with a brass brush).
• I learned that you really can straighten a blade right after hardening.

What did you learn?

There is 1 more way than previously thought to cut a 45° angle  wrong on angle iron.

I learned (after 35 years next Monday) that when SWMBO comes into the shop and says "I've been thinking....", I stop whatever I'm doing as quickly as I can, take out the earplugs and focus on her. I'm not in trouble-- just another project to put on the front burner.

Steve

Happy wife, happy life! Lol

 

Yep when you ask "what do you think" you had better listen.

 

Happy wife, happy life! Lol

 Or we can be gender-neutral and say, "Happy spouse, happy house!"

Some one always takes the role of being the relationship anchor, lol. 

 

Uh, lets see I learned this fine autumn day that I did something to my left heal Saturday and it's swollen and painful. Still I needed to go get the walk behind brush hog to clear the sticks and such that might scratch the new RV. And I wasn't going to get much if anything done in the shop. 

So, the lesson being, wear better shoes if I'm going to be on my feel all day. And if the YF asks your opinion, pay close attention she's about to tell you what it is.

Frosty The Lucky.

I learnt that it's not easy to forge a treble-clef wall hook from 8mm round bar freehand. The time I wasted would have been better spent creating a jig to achieve accurate scrolls, loops and bends.

I learned that galvanized Chinese lag screws are pure junk. While mounting the new post vise, I drilled the pilot holes a little too small and the screws were too tight going in. While backing them out to drill a larger hole they twisted off...grrrr had to relocate the bottom support.

Between trying to resuscitate old equipment and having a bit more ooomph in the arms from smithing I find that I have had to learn methods of dealing with twisted off fittings. One thing is I have a large nasty set of real visegrips, (roadkill) that I can chisel around a lag and install.  I usually heat the lag with a propane torch to make the hole a bit easier to give way too.

(on the bit more ooomph: after my shoulder surgery, bone spur not rotor cuff, I was in PT, about to finish it off, and my PT person asked me if I was happy with my arm and I told here that it was still weaker than it had been. So she braced herself, (and she outweighed me by a goodly bit) and told me to push against her with my "bad" arm---as I was pushing her across the floor her eyes were getting wide and she said: "WEAK????"  and I told her it had been much stronger....)

I learned that you can only heat glass so many times and it gets hard to keep the nice shiny smooth surface when you bring it to slumping temps.

Something I'd like to learn is the structural? compositional? molecular? property? differences between metals, ceramics and glass. They seem to have similarities.

@Latticino knows a lot about that stuff.

Actually I'm a mechanical engineer, not a material scientist. Know a little about glass though.  The phenomena you are describing is a combination of two potential effects of heating glass, depending on the temperature reached. If by heating you mean bringing the glass to liquifing  temperatures,  then each time you do you burn off flux and degrade the glass quality. Eventually the so called "chords" form in the material thick enough to make observable surface defects. On the other hand, if you mean bringing the glass to fusing temperature, (which I believe is more likely ) then the effect you are describing is likely devitrification.  This latter is the result of keeping the glass at a fusing temperature too long. It appears as a sort of surface hazing. Ideally you need to either keep your glass as a liquid  (for a limited time ) or down below fusing at the annealing temperature. 

A parallel type of function in high carbon steel for the first would be overly long heating it and burning the steel. For the latter I guess surface decarb...?

Differences?  Glass can be more a state than a material.  Metal glasses have some wild properties. A friend of mine even has a patent on making pattern welded material by using metal glass between the layers. Extremely high mobility of the atoms due to not being locked in a crystalline matrix allows solid state welding at quite low temps.

My friends Father did quite a lot of research on making metal glasses, something about cooling rates of  millions of degree C per second...(sort of the opposite of the Widmanstatten  process where things were cooling at a million years per deg C...)

I learned how to pull my finger out of joint undoing a vice!!!!!!

Fortunately I've not worn a wedding ring for some years, just as well as I now have an extrememly swollen and bruised finger.....I'll not be swnging a hammer for some time to come!

Ouch

Don't embarrass yourself around other smiths telling them *that* story---just say you were picking your nose and sneezed!

I have a large vise where the  handle had been dropped so many times it had forged a sharp protruding ring around the hole it traveled in.  Only took one incident before I took time out and filed the ring  down flat...

Are you able to apply some alcohol to the finger internally?

Smoggy, during your down time, teach your off hand how to use a hammer (grin)

Time has passed since the incident, it is now at the throbbing stage and getting more painfull with every pulse beat. Only two doses of painkillers left for today so yes TP I will be inserting some of my medicinal loch water before bedtime. Glenn, maybe in a day or so, at the moment I'm avoiding raising either blood pressure or pulse rate.

Holding it up too?  I crushed the end of a finger and waited till the morning to see the Dr once.  Holding it up helped with the pulse throbbing. (but it was a long night!)

This reminds me of something I learned after my throat surgery two years ago: I'm allergic to Percocet and Vicodin. 

Tried that TP, don't seem to make much difference, and then it's worse when I do have to lower it. As far as I know I'm not allergic to anythng other than garlic. I have prescription painkillers for my fibromyalgia anyway and I think have some ibruprofen somewhere I can take to relieve the swelling. Watching another thread for a news of an imminent arrival reminded me how good gas and air is and how reletively insignificant my discomfort is likely to be compared to others!

Thanks for the interesting info Latticino.

For more detail, we fused the glass at max temp of 1480F. But we were sandwiching small pieces between two 1/8" plates and ended up with (the inevitable) air bubbles in between. So in my brilliance, I thought what do you do with air bubbles? Well, pop them of course. So I heated it again to 1500F and pierced some of the bubbles. But it didn't do much - surface cooled enough my "needle" soon wouldn't pierce -  so I heated it again (never letting it cool more than what happened opening the kiln) to 1650F and let the bubbles rise and pop themselves. And standing over the kiln was kinda warm popping them the first go 'round.

Then after annealing and cooling, (it was smooth and shiny at this point) heated it back up to 1225F to slump it over a bowl mold. During that process, parts of the surface of the glass developed striations or more or less parallel cracks/grooves - like if you bent something and instead of the material stretching, it developed a texture of hundreds of very small, shallow cracks along the bend. Weird thing was though, it was the inside of the bend. The outside of the slumping bend came out very smooth and shiny.

Thomas, thank you! You've got my curiosity piqued. Now I need to go research metal glass. I can't imagine cooling rates in the millions of degrees per second.

As I recall they stuff they were using was made by taking a liquid Helium cooled copper disk spinning at very high speeds and just barely touching the surface of their special alloy melt.  It threw a ribbon of metal glass off.