That is what I thought. Trial and error. I think I will try Frosty’s suggestion and I pray it works. What I had been planning to try was roughly what Thomas said.  I was really not wanting to have to go that route. I am dreading the HT step as it is. Being a noob, I fully expect the faces to crack or pop off in the quench. 

The scribe trick is to let you know when you've ground enough off. Doing it on the hardened face will require the scribe be hardened so use a hardened one. The scribe in my machinist's square works a treat.

I was thinking you wanted to know how deep decarb was after welding. My bad, your question was obvious. I'm blaming the tree!

Frosty The Lucky.

No, you were right. A mild steel scribe worked great. It scratched the decarb areas , but wouldn’t after I got down to smooth steel. Maybe a 1/16 of an inch down. Thanks for the tip. 

Well the one which was a bit heavy is no longer a problem. It has walked away. If I were my dad, I would say one of the grandkids was playing with it and lost it. Not being my dad, I am sure it was just me that lost it. 
 

The face would not stick on the smaller one. I will give it another go in a few days. 

I finally found a video of someone doing a jelly roll which was not a type of pattern welded steel. He makes a WI hammer. 
 

 

If I had had it to begin with, I probably would have gone with this piece. Some sort of hinge piece. Instead of forge welding several pieces of round stock to make the body, this alone would have been enough. 

Great vid. I can't help but do a little picky critique.

1) I would have squared up the skinny end before starting the roll.

2) I would have scarfed the other end when I was close to finishing the roll. He had a bit of problem making that last weld and this would have solved that problem.

There's three good reasons for making a hammer this way. The first is if you need a hammer and all ya got Is flat stock that is wrought iron.  The second is bragging rights when you are done. The third is gaining experience on hammer control and forgwelding. There's no real structural benefits

I agree about the scarfing. I think he probably would have been better off just using the ball peen hammer instead of the large sledgehammer. Without a striker he was only able to get in 4 or 5 good hits before reheating because he couldn’t keep it on the anvil. 

Your comment about flat bar makes me wonder if that is why blacksmiths chose to make hammers using this technique.  Wagon wheel tyres would have been plentiful.

He has a few other good videos as well. 

I have read that they thought it did have a structural plus at the time, for one thing the  ferrous silicate spicules were aligned 90 deg to the impact direction and so it was less like to split along them or the old weld lines making up the original merchant  bar. 

Also they would have never used that low of a grade of wrought iron to make a tool for themselves.  They knew the grades and had access to them. We don't have such access and tend to like the etched patterns you get with the coarser stuff.

90 degrees. Would that be oriented to the sides of the hammer or toward the faces?  The answer is likely obvious, but geometry and trigonometry were not my best subjects. 
 

Some of my tongs are WI. The one I performed destructive testing on was horrible to forge. Forging it square and then back to round was possible, but even at a welding heat it wanted to split when taken down thinner than 3/8”.  Most of the pieces of round and flat bar I have seem to be fairly good. The round bar seems better than the flat. 
 

I haven’t tried that large piece of hinge yet, but expect it to be a little worse than most of what I have. On the cut end, I can see the inclusions with just my eyes. 

Wrought iron is quite anisotropic; it behaves differently along the direction it was rolled vs at right angles to the direction it was rolled.  As it is layered up with the axis along the rolling direction this helps contribute as well. (This is also why Byers used to sell "bi-directionally rolled plate" to try to mitigate this somewhat.  I have some; when broken it has a "platey" break rather than a "green stick" break.)

Think of WI as being like wood: take a log you want to split up.  Do you put your wedge on the end grain or on the side of the log to split it?  Much similar with WI.

Jellyroll is basically forming  a mass so the there is no "end grain" to split under repeated impacts.

Just stumbled onto this thread.. 

Dharris,  great start.. Can't wait to see it finished..  I would have folded the tab you had for handling back into it and welded it into the block.. 

I will often upset the welded block looking for splits.. If the welds are good it just upsets and since its wrought iron it moves pretty well..  If I do get a delam, I will continue to upset it a little more and then take a welding heat..  The upset will give me the extra material to weld back in so it will be a strong weld and if done well, will be welded by the time I get to the correct size wanted. 


jelly roll is really tough to get the center to weld well..  What I do is use a section of 3/4" round and weld it 90 to the flat bar..  I then will lock the bar in the vise and pull the wrought iron around it as I weld it up..  this way i get the center as tight as possible and the weld happens as I move it along.   This type of job is best with 2 people.. 

The nice thing about jelly roll is the fact that you can do it fairly quickly once a person get the hang of it..  Ideally it's welded as it's rolled up..  

I still prefer to have the wrought iron with the end grain at either end of the hammer vs in the middle., but have never done experiments to see which is really best. 

I feel one of the best and nicest things about wrought iron is once it's welded the weld seams disappear and it's literally a solid hunk..   

 

Still trying to get the face to weld. Tomorrow will be the third try. First I will weld some more WI to each side of the WI body. With each try an incredible amount of mass is lost to scale. 
 

The first try was a fail that didn’t surprise me. On the second I was really thinking the weld had taken, but when I started working to get the lump back to square I noticed the face cooled much faster than the body, so I set it on the anvil with the face just sticking out over the edge and gave the face a good whack. Just as I expected, it popped off. 

I wonder how many times the spring steel can be taken to a welding heat before it loses so much carbon it can no longer be hardened?

that is a great question..  I'd say at least 50 times. Think Damascus .      With how thick you started out you will have plenty of metal thickness.

The key is not to burn it.. Burning it will do more damage then 100 welding attempts I think and the problem is one might not even notice till they go for heat treatment or get to the grinding stage.. 

Good to know. 
 

I think perhaps I have been too worried about burning it. Maybe just a fraction longer in the fire. It isn’t as if I have a lot of money in the steel or a shortage of it. 
 

And I found the hammer body I had lost. I need to apologize to the grandson. I had lost it, just as my dad had lost his instead of me and my brothers. 

it was in the conference room at work. We don’t go in there much these days and it didn’t occur to me to check there. 

Is that a hand forged, carbon faced thumb drive?

Hold out your thumb. 

Frosty The Lucky.

And that is why we are not allowed to take photos at work. I checked around to make certain there was no PHI in the frame, but missed the thumb drive. Those are forbidden.  I am not sure who it belongs to. 

I love the fact you took your hammer to work with you..   That shows dedication..   I often toted a piece I was working on around with me to stare at and think about the process..   

I thought I was weird for bringing incomplete projects to ponder on with me. Looks like that's not what making me weird

Pnut

Nope that may enhance your weirdness a little but it's not the cause. 

Frosty The Lucky.

The faces seem to be pretty well bonded. I fullered the ends today just to see if they would pop off. They held. 
 

Tomorrow I have to forge a hammer eye drift and punch. (Meaning I have to watch JLP’s video again so I can copy hers.)

 

It is looking rather primitive. 

Cant wait to see it when your done! 

How do I fix this?  If I turn it over the middle portion rests almost on the anvil. 

Don't worry about it now.  It will get deformed further when you punch the eye anyway.  Use your crosspeen on the cheeks with the mandrel in place to fuller out the eye further.

Next time I recommend punching the eye before fullering