I believe I will try to make a steel faced WI hammer

[jlpservicesinc]

On the tail of Latticino, 

That looks great and where it is right now is normal for the route. 

I have a tendency to punch the eye before fullering, but this will work out nicely.. Gives you a good perspective with where the material is and where to punch.  

the rounding up of one face can be done once the eye is punched and the drift is in the eye.. Just remember that the eye will increase in size some when done so don't go in as far as you would for final eye size till you are ready to size it. 

Nice job. 

[JHCC]

On 3/6/2021 at 11:06 AM, pnut said:

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

Pnut

There's a bit of a blacksmithing theme on one wall of my office:

[ThomasPowers]

That's a scary picture!

[JHCC]

The guy in the middle does have something of a “psychotic leprechaun” look, but I’ve grown rather fond of it in the decade it’s been on my wall. I gather it was originally a bequest to our art museum (https://amam.oberlin.edu — check out the Yellin gates), but they didn’t want it and it came over to our offices. 

[Donal Harris]

Since the other hammer I was making had its face pop off during forging, I was concerned the welds on this one were just as poor. I didn’t want to go through all the work of punching the eye only to have the faces pop off during fullering. So I filed them down till I could see not even a hint of a weld line and then beat the heck out of them in my spring fullering tool. I was pleasantly surprised when they stayed on.  

[jlpservicesinc]

No jinx.  

This is a case of practice makes perfect and sadly no matter how good a job it seems to be , a face popping  off in quench is possible. 

Or cracking.  

 

I had to learn early on,  its going to happen and should be expected that not everything will be 100%, 100% of the time. 

 

It freed me up to be willing to not letting a failure get me down. And to keep moving. 

 

[Donal Harris]

I was going to make the drift this morning, but while waiting on the fire to get hot I took a look at the areas I had fullered and filed down on the hammer. I am not sure how I missed it the other day, but there was a hole. I shaved down a toothpick and the hole went almost all the way to the other side. I got the angle grinder out and cut down till the weld was solid. The face was totally non welded except for about 3/8” all around. 
 

I tried four times but couldn’t get the weld to take. The other face seems to be welded. Rather than a rounding hammer, I will just replace some of the lost mass with more WI and shoot for a cross peen. 

[jlpservicesinc]

Looking closely at some of the earlier photos shows this delam.. 

Sorry to hear it.. Looked like it was coming out nicely.. 

If It were I, I might try to weld it back together after an acid soak..

[Donal Harris]

I just looked back at the photos as well. It is visible in two of them. 

I burnt and cracked that face pretty badly on the forth try. I was well and truly miffed by then. Normally I am able to keep stupid away, but this time I just let my anger take over.
 

I still have about three feet of that thick spring steel and enough WI to fail at this many, many more times. I also have several rail anchors. I have considered trying using some of that for a face to see if it might be easier to forge weld. 
 

 

[jlpservicesinc]

Good attitude..  Go get em..   

[Donal Harris]

Weighed what was left. It was exactly 1 kg. I hammered out a piece of round bar to weld to one side for additional mass. It was 333 grams at the start. After 6 failed attempts to weld it to the original chunk, it is considerably less than 333 grams. 

Before giving up for the day, I tried wiring them together. Didn’t help. I will try again tomorrow evening. I may take them to work and ask Engineering to tack them together for me. I am hoping it won’t come to that because unless I get every trace of it ground off, it will show when etched. 

[jlpservicesinc]

Wish you were closer.. I'd come by and help out..   will be in TX 2022 for Abana conference.. 

[Donal Harris]

I see that is in Ft. Worth. Are you presenting or attending?

It is about three hours away. I’ve driven down to Ft. Worth just to play golf 10 or 12 times. Three or four times for clinical lab conferences. I think I will try to attend. It isn’t all that far.

I tried wrapping it with wire to hold it together, but it didn’t work. The wire is sort of thin. Probably just a little less than half as thick as baling wire. (Which may or may not be a reference that would be familiar to you.) It melted well before a welding temp was reached. That left me with non welded pieces and melted steel to get off the WI. 
 

Would stainless wire work better?  It shouldn’t fuse with the WI if it melts. 
 

What about trying a cleft weld to add the additional WI to the body?

If these next attempts fail, I will likely set it aside for a while and finish the punches and drifts I will need. Then practice welding some of the random bits of WI I have together. That and make a proper set of hammer tongs.

Getting a large chunk and a smaller piece both at a welding heat at the same time is difficult enough. Doing it AND getting them both in position on the anvil before they have cooled too much is even more so.

[jlpservicesinc]

I will be there demonstrating and teaching.   ABANA has a dedicated Teaching Tent. So classes are offered.. 

There are Classes on the ABANA curriculum which Mark Aspery has been putting together to be more informed.. He's put out a whole bunch of new videos for the CA group on youtube..  If one were to do each class over the 4 days they would need no further training..  Kinda cool really. 

The easiest way to do it is to tack weld it with some electric or gas welded beads.. Leave the bar long enough so it can be used as a handle and then hot cut it once the forge tack weld is solid.  If using a coal forge or coke or charcoal just rotate the bar with the mass of the hammer on the bottom and take a slow heat.  Let the heat come up and rotate it around a few times just before it's at full welding heat, pull the bar out, quick wire brush and throw some flux on it..  Now take the full welding heat and set the weld..  Back in for another full welding heat and cut the bar off after the weld.. Now just blend it in fully.. 

Doing these types of welds by yourself is where one has to become inventive with how to get all the items together to make it happen. 

I rarely do anything in the forge work that is what I would consider 100% ideal..  I'm not automated enough to come up to that 100% level..   (no hammers, or treadle, or hydraulic press) so this means having to be inventive if I'm not willing to arc weld.. 

[JHCC]

DHarris, back in January, you said:

On 1/11/2021 at 11:28 AM, DHarris said:

I finally got around to putting the faces on the first body. I attempted the traditional way, but gave up after a couple of tries and resorted to tacking them on with an arc welder. 

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "the traditional way"? Did you do the thing with chiseling barbs up from each side of the face, to grab into the WI body of the hammer?

[ThomasPowers]

Or he had his two helpers monitor the pieces at different levels in the forge fire and had one hold the body and the other place the face while he set the weld---having only one person in a smithy is NOT traditional!

[Donal Harris]

Yes. Chisel barbs into the face, heat the body, drive it into the spikes, and then take both to a welding heat. EZ PZ. Or so Jennifer and the other pros on YouTube make it appear. 

I had trouble cutting in the barbs, or more specifically, getting them to stand up. When I try it this way in the future, I will first go back and look at the chisel Jennifer used a bit closer. 
 

And that helps, Thomas. Plus if they had had arc welders way back then, they would surely have used them. 

[jlpservicesinc]

There is a way to cut them that they will stand up on their own and the vise jaws do not get in the way..  (I show this in the set hammer build video I think).

You hold it on the corner vs on the flat/square..  This lets you cut 2 sides at 1 time (corner is sticking up) and when you do the other 2 the corner locked in the vise will keep the barbs all ready put in from being damaged. 

there are a lot of people out there flat welding the face on..  I find this to be the most difficult way, yet that is what they do with good results.. 

In one of the books they say to start with a smaller piece OD than the wrought iron blocks OD..  I've tried this and not a fan..  I like them to both be the same Outside dimension vs outside diameter.. 

Something that also amazes me is when they weld on 1/2" thick steel faces..  In the old days they would use 3/16 or 1/4" for a hand hammer..  I learned the hard way that the tool steel needs to be thin enough not to pull the steel away from the wrought iron when hardened.. So, needs to be fairly thin.. 

I did some thicker faces and they would pop at the weld and if they did not pop when hardened several years later while using them they would pop off.. 

there are a bunch of talented people out there now spending a lot of time getting their skill sets down..   Great to see.. 

 

[anvil]

Here's some thoughts.

Thomas, I'd say that the standard for the last 100 years has been single man shops. I consider this the new norm for the traditional smiths of our time. We do evolve with time and are creating the "new norm" for just what is traditional. Refer to my personal definition from a ways back.

Even "back in the day" when the norm was multi people in a shop, I sincerely believe that "just because you could, doesn't mean you should". Meaning ironing a hammer most likely was then, as it is now, a single man job. I can't see any reason to waste labor, no matter how inexpensive it may be a d I'm pretty sure they did the same. Our craft is, generally, made up of pretty frugal folks. 

Here's a suggestion for cutting rags on a flat piece like a hammer face. Use the step of your anvil to back up your blows. Meaning, place the steel on the face and have your hammer blows be directed into the step. No vice needed.

There is a pretty important reason for attaching your steel with rags to the wrought body. Relative to each piece you have a huge  body and a relatively small steel face. You have to be very careful not to overheat it. If they are attached, and are relatively cool, you must be very careful to get both pieces up to forg welding temp at the same time and not burn the steel, which causes cracks at the very least. The steel being where it is heats up far quicker than it takes to get the needed part of the hammer body up to and heated throughout. So, cut the rags hot, then bring the whole wrought hammer body up to a light forge welding heat, next set the relatively cold steel onto the very hot body. The rags grab and then it only takes a few seconds for the heat of the forge and the residual heat of the hammer to bring the steel up to a forge welding heat. This is quick, efficient, and minimizes any over heating of the steel.

Not to cut Jen's thunder, because her vids are great, but I suggest watching Joey's vid of laying on a face to a hammer. He does use rags, and you can't lose by doubling your how to input.

Also, when I talk of "men in a shop", I'm sorta old school and mean this in the generic sense. 

[ThomasPowers]

I consider the "new norm" as predicated on electrification, the invention of electric motors and welders and the "personal" powerhammer and the decline in smithing and finally the Great Depression. Also being in the USA where the "frontier blacksmith shop was under manned and under tooled.  In Europe single person shops were much rarer until the decline took over.  Even the carvings on the stave church at Hylestad of the forging of the sword Gram show the smith at the anvil and a helper plying the bellows.

We also have a weird hangup on "Single Authorship"  which is not traditional in any way. (exp: Medieval/Renaissance swordmaking where a sword may have gone through 4 or 5 different guilds from start to finish.  Even famed renaissance painters tended to do the "fancy part" of a painting and their apprentices to fill in the blank areas.)

It's dangerous to ascribe modern ideas and methods to prior times---I've run into a lot of folks telling people that what they are doing is the same as what was done in Medieval times---except that what they are doing won't work with real wrought iron and coal wasn't used at the period they reference and the anvil they use wasn't "invented" till a thousand years later...

A lot depends on what you consider "traditional": last 100 years, 19th century (which could be broken up into pre and post Bessemer steel), Industrial Revolution, Renaissance, Medieval, "iron age", then City shops, rural shops, frontier shops, etc.  In my experience "traditional" is used more as a club to beat others up with  and defined to suit the users fancy. I remember a smith saying that they did "traditional blacksmithing" and so didn't use modern methods like a  powerhammer; well the first powerhammer I've seen good evidence for was pre-year 1000 and they certainly were not working to that era!

[JHCC]

There's a big difference between tradition and traditionalism!

[anvil]

On 3/30/2021 at 8:58 AM, ThomasPowers said:

Or he had his two helpers monitor the pieces at different levels in the forge fire and had one hold the body and the other place the face while he set the weld---having only one person in a smithy is NOT traditional

I enjoy these debates, Thomas, for whatever reason.  

Your discussion on the " new norm" is more a catagorizing of cause and effect, which is pretty self evident. I generalize it as changes in the cost of labor. We are in agreement. 

However, I made my statement concerning the above. I hope you will appreciate my humor. You in fact have perfectly described a very "traditional" situation. As traditional today as it was during the time of King Tut and beyond. The epitomy of the " government job".  ;). Too many people standing around watching, a few supervisors and one poor sod doing all the work.  Laying a piece of steel onto a hand hammer is a one man job. I made a point for the ones wanting to try this. You can do it by  yourself and even without a post vice,,, nothing more but a hammer, an anvil, and a chisel.

Using your next post above I will contestthe second half used in .y quote: "having only one person in a smithy is NOT traditional". I believe you made it quite clear that during the timeframe you have chosen literally every type of shop existed from one man frontier shops ala Jim Bridger to multiman shops in every major city. And why were there all this variety of shops? I think it's called supply and demand, not tradition.

So let's go thru the rest of your long post for those who are interested in this stuff. Thomas and I are, without a doubt, and stand with two differing conclusions to the same facts.

"Single authorship" a weird hangup? You mean when we identify a major work that we recognize as a Yellen piece, it's weird to recognize it as his? How should we recognize it? Perhaps as a work out of "some"  shop that Yellen actually had very little to do with and instead celebrate far more the other 20 or so who did the actual work? What you miss with your examples is that when a person designs a piece and has a style of his own, he is hired(commissioned) for these very reasons. He then hires, or has apprentices and journeymen who have the skills to emulate his style exactly. This is what the client wants and is paying for. The client is not paying for a piece that some part looks like Joe, others like Fred, and over there is a Mildred flower. That's why we can look at a piece and absolutely recognize it as a Yellen. And that's how we Author it!

"It's dangerous to ascribe modern ideas and methods to prior times",:. " I've run into a lot of folks telling people that what they are doing is the SAME as what was done in Medieval times": " except that what they are doing won't work with real wrought iron and coal wasn't used at the period they reference and the anvil they use wasn't "invented" till a thousand years later..." 

Alas, you must define " Same" to  tie it to "dangerous" . It's only dangerous if, as you tend to do, make the concept of traditional be a subset of historical reenactment. It is not dangerous if you are working within an art history period such  renaissance, baroque, art Nouveau etc. It then becomes a mark of your skill level. Understanding the details and techniques of these art history periods is critical for the one, knowledge of the proper linen and puffiness of your sleeves is critical for the other.

"except that what they are doing won't work with real wrought iron" Please be more specific here. I have not encountered this situation. I have never been warned by those who I've worked with or studied under that any details that were originally done in wrought can't be done in mild steel.

your last paragraph is covered by what I've said above.. 

Again, our differences seem to focused around you defining "traditional" as a subset of historical reenactment and mine focuses around techniques and architectural details that are prevalent in differing art history periods.

Both pathways exist. We chose the one/ones we follow. For me I am fascinated that we, as traditional smiths, actually have so few techniques, and by varying these, the infinite number of incredible details we can create..

 

 

 

[ThomasPowers]

Yes there is an issue with defining "traditional";  does it refer to styles, materials, processes, equipment, methods, a combination of them,...?  A very imprecise term and often defined quite differently between different people.  Would you consider an item "traditional" if it looked exactly like  a historical item but was made with modern industrial methods?

I think the term "traditional" should be tied to the time period it refers to.  So early/late 19th century smithing styles/processes/materials or 18th century American colonial styles using modern materials.  Hand forged using modern materials.  Perhaps" a work done in the style of 16th century Spain"  Most of us do a broad mix of styles, processes, materials.  I know I do; except for special items when I will try to be as accurate as possible.  This generally doesn't pay except in self satisfaction!

Some of the historical forge welded pieces with very thin stock where the welds flow seamlessly are quite difficult to do with mild steel without a lot of dressing of the weld areas.  I know I'd not want to do a lot of Tijou or Negroli type of work using A36!

I still claim that the single smith in a smithy is a rare exception historically around the world; though less rare in the frontier America during a limited time.

[anvil]

"Would you consider an item "traditional" if it looked exactly like a historical item but was made with modern industrial methods?"

Absolutely. The question is, can this be done? Again, it depends on the tooling and techniques used.  You need something to heat it, something to hit it with, something to hit it on, and something to hold it. And the end product must suggest an esthetic that says "forged". This includes finish, forged or filed. I don't know if acorn still produces much of the stamped colonial patterned hardware in the box stores or not. Prolly gone chinese, but you know what I'm talking of. This fails at every step the definition of traditional. Now lets look at the upper end of high tech made architectural details that are available for fabricators from the upper end specialty outlets. these are a fine combination of modern industry and traditional handwork. Scrolls, baskets, pickets, repousse leafwork, dozens of twists etc. And all made for the mass market. This work is the modern replacement for the work done by so many small shops found in every city during our long history. Railings done from the slums to castles. Made to be arc welded into upper end fabbed rails. However, if one were to forge a tenon on each end of one of these pickets, and it could pass for an "anywhen" piece of "traditional hand forged" iron.

I suggest you check out what Tom Joyce is doing now with contemporary industrial forging tools. It blew me away.

However, I would not consider this type of forgework to fit into a "historical" setting. Traditional yes, historical definitely not.

Thus the reason I don't consider how you heat, what material you heat, type of hammer or style of anvil etc to determine "Traditional". To me it defines a point in the historical time continuum. Thus its "historical" and I tend to put "historical" as a  subset of "traditional".

" Some of the historical forge welded pieces with very thin stock where the welds flow seamlessly are quite difficult to do with mild steel without a lot of dressing of the weld areas"

I thought this was what you were thinking of. Here's my take on that. If you had a hundred of these to do today, by the time you hit #20 or so, it would no longer be quite difficult.  By that time, if not long before, you would know the proper temps to do whatever you want, and you would absolutely know the differences between working thin wrought or a36 and there would be no extra cleanup needed. The basic techniques for forging a light piece to a much heavier piece have not changed from day one to today. The temp you work it at has changed, not the techniques needed to do the forge weld

I know this pic isn't as thin as your example, but it's as good as I can do. It would not make any difference as to how thin as long as I understand and am comfortable with the technique of forging this stock thin to thick. No extra cleanup, no burn. 

"single smith in a smithy is a rare exception historically "

Lol, I'd take either side of this debate and enjoy it. The question to me is why? Why did the african smiths, as an example, use two goat bags pumped by a young kid and not evolve a two chambered bellows and work by himself?  I believe that the norm in Africa was the single smith and a young kid pumping duo "kid" skin bellows. Perhaps it's because humans are more than less social critters.

What I see  concerning evolution of our shops across time is now we have evolved to single man shops as the norm at nearly level other than the heavy industrial side of our craft. And these changes are recent within nearly our lifetimes. After a few thousand years of multi man shops, we have evolved and adapted to technological changes that made this not only possible, but a business necessity to be single man shops. I believe the smiths contemporary with Yellen were the last of the multi man shop era. I believe that the smiths of Francis Whitaker's era, an apprentice of Yellen's, were transitional smiths who had to make major changes in technique in order to continue as "traditional" architectural smiths. They had to learn just how to do such simple tasks as applying collars to a 700# railing by theirselves. No longer was it possible to call over a handful of apprentices to lift the dang'd thing to do it hot. And, the finished collar had to function as securely and as esthetically as the " historical" way common to Yellen and before. Check out "the blacksmiths cookbook" to see his solution. The next gen smiths now use similar techniques to apply collars as those done by Whitaker and the smiths of his generation. My gen, us, all of us, now are the traditional smiths doing traditional iron for the next gen. Our way of doing collars will be the traditional way. Yellens ways are past history and if one were to set up a historical Yellen shop and demo for the public, you will need to have helpers and the skills to apply hot collars to heavy projects. 

A simple example to differentiate between historical and traditional. Not perfect, not done, but definitely evolving. Thanks much.

[ThomasPowers]

I see that we have differing definitions with "traditional" being a style or look for you and not necessarily involving methods, materials, etc.

When I hear people saying that they do "traditional blacksmithing" they are usually meaning that they don't use power tools and use a coal forge and don't focus on the style..  Very interesting that we have had such different experiences!

What about other people?  What are your takes on the term "traditional blacksmithing?"