Hi guys. Today i melted 11.3g of copper wire into a 10.1g copper coin. First forge second firing.

1 hour ago, B4dWolf said:

Hi guys. Today i melted 11.3g of copper wire into a 10.1g copper coin. First forge second firing.

What scale do you use?  I need one, but can’t decide. 

"In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria."

- Ben Franklin

 

Any postage scale will work. If you were closer I'd give you one. I'd just go to the local head shop and pick one up unless you're wanting to weigh hot metal. Then a laboratory triple beam or industrial toledo brand scale would be the thing. 

Pnut

 

Heck, I recently bought a kitchen digital scale from WalMart that would do just fine.  Probably not as accurate as some, but if you do not need accuracy down around 1000ths of a gram it should do fine

As the term bacteria wasn't used till 1838; I do not believe Ben Franklin, who died in 1790, ever used that term!

"Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"

Abraham Lincoln.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, and in water there is dysentery might be more accurate for the period. 

Pnut

“Boomer Sooner!!!”

Julius Caesar 15 March 44 BC

Been super busy the last few months with non shop related stuff. But I have been working on some blades here and there. Hope everyone is doing well!

7 minutes ago, 671jungle said:

 I have been working on some blades here and there.

That is good work jungle

I took my first hook out of the vinegar bath and scrubbed it down with a wire brush in a pail of water, hung it out to dry, wire brushed it with the bench mount slow speed wire brush and dipped/wiped it with BLO and hung it on a wire in the shop---4 more to go!

Oops, copy and paste. Sorry i knew that it was not actually by Franklin but has been credited to him for years mistakenly. 

David Auerbach is the one who actually said it. 

 

Did it yesterday evening and not today. It is the WI cross I made a few days ago. Cut a little off each end of the vertical bar to make the proportions right and etched it. 
 

It still looks a lot like something a child would hand his mom to pin to the front of the fridge, but a little less than before. I may try heating it back up and driving the horizontal bar in toward the vertical bar. It would at least make the gaps on the back less visible. 
 

One thing I hadn’t considered when beginning this is the wire I wrapped it with would weld to the cross. You can see it on the back. 

Honestly, the wire looks kind of cool, and if you made it look intentional, it could form an interesting pattern (not on this one specifically but if you were to revisit it). There may be some flaws, but it still looks pretty darn good in my opinion, and I think you should try and give yourself more credit. The back may look not the greatest, but you only need one good side, the other can be placed strategically against a wall.

I finally took on one of the projects I've wanted to do since I took up smithing. I always wanted to make my own hammer. After the claw hammer and the small mechanics cross peen I had the confidence to try a rounding hammer. I decided to make the flat side square and the rounding side round for easy reference when using it. It came out weighing 2.6lbs and the eye is a little crooked. But for a first attempt I'm pretty satisfied!

Nice looking hammer. I have yet to make a hammer, but I index the faces by making one side of the handle flat and the other just slightly convex. I also carve the top of the handle flat and the bottom somewhat round (Top and bottom being in relation to the face I expect to use most.) If cut in half it would look something like a D.  Someone here said they did that quite a while ago and I tried it and liked it. I don’t have to look at the hammer to orient the face. I can focus on what I am working on.

 

Thanks, Nathan. It isn’t finished. I had thought I would rivet it to a copper or brass cross and then wood beneath that. But now I think I will try to forge a little larger Celtic cross from WI instead of brass or copper. I am still thinking I will go with bois d’arc under that. But who knows. 

I thought about indexing the handle like that, and still might as it is a store bought one and could use some fine tuning. But I figured what the heck, do the faces this way and it will at least be unique. I'm sure others have done it, but I've never seen it. 

Nice. Go put it to work!

Nice looking hammer Cannon Cocker. How does it feel on hot steel?

3 hours ago, DHarris said:

Someone here said they did that quite a while ago and I tried it and liked it.

I may not be THE guy you remember but I've been shaping my hammer handles that way for years and have described it here often.  Flat towards the face and rounded to the pein side, like a D. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks DHarris and frosty. I remember reading a conversation between frosty and Jennifer about shaping handles that way. Since this handle was just slightly larger than comfortable anyways I decided to give your method a go. It feels good in my hand but I'll know for sure once I put it to work later today. I got my hands on some good coal so I'm on my way out to the farm to grab my coal forge and a couple of extra propane tanks that I'm exchanging for o/a bottles. Hopefully I'll have something else to post on here this afternoon!

Just don't run a coal forge on acetylene. You've been warned.

I personally don't like "thin" hammer faces as they are more prone to deformation if soft and chipping/cracking if hard. I'd like to see a similar one with thicker faces.

I agree Thomas, these faces turned out thinner than i expected. That's one of the things I'll focus on differently next time!

Meanwhile you can use that one to destruction or save it for sheetmetal work!