Really nice Pedro, i love the decorative chisel work. 

Got into the shop for the first time in a while and worked on some bowls. 

On the hottest day of the year, I decided an anvil cone could be of use. It worked great.

 

Cheers!

You gave it a good licking I trust.

Frosty The Lucky.

Got some more rose heads formed up.   Going to forge the stems and leaves today,  then i also welded up a couple pumpkins.   My first real non-summer seasonal item. 

Nice work Chad. 

Thanks Das

Nice roses!

Thanks Rojo.  I forged the stems and a couple of leaves tonight.  I had a veining die that I got a couple years ago I never used.   Couldn't coordinate everything b to use it so I tended to use a chisel.   Tonight I fixed it so I could use it. Not sure why I didn't think of this a long time ago. 

I did a couple more scrap bucket hooks. One started as 6” of 1/2” square and the other was a couple feet of 1/8” x 1/2”  lots of fun. 

thanks for looking

Over the weekend I finished out another hatchet:

As soon as the finish was dry, I gifted it to a retired blacksmith from our group who really helped me get started.

Then tonight I forged 23” of 52100 ball screw down into 83-1/2” of 1”x 1/4” bar stock for black smith knives:

Not really anything to brag about, but even considering the cost of coal and time it still saved me a lot compared to buy sized stock and should set me up pretty good for my festival in October… not to mention, it was time in the forge!

Keep it fun,

David

Got talking with another smooth tonight at an open shop night and mentioned how I was playing around with making a star from a friedrich's cross.  We start tossing ideas back and forth, made a couple designs from clay then hopped to it.  To say we were thrilled on the first attempted is an understatement.  

Here are the pictures.  This stated off like my hummingbirds with 3/4 in square stock,  4 inches long, 2 1/4 inch overlap. 

That has a lot of potential Chad, I like it. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Cool

BBQ`d a fish today.  

That's great!   Can you attach pictures of the filet knife you used?  

there you go... 

BBQed Steelhead, Mmmmm. (I don't know about Europe but a "Steelhead" is a type of trout here)

Is it inflated?

Frosty The Lucky.

It is wheeled

Fired up the forge for the first time in a few months, and hammered out two of the tap handles I’m forging for my friend Sam’s new brewpub. 

The bullrush will be getting a couple of leaves welded on later. 

10 hours ago, 528E12 said:

It is wheeled

I was asking about the fish, not the BBQ.

An inflated fish would be made from 2 pieces of sheet steal cut in the shape of the fish and welded together along the edge with an air fitting in an easy to hide place say in the mouth of your fish. You heat it up, blow compressed air into the fish and inflate it like a balloon. Then grind the welds and finish it as you like. 

It can be done with high pressure water too. Both techniques can be very dangerous so you need to take the proper precautions. 

Inflating sculptures can be any shape that has two convex sides like a lens or your fish. Make sense?

Frosty The Lucky.

I was too. The body of the fish I made on the wheeling machine / english wheel. Only one half.  Made some fish to hang on the wall.  The head and contour were forged.

Pressure shaping wth air is very dangerous, with water pressure not so much.  

 

I made the knife years ago... can`t seem to find more pics of it...

I've only "used" an English wheel once at a friends place but not enough to get the hang of it. 

I made an inflated pillow once at the above friend's place in fact. Air or water are dangerous, we used air. We leaned up a sheet of plywood shield and a mirror to watch. He set up the forge outdoors, folks could watch but from a distance. The trick is being easy on the air valve, his setup used a spring loaded lever like you use to fill tires. 

It's easier to make water inflation safe, do it in a water tank so pinhole leaks can't slice you up.

I worked with too much hydraulics on the drill crew to take high pressure liquids for granted. 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

Anything high energy is potentially dangerous.  I would think when inflating sheetmetal with water, in case of weld failure it would splash and get your socks wet.  It case of air it would boom , ruin your hair-do an cause a whisle in the ears... 

I like shaping with hammers and their relatives a lot better.  

Uh HUH. I'd suggest you look into it more deeply before trying either. Splitting a seam on air or water is almost anti climatic, especially liquid. Water is incompressible so like you say all it would do is empty, doesn't even splash until it hits the floor. Air of course releases all the potential energy by expanding to ambient pressure VERY rapidly, maybe shooting your sculpture across or around the room. 

A hydraulic inflation is dangerous if a pinhole leak develops. A stream of 10,000psi water, hydraulic oil, etc. from a pinhole will slice through flesh on contact, bone takes a couple milliseconds. Worse than how frighteningly dangerous it is, the spray is invisible and if oil might fill the shop with carbureted oil just looking for a source of ignition.

Hydraulic inflation goes in a water bath, you should be using enough pressure to do it cold hydraulically. 

Were I inflating I'd use air and make a chain link fence cage as a scatter shield and operate the air from behind a shield. 

The pillow turned out pretty cool and I've always thought doing it in copper so I could enamel it would be even cooler. 

Frosty The Lucky.