14 hours ago, Shainarue said:

I worked on making some mirror clips

Getting the spirals and the necks gets easier with a little practice - light taps and when needed a set of needle nose pliers with the jaws ground smooth help a lot. I used to make shapes almost exactly that way as a warmup, then put jump rings on them and sell them as cheap keyrings. Heck, I've got one in my pocket now.

It's one of a couple of things I used to do with that "about a quarter inch" round rod you used to find around gardens on old farms a lot (the other being make lots and lots of rivets). The older rods tend to look good with the pocks and weathering; newer rods you can do with a twist. If you try it, a longer "s" works better. Think your third from the top with a slightly thinner spiral for the big end. 

My wife has sensory weirdness, too.  She smells things I can't smell, tastes things I can't taste, and hears things I can't hear.  Nothing wrong with my sense of smell or taste, but I have severe high frequency hearing loss, so I give her that one.

I made redneck pasta carbonara using smoked hog jowl instead of guanciale and Manchego cheese as a substitute for pecorino Romano.  I've had the real thing in Italy, but this was really, really good.

Wife said it tasted like goat.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  I couldn't detect it, and I love goat cheese.

My wife smells things I don't, for sure.  She may not always be right, but I've never managed to prove her wrong.  So I generally just go with it.

No great feat of olfactory acuity, but one of my favorites was the time I came up from a session of struggling with my little lathe, and she said "you smell like S."  (She knows her periodic table, but not always the English names of the elements.)

Nice ice pick Billy. My apprentice at work has a strange sense of smell. He thinks some of the 2 part epoxy we use smells like rotisserie chicken. I think it smells like dog excrement. This is also a kid who gave himself food poisoning the first time he cooked sausage and extremely undercooked it, so he said. 

My wife thinks bamboo shoots taste like the smell of Band-Aids, and almond extract tastes like the smell of a squished coachroach.  I sorts get the latter.

I burned one side of a tongs project.  Walked 10' to get my ear muffs, came right back, pulled a sparkler out of the fire.  Made another and managed to make a useable set of pickup tongs for small parts, like little drifts and small pieces of round stock.  I set my glove on fire, and sanded a nice little divot out of a knuckle.

But it was a good day in the smithy.  I needed these little pickup tongs for making my next hammer.

Nice tongs. 

Its never fun pulling out a sparkler unless it's the 4th of July. Just that little moment of distraction and a bunch of work can be ruined. Better to cut the air or pull the piece out of the fire then to ruin it. Better to take a whole nother heat. There is your reminder. 

Also careful with the hands. You only get two. Gloves are replaceable. 

Oooooo... i have run my hand through a surface grinder i hate doing that. Its not so much a cut but a cut with a burn. 

I spent a bunch of years on an Abrams tank so deaf people hear better than me now but i remember when i was just a young lad and my mom and dad were in a bit of an argument. My dad leaned over to me and said "She could hear a P... ant fart." To which i heard my mom from the kitchen yell "What did you say?" Its true women see and hear what we cant, amazing we are the hunters of the species. 

My wife is just weird about our ice though. She goes anywhere else no matter how the ice is made it is just fine. But here at home it is not. 

So back to the shop. Got another scrolling wrench roughed out. Still need a bit of finish work. Made of 5160, 3/4" jaw. Also found a knife i made maybe 7 or 8 years back i never finished. So i cleaned it up. I figure i will give it to my grandson to use when he goes hunting and fishing. 

35 minutes ago, Daswulf said:

Gloves are replaceable. 

I like my dexterity.  A skinned knuckle every once in a while is an reasonable price to pay.

Even a dumb donkey will eventually learn to quit leaning up against an electric fence.  Eventually, I'll learn to pull the workpiece out of the fire if I walk away even a few feet. 

Melted, those look like nice tongs. Just another reminder that I really need to make more myself…

BillyBones, that looks like very stout scrolling wrench.

I haven’t been in the forge for a while, but I hav been working on the bellows for my kit. Pretty much done now:

Keep it fun

David

Pasta carbonara is one of humanity’s greatest creations. 

I'm still working on my forge welds so this afternoon I challenged myself to make some links of chain out of the lightest round stock I have. The steel is about 4mm (just under 3/16") round stock from those ridiculously undersized tent pegs that come with cheap tents and other camping accessories. 

I set up my old A.S.O. on the side of my JABOD for the first weld heat for each link, then I finished them on the horn of my new anvil which is actually round enough and small enough to do the job. (Excuse the mess!)

I cut 4 pieces but I had one that I could tell didn't weld properly. I tested it by hammering on the side of the link and sure enough, the weld let go easily.

The other 3 worked well. It was a challenge moving the last link with the other two dangling on it!

I cleaned some of the scale off and lightly ground the welds to assure myself that, yes, they did take. The seams at the end of the scarfs are still quite prominent, but being such light stock I couldn't really blend them much might without forging too thin. If you look closely in this photo, you can see the seams at the ends of the scarfs, but also that the shiny, ground sections have no lines, seams or inclusions.

All in all I'm super happy with the afternoon's efforts! 

Cheers, 

Jono.

Thanks DAS.  You're right the spiral needs to be larger.  I actually had a bigger one on this but unrolled it a little because I didn't have enough material to make the drop and the hook.  The starting stock was 1/4 round about 4" long.  I need at least 6" and possibly a little more. Part of this prototype was to see how much stock I actually need.  I needed more.  I'm thinking I should have gone longer than I thought and worked my way down instead of starting at the short end of what I was guessing.

Refrigerator flavored ice is easily dealt with by rinsing the cubes in your glass with fresh water before adding the beverage, but she may enjoy using the nice ice pick.

Good job sticking the welds Hefty. I've never tried making a chain before. 

Brian, those spirals use up a lot more material then you would think. You got it, start with a longer measured length then youd think then if you have too much measure the amount you cut off to find the right length you'll need on the rest of them. (Math is not one of my strengths lol) I think that side of my brain got bumped too hard when I was younger. 

Goods, i bit off just a little to much material for the back jaw. Took me a long time to get forged down to that. This is part of a set of scrolling wrenches i am making for a raffle at an upcoming blacksmith gathering. A freind puts on "The Gathering" every year in April for 3 days. He provides everything just asks that people register so he knows how much to cook. There is a raffle to buy tickets to help offset the costs so those of us that go will make items to donate. Women folk and kids welcome as well, his wife plans things for the ladies to do. 

My freinds do a live stream on youtube thursdays from 6:30 to 8. Their channel is Barr Run Farm and Forge, tune in give em a little love. 

Hefty, it is quite satisfying when a weld takes. The sound, the feel, and the sense of accomplishment. I used to warm up my day by making chain. I would make 3 links at a time and then join them to a longer piece. Chain gets harder to make the longer it gets. A 20' chain is pretty weighty when holding with tongs. The trick i found is getting the scarfs made and overlapped properly. When you do that you forge the link down to parent bar thickness and not worry about getting them to thin. 

Mark Asprey did an excellent video on making chain about 8 or 10 years ago. Well worth watching, well any of his videos are well worth watching though. 

If you want try the math, it's fairly simple for a closed scroll from non-tapered stock.  Say you want to make a 2" diameter scroll from 1/4" stock (round or square).  Figure the area of the circle formed by the scroll (pi*R^2).  In this case, that gives you 3.14 square inches.  Then calculate the area of your stock, viewed from the side.  1" of 1/4" stock has a area (viewed from the side) of 1/4 square inch.  Divide the first number by the second, and you get almost 13" of stock.

The math gets much harder if you taper the stock.  But you can still get a decent estimate.  If you will taper the stock to 1/8", that means the finished scroll will have a thickness 1/2 the stock width at the center, and the full stock width at the outside.  If you figure that's 3/4 the original thickness on average, you need about 3/4 the length of stock.  So if you start with 9-10 inches of stock (before you taper), you should be reasonably close.  

I have 3 projects out to the forge. none finished. Thought about doing that today, but I'm sore all over.  Spent the past two days wiring a work shop for a friend of mine. I haven't worn a tool bag for about 4 years now, and I didn't realize back then just how much weight I was carrying around for 12 hours a day. Then, up and down ladder. It was taxing. I've grown soft.  

Finished another project.

I broke a bell trying out a new spring fuller but it was working good beforehand….

then I broke a leaf twisting the stem….

I turned off the forge and took a 5” piece of old 2” copper pipe (14ga) and made some jaws for my post vice. They turned out good. Lots of fun :-)

 

 

Some days everything seems to just go bad. Glad you got something good out of it. On both of the fails Id say not enough heat. 

That was my first thought as well. 

I rehafted a hammer I picked up a couple of weeks ago at The Vintage Tool Shoppe in NH:

Nice work John. What will you be using that one for?

I want to try it for general forging. It’s rather like a classic Swedish blacksmith’s hammer, other than having a round face rather than square. I really like the shape of the peen, so I wanted to see how it behaves. 

John, I would imagine that hammer is particularly useful for peining areas that are hard to reach. I’ve always wanted a hammer like that- let us know how it works.

I will. I haven't weighted it yet, but I'm guessing it's about 2-1/2 lbs.