Yes, that’s me. The four of us rotated striking, running the blower, directing and resting. (I was directing most of the time, but was completely drenched in sweat from earlier consolidating and splitting the bloom with that striker team.)

That was my thought with the scale also, but it would have been nice to hear from someone with 50 smelts worth of experience!

Keep it fun,

David

Building new rolling door frames for the neighbor's new pole barn. This door has a man-door framed within it. Jazzed it up a little with a horseshoe for the bolt and a twisted RR spike hand-grab for the main frame.

Matt.

Did up another set of box jaw tongs I plan on taking to where we have a Thursday night hammer in. All lot of tongs have been getting beaten up and I wanted to make sure we v had some solid heavier sets. I went and made sure I turned them the right direction this time.

That’s always the challenge, isn’t it?

I finished a machining/fabrication project I’ve been planning for some time and actually working on for a few days: a small slip roller.

Almost all of this is from salvaged parts and stock, especially three rollers from an old industrial conveyer and their bearings.

Nice work on the roller.

Nice John! A compliment to your Hossfeld.

--Larry

Thanks!

On a side note, I'd like to point out how this project is a practical demonstration of the rule "never throw away your scraps": the socket on the end of the crank was originally a test piece for forging candle cups from 1" black pipe. While it was never used for that project, the necked-down end was perfect for keeping it from slipping down the mandrel as I forged it down to hexagonal.

As for the rest of the salvaged material, some of which I've had for years, some for only days:

• Rollers, axles, and bearings: salvaged from an industrial conveyor* bought at HGR (industrial surplus warehouse in Cleveland)

• Heavy angle iron for the base: originally part of the HVAC infrastructure at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, rescued from a dumpster during the conversion to geothermal heating and cooling.

• Lighter angle iron for moveable mounting brackets: salvaged from an industrial material handling cart bought at HGR and disassembled for stock

• Hex bar crosspieces: from a bin of shafting bought at HGR under the mistaken assumption that it was tool steel

• Adjusting screws: from the "large bolts" bin in my hardware storage, rethreaded to 3/8 x 24

• Staples to secure crossbar assemblies: from the frame of a rusted-out fire ring, rescued from the scrap bin at the town recycling drop-off

• Crank handle and shaft: 1" black pipe, also from the town scrap bin

• Square tube uprights: uprights from someone's front step railing, also from the town scrap bin.

• End caps of top roller: this is the only one I can't quite remember. I think it may have been part of the scrap I salvaged from the demolition of the old Oberlin Inn and the construction of the new Hotel at Oberlin (I know: fancy, fancy).

Indeed, the only stock that I actually purchased from my steel supplier was the 1/2" round for the adjusting screw handles and the 3/8" x 3/4" flat bar that I doubled up and welded together to make the 3/4" square verticals of the crossbar assemblies.

* Amusingly, whoever received this into the warehouse had put it upside down on the floor and mislabeled it as a cart. Since nobody bought it as a cart, it got marked down a bunch of times until I bought it for about ten bucks. I've used a bunch of the rollers in various shop projects and sold the rest at Quad-State.

A great write-up and a valuable lesson in both feeding & mining the scrap pile. I don't have quite the recall that you have to be able to note the origins, but I sure know your satisfaction in making use of so much of it! A bunch of random scrap turned into a tidy, functional tool that probably takes up less space than the scrap did. Seems like an all-around winner to me!

--Larry

It's equally satisfying to consider how much easier this project was made by having the right tools. I upgraded my drill press last year and invested in a selection of MT-shank bits, which made drilling the holes for the various axles and the locking staples a breeze.

Also incredibly useful were two simple and often underused tools: pencil and paper. I spent a LOT of time thinking about the design and sketching a bunch of different options for its construction before I ever put bandsaw to roller or welder to angle iron. By the time I got started, I'd developed such a good idea of what I wanted that when I had to make design changes on the fly (either because I found some material that was going to work even better or because I realized that my earlier ideas weren't as good as I thought), the solutions evolved fairly quickly and usually for the better.

Oh, and one other note about the scrap pile: another resource rescued from the museum's HVAC renovations was the big hunk of heavy pipe that became the central column of my combination striking vise/armorer's swage block stand:

(If memory serves, the angle iron came from the same place, the orange crosspiece was part of a batch of machinery parts from HGR, and the pitted pipe that makes up the rest of the base was formerly someone's clothesline support. The swage was from Holland Anvil, and I picked up the vise at Quad-State.)

Good Morning,

The term I use is 'Bish', as Rub-Bish. A friend of mine quit looking through my 'Bish'. He claims that when I am finished with it, 'It's not worth picking up"/ LOL

Neil

There’s a story that the Shakers had set up four or five water mills in one of their villages (Mount Lebanon, maybe?) to grind flour, saw lumber, etc, etc. When someone asked their downstream neighbor why he didn’t also set up a similar mill, he replied, “By the time the Shakers are done with the water, it ain’t got no oomph to it!”

Pretty impressive roller (and story). But I think you've just snuffed out my last hope of ever getting my shop cleaned up (grin).

Maybe I'm getting more efficient, though. Last winter I used up the last bit of steel from my old water heater -- and the "new" one promptly failed.

I was in Iceland last month, and the guide was talking about how they'd drill a geothermal well and run the water through the radiators in the house, then to a hot tub in the back yard, then through coils under the driveway . . . . (These days they mostly have municipal systems with central heat exchangers and recirculating fluid.)

Different kind of geothermal: The Icelandic variety uses volcanically heated water to generate electricity, heat houses, etc. The kind the college uses has an array of deeply bored wells paired with efficient heat exchangers to either draw heat out of the ground to heat the buildings or to push heat back into the ground to cool them. It’s not only a lot more efficient and lower-cost than our steam heating system, but every year, it also reduces our water consumption by four million gallons and our wastewater discharge by three million gallons.

Haven’t yet figured out how to run a forge of it, though….

Iceland is definitely spoiled for hot water. The guide also talked about his reaction when he moved to Copenhagen and first stuck his toe in a 60-degree swimming pool. (I was reacting more to the Shakers squeezing out the last bit of energy from what flowed their way.)