October 23, 20241 yr On 10/20/2024 at 1:03 PM, bluerooster said: forge was full of leaves Ha! I could forge every evening and the forge would still be full of leaves when I started my next session. SO MANY LEAVES Larks, that's a beautiful gouge. Did you make the handle as well?
October 24, 20241 yr Thanks for the comments on the roughing gouge guys. Shainarue I’m very much a beginner on the lathe but I turned the handle from a local timber called Blackbean or Moreton Bay Chestnut and copied the size and shape from a Robert Sorry chisel. I had made a second from Scented Rosewood, which is a delight to work with and really smells of roses when you work it but preferred the Blackbean one. I have to say that I’m really impressed with some of the work that you guys are sharing here and I confess that I’m storing so many ideas for future projects. I love that “up cycled” (?) gate.
October 24, 20241 yr New ideas and helping each other is why most of us hang out here. If you have a problem there is almost always someone in the 50,000 members here who knows the answer. Think of us as your world wide think tank . . . sorta. Frosty The Lucky.
October 24, 20241 yr Nice work Larks. Nice wood too. Never heard of it before. I made an autobody hammer this evening. Big face dia. is just under 1". And length of the head is 2 3/4". Handle is a Martin that I bought a few of. Head is made from random round bar stock, shaped, ground and polished.
October 24, 20241 yr Very nice Daswulf. Have you bothered heat treating it or is it for light enough work that it won’t need it? I often wonder about how to heat treat the “random” bits of stock that I collect along the way without knowing their origin or composition.
October 24, 20241 yr I didn't heat treat it. It is lower carbon, and it is for light work. Before you put a lot of work into mystery metal, If you want to know if unknown steel will be hardenable first do a spark test to get an idea if it will work for the intended purpose. Second take a piece of that stock and forge it to a general thickness of what you are making then heat treat it to see if you get the results you are looking for. There are some good threads on that somewhere here.
October 24, 20241 yr Thanks Rojo. Ihave a bunch of reassembling at the moment but as soon as I get to some repairs, I'll put it through the paces and see if it does the job.
October 24, 20241 yr Nice looking body hammer Das. Of course you haven't heard of the wood Larks made his gouge handles from, Australia grows things found nowhere else on Earth. It's like an alien planet landed there. Frosty The Lucky.
October 25, 20241 yr Yes, Robert Sorby of course - and my apologies (I really dislike auto correct...particularly when I don’t notice it .......Everything these days seems intent on correcting us when we don’t want or need to be corrected, lane departure correct is another one that I really dislike).
October 25, 20241 yr Daswulf, my conundrum isn’t about determining if something is hardenable but about determining the best heat treatment process for those easily found but unknown hardenable metals that I use for tools (punches, hammers, dies etc) - ie temp's and processes for normalising, annealing, hardening, tempering, nitriding, austentizing.... I use common things like forklift tines, springs, excavator pins, bearings and bearing housings, old blades, mill balls and so on, and as much as you can often work out what metal is “usually” used for these sort of items there are times when the recommended processes just don’t seem to work as well as you’d want them to....usually meaning that I’ve assumed the wrong metal. I use an app’ called HTS Heat Treaters Guide to determine the processes for most steel compositions.
October 25, 20241 yr Larks, that HTS is great if you know what kind of steel you are working with. For unkowns cut a small piece heat it and let it air cool to see if it hardened, if not try oil, if not then brine followed by water. That will at least get you an idea of what quenchant to use. Nothing wrong with using someone else's idea. Or taking inspiration from them. That is what i love about this site. Seeing what others do and then taking that and doing it as well. I try and put my own "twist" so to say on it so it is not a direct copy. But doing that has made me look outside the box and try new things which in turn improves my skills in the craft. As the old saying goes "there is nothing new under the sun", people have been beating, mashing, forming and shaping metal for eons. You are provably not the first person to think of something. Something that took me a while to learn though was to stand back and look at something i made. I made a cooking chain once where i made the links oblong then folded back onto itself, so that the links looked oblong with 2 circles on the bottom. From the 2 circles were 2 oval links in the top of the next oblong one. Kind of hard to describe but you may get it by what my wife said. She saw it and says "it looks like you linked a bunch of (insert word for phallic symbol here) together."
October 27, 20241 yr After not wearing it much lately, I discovered that my apron had become rather moldy. So, I scrubbed it down on both sides with a dilute bleach solution and hung it up to dry. I was planning to make new straps anyway.
October 27, 20241 yr It'll want an application of saddle soap to clean and bring supple. Frosty The Lucky.
October 27, 20241 yr Rather than saddle soap I would use some neatsfoot oil since he has already cleaned it. Moldy leather is not something we have to deal with in the semi-arid climate here. G
October 27, 20241 yr JHCC, if you can get tea-tree or tea-tree oil solution it seems to be kinder to leather and leaves an anti fungal residue We get a lot of mould here in Queensland and the tea-tree oil is what I use on my apron and leather furniture It cleans the leather, kills the mould and leaves a nice smell.
October 28, 20241 yr I cleaned up a couple pieces to go in a fundraiser auction (wood badge support for those involved in scouting): I also forge out about a dozen nails and an additional steak flipper: No pictures of the nails. Not very pretty or interesting, this was the first time I’ve forge nails and it to a few to get the feel for it… Keep it fun, David
October 28, 20241 yr Fired up the new coal forge today. Worked great but the coal I had was garbage. Anyway made a couple of spike cleavers and I'm finally getting the hang of spoons.
October 28, 20241 yr Forged the last tap handle: And drilled, tapped, and finished the whole set: Also made a bracket to hold the throatless shear in the vise: And started a small repoussé project:
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