Thomas that trivet is really neat!!! I'd be tempted to heat it up and brush the scale off and oil it to preserve the antiquity and story of it. I do that to old wrought iron horseshoes I find. Its neat to see the grain on an old piece forged wrought and imagine what the smith 100+ years ago was thinking when he wrought it and what he would think if he knew someone would be holding and admiring his work all these years later...

 

Today my brother came back over and worked as my striker again to finish forging out my ax eye drift. Tomorrow I'll grind and polish it, and if time is left I'll fire up the forge and see if the welds on my camp ax hold up to being drifted. 

Frosty, thanks.

It does bite when things dont work out but that just means i will have to figure out another way to make it work. 

Got the last two forge welds done and finished rasping the hot cut ends of the 1/2" sq stock yesterday.

Today is trying to catch the female feral cats for a visit to spayland!

I plan to make a couple of copies of the trivet including ones made from old wagon tyre, a coarse WI and may have been what the original was made from.

Just ordered a 220 V capacitor for my Bader, the 2 hp Baldor motor is discontinued but as a good name product, they have plenty of parts for it.  The local ABB service company has to order the part in and I asked them to drop ship it directly to me---saves a $40+ in gas trip for me and gets it to me faster.  Now to wire the drill press's 220 VAC line and repeat the capacitor change out...

Been so long since I dealt with a company that went out of their way to be helpful, I almost was speechless!

It can be a little disorienting can't it? 

I get a similar feeling meeting young people sometimes but I'm getting over almost all of them being polite and courteous. Some are buttheads in training but I don't meet many. I suppose that will continue till I start expecting them to be considerate and they'll blind side me. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Addendum:  The guy at the motor service place called back.  He had talked with Baldor and they said that the capacitor was a start capacitor and was wired for 110 either for 110 or 220.  Cancelled the order after wiring for 220 and running it a while.  Also told them that they had my motor business from here on out!  (I did have to switch two wires as wiring per the diagram reversed the motor, however the fine print on the bottom of the plate had the "to change the direction of rotation swap these two leads."

Now the big fun is that my *old* coarse belts tend to blow up after a short while; been stored only a couple of decades!  However I am getting some use out of them before the "BOOM"!  Luckily I have the 50 120 grit belts John sold me to fall back on.  Got my first roller chain blade soaking in vinegar right now to see the pattern. (More will need to wait on the powerhammer as it was *very* hard under the hammer.)

Did I sell you those? I don’t remember, but I’ll take your word for it  

I started another batch of a half-dozen knitting bowls. 

Yup and now the grinder is running; I'm very happy to have spent the money!  My wife informs me that she tucked some money away for kitting out my shop once I got electricity so I may switch out the one bulb for a receptacle and put in two more LED shop lights for the "clean shop".

Thomas - Your wife is obviously a gem. So's mine. Good thing we don't get what we deserve.

My grandson’s name is Max too, he’s 3 now. 
 

With 90 hour weeks at work I haven’t had a chance to do anything in the shop. I did finally just bite the bullet and got my roses in the ground. 

JHCC, I saw that you had those knitting bowls. My wife knits and I asked her about knitting bowls and she didn't know what they were. Could you enlighten me please?

Not to upstage John but I know I know! Deb knits and it's handy to have a place to put a ball of yarn you don't have to unwind or worry about it rolling away, getting tangled, etc. A bowl works a treat as does a jar large enough to drop the ball in.

Have the missus try a largish, 6" or larger Pyrex mixing bowl or similar. You'll be finding or forging her a yarn bowl soonest.

Frosty The Lucky. 

I feel so upstaged….

Also, here are a couple of other versions I’ve made:

Bwa ha ha ha ha! 

Frosty The Lucky. 

John, for the basket one did you calculate and cut the length before you started forging or did you start with a long piece of stock and then cut it off and taper the end when the basket go large enough?  I can see doing it either way.

Thx.

GNM

My steel supplier had been cutting pieces from heavy sheet (about 6 or 7 gauge, I’d guess), and there were a bunch of 8’ offcuts in the drop bin. One of them was tapered along its length from about 5/8” down to about 1/8”, so all it needed was a bit of filing of the edges. 

the coffee table took its place in the bedroom.

Simply beautiful alexandr. Your work always blows me away

Giving a new student his first taste of forging. I am very pleased with how quickly he picked it up, with a very natural hammer swing. 

Also welded a hardy stem onto this (CO2?) tank bottom, so that it can fit on the striking anvil for the initial shaping of forged bowls. 

On 3/31/2022 at 1:47 AM, alexandr said:

the coffee table took its place in the bedroom.

Alexandr, i have run out of words for complimenting your work. 

Was there something lost in translation though? I ask becuase a coffee table is usually in a living room for having coffee on, or also used as a foot stool, and not many folks i know drink coffee in the bedroom. And generally rectangle. I would have said end table or night stand. Could be just an American thing though, so i ask. 

JHCC, can you actually find anything in that shop? And how many times do you find something and say "Oh, i forgot i had one of those." I know for me that is quite a common occurrence. I also usually find it 2 or 3 days after i needed it and in many cases bought another one so i can forget that i own 2 of them now.

With difficulty, and all the time.

Heh, heh, heh, I usually find the missing tool when I put the one I bought to replace it away were I won't lose it. I now have 4 multi meters, two are stacked on a 2x4 somewhere IN the house with a half pack of smokes and my good brass Zippo lighter. I expected to find it all when I was finished with the replacement multi meter but just put it where I wouldn't lose (find) it. 

I have #4 but learned and bought a tool box special for household type wiring and know exactly where the multi meter is.  Happily the tool box is large enough I can usually find it in under an hour. 

I expect to find my framing hatchet one of these days, it aught to be pretty close to one of my 32oz. framing hammers. <sigh>

Frosty The Lucky. 

At least you have an excuse, Jerry.  Some of us can lose an item we had in our hands 30 seconds earlier without moving 3 paces - and have nothing reasonable to blame it on.

The only reason that I have is that since almost everything is within the same gray/rust/black color palate, the thing that you're looking for rarely stands out against the background.

John, don’t let them get under your skin, I love the pictures of your shop because it proves that I’m not the only person that has a shop that looks like mine 

I tell my wife that it’s my security system, I’m the only person that can find the good stuff, I just don’t tell her how long it takes me 

I'm just kind of stunned that I managed to take four different photos from four different angles in my shop and still managed to have almost everything in the frame be blacksmithing-related.