What in nature are y’all thankful for?

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

Nature here in the desert is far different than back home in N.CA. Far less tall trees, and in general less green which means less hiding places.  I have an affinity for trees, and hate to see wood wasted. It isn't like you just make more the next day, it takes years to develop. I have Mesquite and Palo Verde that I have planted in my yard. Cottonwoods,pine,and palms are more prevalent in the surrounding yards. All of them are transplants, the surrounding desert is devoid of trees with the majority of greenery being creosote bushes.

I have around 200 Gambles quail that pass through daily while on their rounds. The little ones look like fuzz balls behind momma. When I toss seeds from work out they make quite the chatter as they eat. "My" quail are the only constant here. I do get roadrunners on occasion , and up close you can see the dinosaur within. Yodel dogs can be heard nearby as I also have cottontails in the area. The ones that surprised me were the banded gecko, gophers, and toads. Never would have thought of them as desert critters.  The scorpions are an interesting critter when observed up close. We have the giant hairy here which is the largest in N.America reaching up to 6". The biggest I have had here is around 4". If found in the house I toss them back outside to eat the cockroaches.  Other places welcome in spring with red breasted Robins, we know it is spring when we see our first cockroach......  The Sun Spiders don't look like spiders at all and they are very fast. They have to be as they do not spin webs, but run down their prey. The tarantulas stay down in the lower part of the valley, and we are starting their migration period. The males will be seen as they are in their yearly pursuit of love. The horn toads are neat, but I see very few of them. I had one as a pet for years back in CA. My brother brought me one home from Arizona when he was going to school there. The tortoises are a special sighting here, and I have helped a few get across the roads safely.  The one I would love to get up close to is the Kit Foxes we have in the area. I see them at night when driving, and they are hard to miss with their huge ears and big bushy tails. I live near the Valley of Fire state park, and Lake Mead. With these nearby I have seen desert Bighorn sheep right next to the road. In Boulder City they come down into the park to munch on the green grass , so you can get really close to them.  Yes, nature is different here in that it is much easier to see than back home. Plus not being in suburbia helps a lot.

 

George N.M. I had to watch out for Antelope crossing the roads when driving to Burlington WY last year. It is funny how they will not jump over a barb wire fence, but will dive under them instead.

[BillyBones]

7 hours ago, TWISTEDWILLOW said:

did you try it?

Uh...no.

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

BIGGUNDOCTOR, that’s pretty cool that you have resident quail to watch! 
 

BillyBones, ah come on! I’m sure they are perfectly healthy, just maybe not tasty lol. 

[ThomasPowers]

Badlands were very  hazy/smoky on the way back; did not make them more senic!  Lots of nice strata and you can see a lot of nice formations from the road; (like Shiprock!) I'll have to stop back by sometime and investigate the abandoned coal tip...

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

Abandoned coal tip? 

[ThomasPowers]

Yup saw a disused coal loading set up with coal scattered about it.  I want to grap a 5 gal bucket of it and test it out!

[George N. M.]

Thomas, I suspect that you were somewhere in the San Juan Basin and seeing an old mine in one of the Mesa Verde Fm. coals.  You might check with the NM Bureau of Mines about the characteristics of coals in that area.  There is a mine near Hesperus, CO (King Mine, IIRC) which produces metallurgical grade coal which I've heard is pretty good for blacksmithing.  I suspect that it is from a similar stratigraphic location.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

PS  Coal that has been exposed to the weather for any period of time may have "slaked" and broken down into pretty small fragments (pea sized or smaller)  which don't work as well in a forge as larger fragments.  It can depend on the characteristics of the seam.  Generally, higher grade coals don't slake as badly as lower grades. 

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

Kinda off topic but I was stationed on the USS Mesa Verde,  it’s interesting to here that there’s coal from the area my  ship was named after! 

[George N. M.]

Geologic formations are usually named after the area where they were first described, e.g. the Jurassic Morrison Formation (lots of dinosaur fossils) was first described near the town of Morrison, CO.  In this case the first detailed description was made in the Meas Verde area in the 1870s.

The Mesa Verde Group (it was later split into a number of formations.  A Group is 2 or more Formations) extends across most of the Rocky Mountain west from Montana to New Mexico and is composed of sandstones, shales, and coal beds.

In your case the USS Mesa Verde (LPD 19) was named after the National Park which was named after the terrain feature which was also the source of the name of the geologic unit.

If you haven't ever visited Mesa Verde NP it is a very cool place and worth a trip.  Some years ago my son and I took a guided tour of the Anasazi ruins on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation which surrounds the NP.  The ruins there are untouched and not cleaned up as the NP ones are.  There are still 800 year old corn cobs lying around and many of the original wood feature are still in place.  These ruins are about in the condition the Mesa Verde sites were when they were discovered by White folk in the late 19th century.  The NP sites are larger but these are still impressive.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

I’ve never been to the park but there is a small Meuseum on board the Mesa Verde dedicated to the area so I saw some pictures and some artifacts, 

I wouldn’t mind taking a trip out there and taking a look at what all they got goin on!
It sounds like a neat place to visit, 

[George N. M.]

If you go, go in the spring or fall.  Fewer tourists and more moderate temperatures.

[Purple Bullet]

Yep. I went a couple of summers back on an extended motorcycle trip. I wanted to make the climb but some other tourist got hurt or sick while on the site and they shut down the tour for the day. Even from a distance, it is impressive. For the tools they had it is positively astounding. 

Way off topic (I've learned that is not only tolerated, but encouraged on IFI) Think about the technology of ancient civilization. I was reading the other day about pouring brass columns for a temple. Melting a little brass isn't that hard, but a column some 20 ' high or so? Was that one pour or did they do it in rings that were stacked? This was ~1000 BC! And that iron pillar in India, can you imagine the fire it took? and how did they get that close to something that big and hot to beat on it?

I enjoy nature as much as the next guy, but the most interesting, adaptive and creative creature is us.

[ThomasPowers]

Wprking something so large and hot is easy---you use the "disposable minion" method!

[Purple Bullet]

LOL - Yeah Thomas, but just think of the training issue. Even disposable minions need to know where to strike. Would they survive even one blow?

[Frosty]

Considering the size of the tower how could they miss?

Frosty The Lucky.

[Purple Bullet]

Oh they could hit the tower, but would it be at the spot they wanted to weld the section to? I don't think they issued #5 shades to disposable minions. Of course if they did they could re-use them for the next minion...

[Frosty]

If we're talking about welded tower sections similar to carved columns it'd be pretty easy to judge how far from the end to hit. 

Were I doing it I'd try a hammer head on a long pole suspended like a battering ram. How about the minions turning the tower with REALLY BIG tongs? 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Purple Bullet]

I think I'd try dropping rocks on it from 20 ft above. But speaking of tongs, do you heat it on the anvil? In all seriousness, the more I think about it, the more I think they must have invented some form of gas welding (like we acetylene weld) or built a fire on one little spot to heat it and heat the small bit of iron you wanted to weld to in in a separate forge.

But that doesn't tell me how they heated a couple of tons of brass do to a continuous pour. I've heard theories about using prevailing winds by a clay bank or cliff. As I've read before on this site, "It's not the fuel that makes it hot, it's the oxygen."  Then again, assuming disposable minions working bellows 24-7 (oops! Make that 24-6, you would get stoned (Frosty! Lay the pun down and back away!) for working on the 7th.) How do you control that much molten metal to make it go where you want when you want? These guys had some smarts.

[BillyBones]

I have been watching this guy on youtube going and showing various Hindu temples. While he does go into some outlandish theories like ancient aliens and technologies he does show the intricacies of the carvings. Truly amazing work.  

[Frosty]

I thought we were talking about the iron tower/spire/? Cast bronze that scale isn't so difficult if you're emperor, seen the Great Wall or Hadrian's Wall? 

Are the brass/bronze columns hollow? It'd make it a lot easier to cast them hollow. A vertical mold 20' high will have a lot of head against the mold. I'd assume it was carved stone possibly in nested rings sort of like the carved stone columns in Ancient Greece and Rome. 

Using a stone mold they could preheat it and use a cupola to melt bronze ingots and tap into a stone trough into the mold. The trick would clamping them tightly enough the mold didn't blow out under all that head.

Humans 3,000 years ago were just as smart as we are provided they had good nutrition and working metals is a lot older than that. This is just an engineering problem that's pretty easy if you build the scale in increments.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Purple Bullet]

I agree humans were just as smart, I'm saying even smarter, 'cause they did that without heavy equipment, efficient heat methods or IFI on the Internet! . I know there are methods to handle heavy loads and I saw the You Tube of the guy duplicating Stonehenge.

We were talking about both. The iron pillar in India is a puzzle. I finally thought out that they only had to heat a small area to weld some more iron (think how we gas weld) but that surmises they had a fuel/air of some kind that would overcome the conductivity of the iron. Still, to put that much iron together at a time when iron was made a fist-full at a time was quiet a feat.

Now about the bronze pillars : The pillars of Solomon's temple were 26.25 ft high  and 5.6 ft in diameter. These are the lower end of the range of heights I've seen. Some say they were 45 ft high. I don't know if they were hollow, but they were cast in the plain of Jordan where there was clay. Stone or clay, if it had any moisture content, would explode. As you point out, head pressure would be enormous if it was poured vertically, but if you made it by digging a vertical shaft with an interior column of brick it would work IF you could dry it out and keep it dry. Making it hollow would not be as easy if poured on its side. How big would the cupola have to be to melt that much bronze? How tall? 

My best guess is that they had to cast bronze rings that would stack one on top of another. I can't see how else they could have done it.

[Frosty]

We did green sand molds for bronze in high school. Dry won't work, it has to have the right moisture content or it won't stay together at all. Green sand is sand bound with clay so there is plenty of space between grains for steam to escape. 

A core to make a hollow pillar would be problematical in a horizontal pour and it would require a quick fill. Vertical molds could easily hold a core and would automatically fill completely around the circumference if the entire column couldn't be filled in a continuous stream.

How large a melter depends on how many tons of bronze are required, just arithmetic to a caster experienced in the methods of the day.

Heating the iron pillar in a small area and welding is no big deal. Build a crucible, clay furnace right on it and direct the air blast against the iron. Iron is a poor conductor of heat, I'll bet it'd only take a couple hours at most to heat a 10" dia. area to welding temp. If you used a longish bar with a hammer shaped end you could hammer it right through the "forge". Then move the forge and heat the next section. 

I've never done it but I'll bet a dollar I could make it work in a couple tries with enough bellows thralls. Adding fist size pieces of bloom iron would be easy.

Frosty The Lucky.

[George N. M.]

How to cast a large, hollow tube was a problem for cannon makers for centuries prior to the invention of breech loading artillery.  Part of the problem with casting a gun horizontally is that the core tends to float in the molten metal resulting in an off center bore and one side (the top) being thinner and weaker than the opposite side.  The problem was generally solved by several methods.  One was to cast the gun solid and then drill out the middle.  Hence, the name "bore" for the central cavity of a gun barrel.  Another was to cast the gun vertically.  Sometimes that was done muzzle up or muzzle down.  By the time of the American Civil War they were using water cooled central molds to allow the gun to cool from the inside out which gave a stronger barrel which could resist a stronger propellant charge.

Bronze was the preferred metal for guns until steel became available in large enough amounts because it was more elastic and less brittle. However, it was much more expensive.  Cast iron was used, particularly in England, but had a high catastrophic failure rate but was cheaper.

Artillery history factoid:  The Austrians used bronze (gunmetal, aka red brass in the US, often 88% Cu, 8-10% Sn, and 2-4% Zn) for artillery barrels up through World War 1.  The guns often carried the motto "Ultima Ratio Regnum," "The Last Argument of Kings."

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Purple Bullet]

Wow! Maybe we should have a section of "Antique Technique". This is fascinating stuff. Thanks for contributing to my further education. I love it.

[Frosty]

Before casting was developed enough in the west, cannon were made up of welded and banded staves just like a wooden wine barrel, hence the name. Man, it's been too many years since I read about this stuff but I'm thinking cast guns didn't start showing up in any number till the 13th century. The cannon at battles of Agincourt and Crecy were banded stave though the match lock guns were helically welded over a mandrel then swaged to size. Torrential rain about eliminated them as influential in the battles. Later, bored guns were a huge improvement because musketeers could all use the same ammunition. It wasn't till later, cannon were bored to a uniform size and that was often by country. 

Frosty The Lucky.