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I Forge Iron

It followed me home


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Les is pretty spot on Chris. For smaller stuff you will be using a fairly low amperage and wont need super dark. My auto hood goes to 12 I believe, but I generally use 9 or 10 for most everything I do. Low amp tig 9, mig usually 10. 1/8 7018 it depends on indoors or outdoors. Indoors I use a darker setting.

Fixed shade is nice and light, but the auto is nice when you are trying to do your own fits and tig tracking. Or crawling inside of a tight machine haha.

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After some back-and-forth I finally met the owner of an equipment rental place and made off with some of their unusable breaker bits.  If I had the time and skills I'd look at sharpening some and see what he'd be willing to pay for re-pointing the worn ones he has (the heat treating requirement is what keeps me from looking into it further).  Something like 18-20 bits here, I gave him $20 and a bottle opener.

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My favorite hardy was made from the broken off tip of a jackhammer bit. It had the wedge shaped tip already and all I needed to do was to forge down the broken shaft to fit into a 1" hardy hole---and then forge it down a bit more so I can remove it from a 7/8" hardy hole that college students couldn't tell was colour coded for a different hardy...  No heat treat but normalization on it for my use.

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STASH, all of the manufacturers of diamond saw blades told me they use 4140 for the body.

Well my phone won't take a picture. It says not enough memory, but I did find an internet picture of the Whitney 20-1 punch I bought for $4 at the yard sale. And it appears the punches and dies I found in box of misc go to the Whitney.

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Nothing too fancy, but found an 8lb'er at the scrap yard and picked it up for less than $3. Nasty fiberglass handle, will probably blow it out and put a nice hickory handle in. Shorter as well, make a light striker out of it perhaps?

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None of them fit in my silly french hardie hole but I picked this job lot up recently.  They were delivered while I was working away, was difficult saying it wasn’t  more ‘scrap iron’ given the weight of the box.  I’m thinking I’ll make something else with a hardy hole to fit them.  I love them already though, and that’s the main thing right?

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To a blacksmith *everything* may be scrap iron and *nothing* may be scrap iron.---We may reforge items others might already say were tools; and we might save odd items of metal to use as tools that others might say were just scrap iron!  I learned to tag ALL my "tools" with my tool colour after catching a student reforging my hold down into something else.  Now I tell them that they cannot use anything tagged with my tool colour as stock without explicit permission from me!

Nice haul!

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13 minutes ago, MacLeod said:

I love them already though, and that’s the main thing right?

 

How could you not love them already.  I'm drooling on this end of the Internet!   I'd love to come into a stash like that.

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4 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

Nice haul!

Thanks Thomas, my father used to say ‘if you keep a thing for 20 years, you’ll find a use for it’.

I might give a couple of the cut offs a french tail to fit the hardie as they need reforged but I have an idea for a hardie hole for the others.  I find it a bit wrong reworking something that a blacksmith of old took care to make and used many many times and put his touch mark on.  Perhaps I’m weird.  However I guess if I’ll go some way to wearing it out again and someone else reworks it in 70 years I won’t be spinning in my grave. :rolleyes:

7 minutes ago, Chris C said:

How could you not love them already.

Excellent, Thanks Chris.  Yet again, IFI gets me back to thinking I’m normal again!:) I’ve smuggled a couple of them into the house with me tonight just look at them and work out their intended purpose when they were forged!

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33 minutes ago, MacLeod said:

I’m thinking I’ll make something else with a hardy hole to fit

Nice score. Isn't that handle in the background to a leg vise, or do you just want to make a portable hole? Yeah, a little tall but a leg vise will hold any bottom tool I've picked up and then some.

Frosty The Lucky.

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Just now, Frosty said:

leg vise

Hi Frosty, hope you’re well! 

the leg vice is at the other end of the workshop (that’s about 6 feet from that one!:unsure:).  Yet again you have pointed out the straightforward, sensible, pragmatic solution that was entirely not obvious to me!  I’m gonna use the leg vise.:rolleyes: 
Goodness only knows how long I would have spent fixing yet another problem I didn’t have.  That’s another dram I owe you!

 

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Single malt scotch mmmmm. :) Hopefully I'll get to take you up on it some day.  Just the word "obvious" is an oxymoron, there's almost never anything obvious about IT at all. I don't recall who pointed to my leg vise after asking why I wasn't using one of the many bottom tools I'd picked up. I didn't have a hardy hole to match the one I needed of course. 

I do appreciate you're giving me the opportunity to point it out again. 

Frosty The Lucky.

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I know smiths that have welded a short piece of angle iron to a hardy stem to make it fit their larger hardy hole.  Me I generally have a removable sleeve for the hole to make it fit.  (As my large hardy holes are 1.5" on a side I don't seem to have a problems with hardy stems being too large for the hardy holes. Current hardy holes in my shop are 7/8", 1", 1 3/8", 1.5", with several 1" being a bit loose.)

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