Forging ball ends

[Tim grows Vegetables]

Today a potential customer came up to me at the farmers market where I vend my produce and forged stuff with a really cool old piece.  I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take pictures of it.  It was a swing arm made of 5/8ths square stock appoximately 30' long.  The pivot ends of the arm were set down and had very small (3/16?) holes for a pivot pin.  Under the two square bars was a thin 3/16ths wire that suspended from the lower bar the length of the arm.  The guy called it a "swing arm banner hanger"  The upper bar had a sheet metal indian head profile riveted to it and the end of the lower bar had a 3/4' faceted ball end on it.  There were also two short 5/8's square braces that connected the two bars with rivets and little scrolls.  All in all a very cool old piece.  The square stock had lots of faint hammer facets that looked like it had been forged down to size from larger stock.  The wire on the bottom looked like machine drawn wire though.  

He wanted me to make a bracket-hanger with a similar ball end that had a 3/16' pintle to swing this arm off of.  I told him it was beyond my skill set to make a faceted ball end pintle.  Especially since he wanted it next week.  I think he's going to have trouble finding someone to make that for him that quickly.  
 

I've never considered making a ball end.  I looked up "ball end" and found some discussions but all the image links were broken.  What would the best procedure/process be for makeing a 3/4 inch faceted ball on the end of some 5/8 inch square stock?

It seems like the best way is to forge weld on a collar and then forge the resulting end into a sphere?  It would definitely take me many many attempts before I could ever get such a thing down, expecially without messing up the bar the ball was attached to at least a little.  

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[Mike BR]

I didn’t completely follow the description, but is there a fullered grove at the base of the ball?  If so, if you isolate a 5/8” cube, you’ll have a little more material than you need for a 3/4” sphere — quite possibly the reason the original has a 3/4” ball.  So this should be pretty straightforward. (It’s also not hard to upset the end of a bar if you need a little more material for some reason.)

[Tim grows Vegetables]

Sorry,  My mental fraction math went out the window writing that description.  It was more like 5/16ths square, not 5/8ths.  the ball diameter was a little more than twice the width of the square stock.  I am kicking myself for not taking a bunch of pictures, it was really cool and I had my phone right there.

[Goods]

Check out JLP services videos on YouTube. They are good instructional videos and several have different finials. There’s a link to the videos on here on IFI:

Keep it fun,

David