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armorer posted:I seem to recall someone here making a custom maker's mark for another goon? I am thinking about getting a mark made and looking into what my options are. I missed this, sorry. The maker's marks were mine, most excellent and generous+nice goon A Proper Uppercut did 'em for me. They're fantastic and easily my most carefully-protected and gently-handled workshop tools 
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Sep 15, 2013 16:58
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Ambrose Burnside posted:I missed this, sorry. The maker's marks were mine, most excellent and generous goonfriend A Proper Uppercut did 'em for me. They're fantastic and easily my most carefully-protected and gently-handled workshop tools. For people not as lucky as you were (I remember that stamp, it's really nice) there's http://www.infinitystamps.com/steel_stamps.html They're expensive as gently caress, but might be worth it, if you're making money doing steel/wood/leather arts.
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Sep 15, 2013 18:54
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oxbrain posted:Try to get into aerospace welding, or better yet some kind of machine(laser/friction stir/whatever) welding. Those guys have it good. Food and dairy industry is nice too  Very clean and sanitary, but you gotta be good @ stainless.
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Sep 15, 2013 20:27
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What do you do if you're like me and really really love welding, used to have my own AWS 3G cert with a 7018, and flux core. I've also had numerous in house certs like 3 and 4G 1"- unlimited aluminum. I'm kind of bored with the kind of work I'm doing now which is prettymuch filling gaps and pushing start on a robot. Sometimes I get to rework stuff which is fun and really breaks up the monotony. I'm too fat to climb iron, and really don't want to work in the dungeons that boilermakers have to work in. I guess I really want to tig stuff like pops up on weldporn all the time but don't have access to a tig machine to get good at it.
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Sep 15, 2013 21:19
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I just finished an 8 week welding course and I have been having issues with pain and numbness in my rt hand. Seems that years of computer work are causing a carpal tunnel flare up. Anyone have any helpful hints on dealing with the pain and numbness? I've been wearing a brace at night which seems to be slowly helping. Also, any advice on getting my first job? I've been out of work now for over 6 months. I live in the Hampton Roads area in VA. Shipyard work seems to be the biggest opportunities, but the whole sequestration issue has put a huge damper on things lately.
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Sep 16, 2013 05:00
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Vendictus Prime posted:I just finished an 8 week welding course and I have been having issues with pain and numbness in my rt hand. Seems that years of computer work are causing a carpal tunnel flare up. Anyone have any helpful hints on dealing with the pain and numbness? I've been wearing a brace at night which seems to be slowly helping. See a doctor immediately, and immediately stop doing the repetitive task that is causing the pain. You don't want to wind up needing surgery. There may be a way to hold and use your tools that doesn't exacerbate your injury, but it'd be impossible for anyone here to tell you what that is, since it's related to exactly how you hold and use your tools now, your personal physical dimensions, etc. The best advice will come from a doctor with experience with repetitive stress injuries.
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Sep 16, 2013 08:27
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I've been screwing around with my propane forge for awhile, not producing anything spectacular so I decided to take a forging workshop. We learned how to make scrolls for the hook, then we made the tongs from a single 14" piece of half inch square stock. Then we made a cold chisel, annealed it, and tempered it. 
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Sep 16, 2013 15:27
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Sounds like you took a similar intro to blacksmithing course as the one I took! Your first tongs look better than my first tongs (I managed to get a crack at the jaw that we had to weld shut).
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Sep 20, 2013 17:58
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Leperflesh posted:Sounds like you took a similar intro to blacksmithing course as the one I took! Yeah they turned out pretty drat good. I've been screwing around with my propane forge since about February and had tried making some tongs based on internet tutorials and they turned into a mess. The workshop was with a very traditional smith and I think he's gotten me hooked on using coal. I haven't been able to burn a piece of metal in my propane forge, but the coal was able to get the metal HOT. The only problem is that to switch to coal I'll have to put in a new flue, build a coal forge, and keep a poo poo ton of coal around.
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Sep 20, 2013 19:09
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Having used charcoal for a few years, I'm switching to a gas forge ASAP. I just want to light it and forget it. But I haven't used coal, maybe it's easier to deal with than charcoal on account of the slower burn rate. Edit: VVV Lump charcoal is what you want, stay clear of briquettes. You can buy it by the bag, and restaurant supply companies are an option to buy it in bulk. If you're really ambitious you can make a retort out of a metal drum. TerminalSaint fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Sep 20, 2013 |
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Sep 20, 2013 20:24
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TerminalSaint posted:Having used charcoal for a few years, I'm switching to a gas forge ASAP. I just want to light it and forget it. But I haven't used coal, maybe it's easier to deal with than charcoal on account of the slower burn rate. I'm curious what kind of charcoal you have used and where you usually got it. Also would like to hear from anyone else who has a favorite charcoal.
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Sep 20, 2013 21:47
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An antique mall near my parents' house had 4 anvils for sale. The front one was $239 for 100lb, and the rear was $189 for 75lb. The other two didn't have weights listed on them, but were around the same size.  Also, novelty size saw blade beside it. Probable 1.5ft radius.
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Sep 21, 2013 03:33
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Brekelefuw posted:An antique mall near my parents' house had 4 anvils for sale. That ain't novelty. That's from a saw mill.
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Sep 21, 2013 03:36
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Brekelefuw posted:An antique mall near my parents' house had 4 anvils for sale. Is that front one as chipped along the edge as it looks to be in the picture? The lighting makes it hard to tell. The back one looks pitted as gently caress though. Front one might be serviceable, and that's a surprisingly not terrible price for an antique store. Favourite charcoal: Royal Oak, I just bought 100 kilos of it the other day. Great for forging and cooking.
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Sep 22, 2013 16:07
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I used royal oak for a while, ocean state job lot had it on sale. It was decent, and getting it started with an oxyacetylene torch imparted a hint of almond flavoahahahaha who am I kidding I was 4 beers deep, melted a hole in the charcoal grate by accident while using the o/a torch to start the charcoal, then threw my polish sausages on it and ate them and it was awesome. E: I tried just cooking the sausages with o/a first but it charred the outside before it even warmed the inside.
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Sep 23, 2013 02:41
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Ah yes, besides burning a hell of a lot cleaner, charcoal is also good when lunchtime rolls around.
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Sep 23, 2013 02:59
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I am doing a lot better in my stick welding class. I should be starting the upside down position tonight. My main reason for posting is that I made my first welding commission. I put a wheel mount back on a mower deck for my boss. It was really simple, but I feel pretty good about it. On a blacksmith note, I am ramping up production of sell worthy items for october. I will be smithing at four different events this month and I have almost nothing made to sell. Does anyone else here do events? I really like it. I am not great at talking to people about what I am doing, but I love demonstrating. I mostly work these events with another smith. He is older and much better at talking up the people and selling, it works out well for me. My favorite thing to do at these events is to give away nails I make to kids. I hold them in the quench tub long enough for them to be cold for sure and then immediately throw them to the kid. Parents freak out a little when they see it go down, I love it.
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Sep 23, 2013 23:03
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Starz posted:I am doing a lot better in my stick welding class. I should be starting the upside down position tonight. I love doing the big show in Irricana every year, it's one of my annual highlights for sure. We do the same thing with the nails, except we always have a little stack of cold ones to hand out. Sometimes I make little spoons out of horseshoe nails for keychains, those are great sellers too. So remember when I made that smelting furnace? IT IS TIME. Got me a 12' piece of 1.5" copper pipe (for free!!!) because Sauder said they used a copper tuyere as their most successful air pipe. I didn't find the detail on the exact specifics of said pipe until later, but ehn, whatever.  After preheating with the tiger torch and a bunch of poplar firewood, I started charging it with charcoal. This was a couple hours into it, you can see the cracks burning through.  This is the magnetite sand I used.  Checking the peep hole.  Burn was going pretty well. Cracks around the arch, but nothing too horrid.  Tapping the slag was pretty drat cool.       Closed it back up and kept charging for a couple hours.  I don't think I got any wrought iron out of it though. An hour or so after I tapped the slag the first time, the blow pipe got kinda gummed up at the end and melted, it was doing amazingly well for thin walled copper up to that point though. poo poo's an amazing conductor. However, I did get a bunch of what I think is cast iron, because it is HARD AS gently caress. These are all magnetic, that's how we found them.      These are just random bits of slag that I thought were cool.      The furnace did not survive the extraction, but that's totally ok. I will build it way better next time.  Amazingly, it held up to 6-7 hours of extreme heat. I burned a truckful of charcoal, and many beers were consumed. It was a fun night. Things learned / I want to try next time: The tuyere should be made of 1/4" thick copper plate forged into a tapered cone. Patching the cracks worked pretty well to keep the air blast going up the stack instead of coming out the sides. Building it better in the first place would have been a good idea. Fire brick worked great as a tap arch door. This thing got hot enough to melt regular ceramic brick to glassy blobs (  ) and they did not make good tap arch doors.Build the tap arch into the form, do not cut it out after the fact, make an arch support or something out of angle iron when building. Maybe a stronger fan? The one I had seemed to work pretty well, I can't tell if the bloom formed so misshaped because there wasn't enough air, too much air (you need a lot to make cast iron apparently) or just because the tip melted and the air didn't get deep enough into the chimney. I'm betting it was the latter. Not bad for a first try!
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Sep 24, 2013 04:19
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That's loving awesome! I now want to see you build a crucible furnace and melt/flux/pour that cast iron!
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Sep 24, 2013 04:32
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Slung Blade posted:This thing got hot enough to melt regular ceramic brick to glassy blobs ( I suspect you actually just glazed your brick. Ash is a common ingredient in ceramic glaze, and you burned a lot of charcoal so you made a lot of ash in there. It would naturally stick to ordinary ceramic and glaze it, possibly with a very thick layer since you went for so long. You may also have made glass, if your iron ore contained a lot of silica.
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Sep 24, 2013 18:28
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Leperflesh posted:You may also have made glass, if your iron ore contained a lot of silica. Slung Blade posted:This is the magnetite sand I used.
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Sep 24, 2013 18:40
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That is so cool
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Sep 24, 2013 23:17
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I got a lot of greeny glass. Like in this image, see the bubbly poo poo on the right? I think that's all from the furnace walls though, it was at least 50% sand by weight. The slag dripping out there was like glass, just not very clear. It was quite black once cooled. Leper: that's certainly possible, this magnetite is sold by a glaze company, after all. Hadn't really considered that until you pointed it out.
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Sep 25, 2013 02:31
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Starz posted:I will be smithing at four different events this month and I have almost nothing made to sell. Does anyone else here do events? All the time. Maker's Faire, Academy of Sciences, demos for classes, demos for school groups. We use it for advertising classes mostly. But we do sell things. Hooks mostly. I'm about to start gearing up for a gift show in December, if I have the time. I'm thinking small affordable luxury items for the home. As far as talking and demonstrating goes, it is difficult to do both. Most people have never seen blacksmithing before, so just telling them what they you are doing and why gets them intrigued. Or I ask them questions. For instance I do a taper on the bick with a round hammer, and I ask the audience why I am using a round hammer and the round part of the anvil to make a flat taper. There is almost always a kid who figures out why, but the adults never do. Or I have them guess the temperature of the forge or the weight of my anvil. It gets them engaged. Slung Blade, even though you didn't get any bloom from it, it looks like it was a lot of fun to do. What a great experience working with that process. Thanks for sharing.
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Sep 25, 2013 15:51
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Well, don't write off those lumps just yet, there might be something forge-able in there somewhere. I just need to find it.
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Sep 26, 2013 05:14
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put em on your mantlepiece and tell people with a straight face they're meteorites, imo also: basket-twist gif 
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Sep 27, 2013 13:56
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Nice one Slung Blade! Hope you get some iron out of that lot, even if it's just a few little bits. Tried to do my first forge weld on the weekend but I had trouble getting the steel to the right temperature. It didn't help that the charcoal I was using sucked balls, spitting and burning dirty. I managed to get the two bits stuck together (actually it was the same bit bent over), and got to use the borax I bought off ebay, but it wasn't pretty and I ended up whacking the piece all out of shape getting it to take  Going to hunt out some better charcoal this weekend and maybe try again tomorrow. If at first you don't succeed and all that...
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Sep 27, 2013 14:18
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Ambrose Burnside posted:put em on your mantlepiece and tell people with a straight face they're meteorites, imo I already have two chunks of a Russian meteorite, and yeah it'd be hard to tell them apart. 
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Sep 27, 2013 17:22
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A while back I posted some pictures at the start of this railing project. There were many delays involved, as the customer changed elements of the design atleast 5 times, as well as me breaking my foot and having to stop work on it for almost a month. I am pretty bad at taking pictures as I do things, but here is the finished product. The house was built in the mid 1940s and he wanted something that matched the period and had a simple but effective design. The rock wall goes around a staircase that leads to the basement, and without the railing, it would have been easy for someone to wander off the porch and fall the 9 feet to the bottom of the staircase. I also made a handrail for the back door coming out of the kitchen. I wanted to core drill and set the posts in epoxy but the customer was adamant about me welding plates on the bottom and bolting the rail down. While this rail is very sturdy, it would be much stronger if I had my way and set the posts down inside the stone and concrete. Bonus shot of my old forge that I brought out of retirement to bend the cap rail for the transition from the basement staircase to the guardrail. This process took about 30 cycles of heating it, bending it a few degrees, hammering it flat with a big wooden mallet, rinse, repeat. Bending it too fast would cause the cap rail to buckle and not look very good at all. I hope you all like it! Also, a special thanks to AbsentMindedWelder for letting me poo poo all over his driveway and use his welder while I was making and installing this.      
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Sep 27, 2013 17:24
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Anybody know where one might find a chunk of 7/8-4 acme threaded rod? I'm trying to repair a vise on the cheap, and all the usual suspects just have 6 tpi, and very rarely 5. There's one super expensive place I found that sells it as... a replacement vise part . The HF vise I'm using in the meantime is just the worst.
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Sep 27, 2013 18:20
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So I got to make something on my week off. A guy I work with loves cooking outside with charcoal and wood. He has a tripod stand for a 10qt dutch oven and wanted a charcoal box/chimney type thing to put under the dutch oven. He makes some bomb rear end chicken noodle soup and had most of the materials he wanted the box made of so I said I"d make it for a whole pot of soup. So I started with this piece of 8x8 square tube.  Layed out some lines. I started with soapstone but eventually said gently caress that and busted out the metal scribe.  Drilled some holes!  40 3/4" holes later and we have this. The drill press I was using even at its lowest speed was still faster than I'd like, but It worked. I had to take the bit to the bench grinder and sharpen it by the time I got to the last side but oh well, you'll have that.  Cut some 1/2" square stock for the grate to set on.  Cut a piece of stainless mesh I had laying around for the grate. The guy who this is for originally wanted me to build a grate out of 1/4" plate but I was like gently caress that, and eventually talked him into using this stuff. He was pretty reluctant because he thinks it's not heavy duty enough to hold up to the heat but it'll be fine. He had handles he wanted welded on but didn't want them stick welded on so I took it to where my brother works and mig'd them on. If anyone's interested I can get some pictures of the whole set up when I go to pick my soup up.
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Sep 27, 2013 22:12
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That's really awesomely made, but wouldn't it have been a million times cheaper to make another little tripod stand out of some barstock to hold the dutch oven over a little brazier pan made out of that stainless grill? Still, it's cool as gently caress and I'd use the hell out of it. Iforge: drat that's nice work there.
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Sep 28, 2013 05:31
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Yea probably, normal people would just use a stove but he likes open fire. I think he said he paid $35 for the piece of 8x8, and 35ish for the handles. By the time he makes me a pot of soup he'll have over 100 in it. It took a lot longer than I thought it'd take for me to build it. IMO he got off cheap with me charging him a pot of soup.
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Sep 28, 2013 06:08
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fps_bill posted:Yea probably, normal people would just use a stove but he likes open fire. I think he said he paid $35 for the piece of 8x8, and 35ish for the handles. By the time he makes me a pot of soup he'll have over 100 in it. It took a lot longer than I thought it'd take for me to build it. IMO he got off cheap with me charging him a pot of soup. Drilling those holes by hand alone is worth a steak main course to follow the soup in my opinion, especially when you know that a machine like this exists http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7grjE7obUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7grjE7obUo iforge that's nice work, my last job was making and installing gates and railings and we always preferred to epoxy anchor bars down into the walls as well especially on stone walls like that.
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Sep 28, 2013 13:24
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Slung Blade posted:That's really awesomely made, but wouldn't it have been a million times cheaper to make another little tripod stand out of some barstock to hold the dutch oven over a little brazier pan made out of that stainless grill? A chimney like this will get a lot hotter than a brazier pan. I frequently use a "chimney starter" to get coals going for my bbq and the drat things are magical. Basically once it gets hot inside, it pulls a continuous stream of air in from the bottom and through the coals.
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Sep 28, 2013 14:14
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I have come into a crapload of scrap aluminum, mostly extrusions but also some cast stuff and several buckets of milling swarf, that I'm going to melt down and recycle. I am not sure what alloys I've got specifically but it's almost certainly a mix of different things. What's a decent flux to use in this case?
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Sep 28, 2013 20:13
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I believe you can use malt vinegar to check for the presence of magnesium, if you're planning to recycle material that's something you might consider. How are you going to melt It down?
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Sep 28, 2013 21:51
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At work we have a small gas-fired foundry furnace from some ancient era that is still plumbed and completely functional, but which hardly sees any use these days. We fired it up the other day and managed to melt maybe 10 lbs. of the aluminum and pour a couple of small ingots, but there was a huge amount of dross to skim off. I'm just interested in recovering as much of the metal as possible. e: oh, well that's neat. The second post of the thread is a huge mega-post from AbsentMindedWelder explaining everything about casting aluminum. I should really go back and check these things sometimes. Sweet! Sagebrush fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Sep 28, 2013 |
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Sep 28, 2013 22:03
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Afaik if you're looking to sell the aluminium as scrap, there's virtually no circumstance in which you won't lose money melting it down into ingots yourself. Plus I've heard some recyclers specifically don't like ingots because it makes it impossible to determine the original alloy; i.e. scrap cast parts are likely to be X or Y, extruded parts alloy Z, whereas an ingot is going to be a bunch of crap all mixed together. Ask your scrapper how he prefers receiving metal for recycling.
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Sep 28, 2013 23:05
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Oh, no, I don't mean recycling like selling the metal for money -- I mean recycling it myself into a usable form. We have an entire sand-casting setup here that, again, hasn't seen use in many years, but somewhere down the line I'd like to start screwing around with it. Making a bunch of practice ingots seemed like a good way to start that also generates a supply of raw material for later.
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Sep 28, 2013 23:13
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