In Dallas this week...  Decided to take a trip to a local flea market(bad idea) and then went to the Old City Park(better idea...)  The park did have two blacksmiths working.  I did my usually thing of hanging out for the afternoon and seeing what I could learn from them...  I'm no longer going to turn my nose up at railroad spikes as a source for quick tools.

Good day on the forge.  I finished the bootscrapers that I'm giving away as gifts.  Definitely not the greatest work in the world but I'm still learning.  Anyway, I made five of them.  I needed to get them done before Tuesday.  I leave for a business trip for about 8 days.  Going to Dallas, not one of my favorite places to go.  However, I did find a historical museum that has a blacksmithing shop so I'm hoping to check it out.

Rain drove me inside today so not much progress to report but I did pick up a pair of inner calipers at the flea market to help make the circles close to perfect...

Tonight I was on www.anvilfire.com.  I decided to go and get some advice on how to do the hub and spokes for the clock gears.  The part I need to teach myself to make next can be seen below...

The weld points of the spokes to the wheel can be clearly seen.  However, where the spokes meet the hub shows no sign of welding.  Even when looking at the X-ray, there is no evidence of welds.  I had a theory that a single piece of bar material could be used to make the hub and spokes.  My thought was to split the bar from either ends.  Where the bar was split would become the spokes.  The only problem I had was that it would leave a lot of material to thin out.

So I went on Anvilfire and asked for advice.  The solution was so simple that I'm embarrased that I didn't think of it.  I was very close.  I'm going to try starting with a single bar.  About 2 1/4" x 1/2" x 16".  Instead of just splitting the material to form the spokes, I am going to remove about a 1" wide strip down the length of either end.  So, before I begin the real shaping, it will essentially look like a tall, skinny "H".

I will take that "H" and spread the arms to make the "X" shape.  Hopefully it will work!!!

Smoke, smoke, everywhere...

  Allright, I don't actually have a real shop.  My woodworking and blacksmithing is done out of my garage.  To do blacksmithing, I pull the stuff out of the garage, set it up in the driveway and get to work.  Occasionally, I have a problem like I had last night.

  When I shut down for the night, I put some water on the fire but not too much.  If the fire is cooled too rapidly, the forge may potentially crack from the sudden temperature change.  So when I put the forge back into the garage, it is still pretty hot.  Usually, without a good flow of air, the fire will go out on its own.

  Last night I'm sitting in the house several hours after closing down the forge when I begin to notice the familiar smell of sulphur drifting through the house.  I go out to the garage and find the upper half of the garage to be very smoky.

  The fire in the forge was not completely out so the coal slowly burned over those hours.  Since it is in the forge, there is no real danger(allright, almost no danger) but it is annoying.

  Today, I picked up a smoke detector for the garage...  Hopefully won't be a problem in the future.

 

So, what are they?

A)  New symbol for the Special Olympics?

B)  Sauron's first attempts at making the One Ring?

C)  My first attempts at clock gears?

  The answer is of course C...  The ring at the bottom is the first ring I was able to complete and weld closed.  It is about 6-7 inches across.  The ring on the upper left is from Sunday.  Its closing weld can be seen in the 1:00 position.  The ring in the upper right is from today.  Its closing weld can be seen in the 10:00 position.  Although it can't be told from the photos, the weld from today is much cleaner than the one from Sunday.  Also, it would have been a much better circle but I was running out of light and I had to rush the last little bit.  I think before I do the spokes of the gears, I am going to practice more circles...  Its boring but necessary.

Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor or the law of parsimony. A problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms. In science, the simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected.  (from http://www.2think.org/occams_razor.shtml)

In other words, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one.

Scott's Razor...

1) A semi-dull instrument that I cut my face with.

2) The simplest way to do something in blacksmithing is probably the method I will try last.

  Well, I decided tonight when I went to clean up from working earlier to try and make a wheel using the bending bar I described in a previous entry.  After two hours I have a completed circle welded closed.  It is close to a perfect circle, about 12 inches across with a diameter varience of probably no more than 1/4".  I did a little cleanup but not an extensive amount. 

  Only two hours to do pretty much a complete circle...  I will get faster at it as I go.  I'm going to clean up the circle a bit more.  Sometime this week, hopefully I will be able to try and add the spokes.  If that goes okay, truing up the circle and gear cutting come next.  I don't plan on using this particular gear in the clock.  This is simply a proof of concept.

  After this evening, I have no doubts that I will eventually be able to make the clock.  I hope for about a year from now.  Realistically, more like 18 months to 2 years.

Too many irons in the fire...  Its more than just an expression...

  I was working on the bootscrapers today and things were going well.  At one point I became briefly distracted but it was a long enough of a period of time.  I ended up burning two pieces of iron.  For those not familiar with blacksmithing, it is possible to actually completely vaporisize the steel if you are not careful...  Other than destorying the two pieces, most the rest of the forge work went pretty well.

  Didn't do much towards the clock today but the day still has a few hours in it.  Also, I got a bit of metal in my eye and I need to go dig it out.  :)

  Today was a good day.  I spent about 3 hours on the forge.  My arm did much better today than it did on Sunday.  Anyway, after doing some yard work, I decided to fire up the forge.  I spent the first hour doing some more work on the bootscrapers.  While I was working, my mind kept coming back to a show I had seen on the History or Discovery.

  The show was talking about cannons through the middle ages.  The earlier cannons were interesting but a cannon from the later middle ages interested me more.  The cannon in question was one from the Mary Rose(a later middle ages English warship).  www.maryrose.org

  Now, I have a soft spot for the Mary Rose.  I've visited the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth 3 times in my life.  There is something about that ship which has always interested me.  Anyway, the show was talking about the cannons recovered from the Mary Rose.

  The show detailed the reconstruction of one of these cannons.  The cannon comes from an extremely complex construction process.  It starts with long iron staves layed side by side to form a cylinder.  Very similar to how you make a wine barrel.  Once the cylinder is formed from the staves, you need someway to hold them together just like the metal bands on a wine barrel.  The way this is done on the cannon is by forming metal rings very similar to the rings you wear on a finger except on a much larger scale.  These rings are heated, placed over the cylinder, then cooled.  During the cooling process, the rings shrink forming a tight band around the staves holding them tight together.  From what I could tell, these rings were down the hold length of the barrel.

  Anyway, during the show, they showed the blacksmiths making the gun.  The part that caught my attention the most was the forming of the rings.  The smith was using a bending bar to form the rings.  A bending bar is like a long two prong fork with the tines pointing out to the side.  It is placed over a hot bar and the leverage of the handle makes it easy to bend the bar. 

  When I had tried to form circles in the past, I had always done it by hammering the metal over the edge of the anvil's horn.  While this worked it has several drawbacks(especially to a new smith like me.)  It tends to create bulges on the edge of the metal where it is struck and it is difficult to make that near perfect circle.

  So, today I decided to make a bending bar and give it a try on my metal.  Now, this idea had occurred to me before I saw the show but I had assumed that the metal was too thick to bend this way.  Well I made the bending bar, heated up some 1 1/4" x 3/8" bar stock, put it in the vice and bent it...

  Damn, it was so easy and so easy to control compared to the hammering.  One of the most common misconceptions by non blacksmiths is that blacksmithing is almost all hammering.  In reality, only about 25-50% of blacksmithing time is hammering at the anvil.

  This also reminded me of one my great weaknesses that I am trying to get rid of.  I have a bad habit of forming theories on how things should be done even when my level of experience is not that great...  Well, I proved myself wrong(I think).  The bending bar will probably be the way that I will form the circles for the clock gears.

Things that suck...

  Well, been a little bit since I've posted.  I've been doing work around the house which was suddenly halted when my pickup's transmission started acting up.  Anyway, I'm making some gifts that need to be done in a few weeks(bootscrapers) and today was the first day that I've gotten forge time in weeks.  Its amazing how difficult it was after not having lifted a hammer for a month.  I made good progress and there should be no problem getting the gifts done but my arm feels like a noodle now...

  I hope to pick up some larger oxy/acetylene cylinders this week.  I already own a pair but they are very small and are usually empty after about an hours worth of work or less if I'm doing cutting.  I'm not going to use modern welding on any of my period items but I will be using it for tools that are difficult to make(usually because I don't have a helper to hold things while I'm working...)