A good day out...

  Today, the local blacksmithing group was meeting at a gentleman's shop over on the Gulf Coast.  Before I go any further, a bit of history on the area.

  The town I went to is Tarpon Springs, Florida.  This area was mostly populated by Greek immigrants around 1900.  The brought much of their culture with them as well as one of their occupations, sponge diving.  Sponge harvesting is still one of the big businesses in the area.

  The gentleman's shop we went to makes traditional sponge diving helmets.  These are the large helmets often associated with underwater salvage or other heavy work.  For examples, visit this site.  http://www.divingheritage.com/lerioskern.htm  This is the shop that we went to.

  He gave a great presentation.  Very friendly individual and very open the sharing his knowledge.  And his shop was full of many great antique tools.

  As the day was winding down, he was talking about dredging part of the ocean out next to his shop.  Part of the dredging brought up a large amount of rusty metal bars.  When I finally got a closer look, I had a surprise.  It was real wrought iron and a lot of it.  Some of asked if he would mind if we took it.  He had no problem and I ended up with the lion's share of it.  I probably have about 50' of 1 1/2" by 1/2" wrought iron.  A few spots are heavily rusted but since it is wrought iron it will be easy to fold it back on itself and weld it together to thicken it back up...

  Anyway, a few good day.  Lot of neat things and some free wrought iron.

  On another note, over the past few weeks I have been thinking about the problems I have been having in making any real progress on the clock over the past few months.  I think the real problem is that I have been working on the clock at demos.  I tend to rush things and mess them up.  So, for the foreseeable future, I am only going to work on the clock at home when no one is watching.

Still working on first gear...

  I finally got out to the forge to work on some stuff just for myself.  Primarily, I worked on forging another outer ring for the gear.  As I mentioned in a prevous post, this was a heavier stock.  I'm pretty happy with how this one came out.  I started to work on getting the spokes attached to the outer ring, but I wasn't real happy with how that was coming out so I stopped for the night.

  I haven't been able to do much smithing for about 2 months now but I should be able to get back to it on a regular basis so hope to make some real progress soon.

 

Long time, no entry...

So, just realized that I haven't put up an entry in a little while so thought I would drop in some notes.

Two weekends ago, I did a demo for a local town.  On Saturday, I made a trivet which is a three legged platform placed over a campfire that is used to hold frying pans.  I also made a shovel for moving my coal.  And finally, I decided to make a new circle for my main clock gear.

The first circle I made was a bit two small and also I had made it at another demo and my welding wasn't pretty.  I had overheated the metal and had some burn damage..  So I decided to work on a new ring.  This one came out pretty well as well but I did make a somewhat significant mistake on the weld as well.  I had not allowed for enough overlap and the area of the weld was a bit on the thin side.  I also noticed after I got it done that I had used 1/4" stock instead of 3/8" stock.  Don't know how that happend but oh well...

Sunday of the event was a no-go for me.  The winds got too high for me to start up my fire.  So I packed up on Sunday to head home.

I made a surprise visit back to Ohio a week ago for my parent's 45th anniversary so a lot of last week was non-productive.

This past weekend I did another demo for a railroad festival.  It was a bit of a drive for me but I was doing it for a friend.  On the way to the event, I came across an accident where a vehicle had struck a power line and started a fire.  I used up my fire extinguisher before the fire department arrived so I need to get that recharged.  No one was hurt.

I set up at the festival on Saturday and had a lot of fun.  I did another trivet (this one had twists).  After that, I had a gentleman who was involved with civil war reenactment and he requested a specific style of S-hook for his coffee pot.  Essentially, the design of the coffee pot did not allow for it to hang easily from a basic S-hook.  I came up with a design that looked like an upside down "Y".  It had two hooks on the bottom for the coffee pot.  I tried to give it to him for free but he insisted on giving me some money for it.

Finally, I started another ring for the clock's main gear.  This is larger than the first ring by about 1" on the radius.  I think when I made the frame, I made it a touch larger that I should have so I am bumping up the gear size.  Also, I made sure to use 3/8" stock this time.  I got that circle about 75% done before the end of the day.  That was fine, I had already decided I would not weld another ring closed in front of the public.  I tend to rush it and it ends up not as nice as I would like.

If things go well, I should be doing some more smithing this week...