Finally, some forge time

  The past few months have not been fun.  Way too much work, way too little time.  But, I finally got back out to the forge.

  It really wasn't that exciting.  This weekend I am teaching some classes including a fire starting class.  As part of that class, I am giving out fire starting kits.  So this afternoon I started forge some basic fire starters.

  I am really glad that I didn't work on the clock.  Because I haven't been doing any work on the forge, my muscles were out of shape.  It didn't take much for me to get tired.

  This weekend I will be doing some smithing as well but probably won't be able to get to the clock.

I promise, something new soon...

  Work sucks...  I can't go into too much detail here because I don't want to get into trouble but my company has been preparing for a possible strike and I've been in the middle of those strike preparations.  It hasn't been fun and it has kept me busy.  But it looks like things are very close to be resolved so hopefully I will be doing more here soon.

  Anyway, the only real news to post it that I have begun to assemble materials to make a set of bellows.  Right now for my forge I use a hand crank that is about 100 years old.  I've been wanting to make a set of bellows for some time.  I have mostly wanted them for when I do historical demos.  It is hard to look like you are doing something medieval when you have a 20th century hand crank.

  So I picked up some duck cloth for the bellows yesterday.  The canvas will take the place of leather.  I'm using canvas instead of leather for cost, maintenance, simplicity, etc...  The bellows that I am making will be about 5 feet long by 3 feet wide.  They will be a style of bellows known as double lung.  Although this style is more colonial than medieval, the average observer won't know this.  I am using this style because the true medieval style works best when you have a second person working the bellows and they tend to "puff" more.  In other words they alternate puffing and not puffing much like a set of fireplace bellows.  The double lung bellows tend to give a more constant stream of air.

  I hope to start providing real updates soon.  This has been a very frustrating stretch for me.