Finial posts cut

A note before I go into the work today.  Currently I am working at a slower pace.  There are several reasons for it.  The primary reason is just that it has been 5 years since I consistently did blacksmithing.  As a result, I am not as in good of shape for it as I need to be.  The primary issue is my hammer arm.  I am still building up the endurance.  However, the moment my arm feels weak at all, I stop.  An arm that is tired can cause a bad hammer blow that can lose hours of work.

Anyway, excuses aside I feel that things will begin to accelerate now.  I am feeling good.  Things are looking good.  I am sure I will have some setbacks but that is part of working on this project.  I hope to get the corners done next weekend.  Once those are done, the rest of the frame is rather easy to put together and things will really start moving then.

So today, I worked on cutting the posts that the corner finials will sit on.  It really was not anything special, it just involved cutting some metal and shaping up the pieces just a bit.  Right now, the lengths are not the same.  That is not an issue because they have not been cut yet.  So nothing terribly exciting but here are the work pictures.

In the top photo are three of the corner pieces.  The top piece is after being cut, the middle is in the process of being cut (using a chisel) while the bottom one is just marked for cutting.