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.

Hopefully some work soon...

Still alive...  Unfortunately over the past few months, work has been extremely busy.  I have had very, very little personal time and what little time I do have usually coincides with the afternoon rainstorms.  For those not from Florida, during the summertime we get rain almost everyday at about 4-5PM.  Since I work outside, this prevents me from working.

Anyway, I hope over the next few weeks that there will be a bit of a slow down and that I can get back to some work on the forge.

Sunday work

  Sunday started with some more work on the hub.  Essentially I had to draw out the arms of the spokes, straighten them in a perfect "X" and punch the hole for the arbor.  Finally, I had to create small tenons to connect into the outer part of the Crown Wheel.  Not much here to show that I haven't shown before.  This picture is just prior to forming the tenons.

Next, on the crown wheel I had to punch the holes for those tenons on the spokes.  I messed one of these (made it too big) but was able recover from it.  The really difficult part here was to force the spokes into wheel.  This really took a lot of muscle, hammering, clamps, etc...  to get it into place.  In the process, the wheel became slightly distorted.  I think I can do some corrective action.  Hopefully the wheel is still in good shape.  This picture shows the spokes in the wheel.



Finally, some pictures of the nearly complete wheel in the frame.





The main problem with the wheel is that the arbor is not perfectly perpendicular to the wheel.  This causes a wobble when the wheel is spun.  With my experience of the great gear, I know I can correct this to some degree.  Hopefully it will be enough.

Even if this wheel does not work out (I hope that it does!), the important thing for me to remember is that I created this in under two days.  If you look back in my blog, when I first attempted the great wheel, that was over several months.  My experience level is getting to the point where I am much faster, more confident, blah, blah, blah...  :)  I will beat this project yet...

Some more work on Sunday...

  I did get in some more work on Sunday.  However, I have not had a chance to upload photos yet.  I will do a longer entry this evening.

Good progress day...

Today I wanted to get started on the crown wheel and I was able to make good progress.

I started with the hub of the wheel.  This is just like the hub I did for the test great wheel I did months ago.  The metal is split into a "Y" shape and stretched out.  Then it is flipped around and repeated.

This is the last photo of the hub that I took.  I wanted to hold off on finishing it to make sure it would work with the crown wheel.

Next I turned to the crown wheel.  The crown wheel has a diameter of approximately 8" with 33 teeth.  Something of an interesting note.  An article that I have used for a lot of my source information had some interesting theories on how you would lay out 33 teeth.  He believed that since the number could not be easily split into halves that it would be difficult to layout with a divider.  He had some interesting theories on how you could layout the teeth.

In reality, it was quite easy with the divider.  I divided by 11 then divided those by 3.  I started by laying this out on a straight bar.  It was about 1/8" thick by 1 1/2" (I think).



I then removed the waste with a hacksaw.  Because of the thinness of the metal, this was fairly easy.  I am still a little bothered that I don't have more evidence on using hacksaws but it seems perfectly logical.  Medieval hacksaws do exists and they could easily be made to be hard enough it is just that I do not know of any woodcuts, manuscripts, etc...  that show a smith using a hacksaw.



You may notice a little tab on the end of the stock.  I was originally going to rivet the wheel together but I decided to braze it instead so the tab was cut off.  After cutting the metal, I began to curve it into shape.  This shows the crown wheel in the fire.



Finally, after curving the wheel, I took a photo of the crown wheel with the verge and foliot just to see them together for the first time.  The tabs are not yet on the verge and foliot and I haven't placed the hub in the crown wheel.  Also at the bottom of the photo, you can see that the crown wheel is not yet welded together.  I want to hold that off until I get the hub in the crown wheel to make it safe.



Finally, a picture of the crown wheel on its own.  I did double check and when it is brazed together, the teeth are perfectly spaced  (probably no more than 1/32" inch variation.)

Clockmaking weekend...

  I have tried to clear my schedule for this weekend.  I am going to make the serious effort to do the crown wheel this weekend and get the clock ticking.  At this moment, I don't have any commitments either personally or professionally so I am really hopeing to get a solid 2 days of blacksmithing in.

  The key right now for me to work on the clock is simply time at the forge.  I truly feel that I have all of the skills (although I am sure I will make plenty more mistakes.)  I've also noticed that over the past 6 months in particular that when I do work at the forge, I have a lot more confidence and that I am working much faster.

  I may try to get some evening work in as well this week.  With summer coming on, there are a few hours after I get home that I can work.