Joshua States

Very nice! Are the bolsters pinned on, or soldered?

Oh, how I want to do this!

Ball end mills and router bits

I always do cold bluing "hot". I will heat the piece/part/blade in my HT oven to 170-200 F and apply the bluing paste with a felt dauber.

I've never worked with it either, so consider this uninformed rambling.... Maybe isolated heat and straighten hot? Don't mind me, I never worry about ruining a perfectly good pirce of steel by pushing the envelope.

This is a weird one. I seriously don't know what to say. I have had a Paragon 24" oven for like 12 years and never had a problem. Except for that time I melted a mokume billet....... Those are some nice looking handles.

Nice one Alan. I have a couple of forged integrals sitting on the bench in various states of forgottenness.......Maybe I can get around to them someday too.

Etched this morning before work.

I haven't been in the shop for a month now and this weekend I took some time to work on getting this order for 6 PW baldes ready. They have been through HT and profiled for a while. Customer's specific shapes and sizes. I got 4 of them ready to etch.

Very cool handle. I always draw back my tangs with a torch and can straighten them fairly easily.

OK that's one for my feeble memory. How do you remove the sprues? Rough cut with a bandsaw or hacksaw and grind flush is my assumption.

There's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said. Love your work. Thanks for sharing

The house has power now. I had about 60 feet of drain pipe to lay and it needed to slope at 1/4 inch per foot through the crawl space. So I made a scaled drawing of the path it would take, did some calculations, and made these little cradles to hold the pipe. Worked like a charm.

Holy smokes! 3000 years ago in a dark smithy that was probably little more than a man-made cave, the craftsmen set their tools to work.

With all the different colors out there for polishing rouge.......

Sewn wheel or unsewn?

Going back out there this weekend to fasten the vapor barrier and lay the building drain pipe.

Following. The image is hauntingly familiar. Almost like something out of an ancient memory from another life in Sumaria or Babylon.

I think it is more than possible, in fact almost guaranteed, that forge design can be over-thought, over engineered, and complicated needlessly. Too many times I have seen modifications to a basic design that seem to me to be solutions in search of a problem. There is a general acceptance that the "swirling effect" is absolutely required for efficient forge design. My response is "show me the test and comparison data". If you look at that photo of my welding forge above, you will see a 12" x 3" ribbon burner in a 16" long forge with an interior diameter of about 8". The burner is located in the center, pointed straight down. Most folks say this causes a "hot spot" directly under the burner and I'm risking burning my steel. Seems logical right? My short answer is it doesn't work that way. The long answer is it works quite the opposite, especially at lower than welding temps. For some weird reason unknown to me, the center of this forge runs colder than the sides. When I tried cocking the burner off plumb, I got a cold spot on the other side of the billet, uneven heat, and a buggered weld. I have tried to photograph the cold spot, but it's very difficult to get a good pic Here is the best one I have. I have this forge set up so I can run it at 1900 F and 2000 F for general foging of the steels I generall use and with a click of a ball valve, jump up to welding heat. At welding heat, the sides of the billet generally tend to come up faster and reach welding temp before the entire top does. I know this because I still use some flux in my forge welding of PW billets. I can see the sides sweating and bubbling before the top does. This is impossible to photograph.

All of the ribbon burners I have made follow the Emmerling model and the gas/air tube comes in directly behind the ceramic burner perpendicular to the burner. One of the things I remember about the Paragon oven is it will not begin firing a program if the furnace temp is less than 100*C below the target F1 temp. Have you tried the basic reboot? Unplug it, spin around 3 times, and plug it back in.

1. Build ideas/concepts - As previously mentioned, rain and wind combining mean you need to be able to enclose a portion of the shop against the weather. Instead of just one solid wall why not create two sections perpendicular to that wall at each end. Maybe even add a couple of swinging doors so you can close it up like a big cabinet with the tool racks, bench and electrical equipment now protected? 2. What are your pro's and cons - It's difficult at best to identify a benefit to having the blacksmith shop outdoors unless you plan on conducting demonstrations.....all the previous considerations are negatives, but not deal killers. Depending on where you live and how close your neighbors are, a shop building may bring unwanted attention from things like the HOA, the fire dept, the zoning and building commission, you get the idea. If you build it, they will come. 3. How to protect your tools from the elements - See the enclosure idea above. There is also just shopping around second-hand stores and garage sales for steel cabinets, file cabinets, any type of furniture that is basically weather tight or can be covered with a tarp to keep out water. 4. Workspace considerations, how big of a work area for your beginner shop, - Figure out how much room you need for the tools you have and the ones you will buy within the next 6 months. Then double that space requirement. 5. extra considerations ideas for this kind of workspace. - Location on the lot in terms of safety. You mentioned putting it under the large maple tree and my first thought was "fire hazard".

Here's basically how I do it with a couple minor mods. I spent a few years collecting scrap wood and a couple of weekends making charcoal. I made 160 pounds of the stuff and still have most of it.

That would make a really nice slack belt grinder for handles.

Tons of activity there. Looks great! Hope your healing is swift.

+1 The addition of the colored stripes in the handle is eye catching