Alan Longmire

Do you have access to a kiln? If so, you could cast a rod of anhydrous borax by melting regular borax powder into a mold and firing it at around 2000 F. Otherwise, you could use the powder and bond it with either hide glue or white wood glue. It wouldn't be hard, but it wpuld gold together.

I keep forgetting about those... if you search for one, call it a standard bull pin. They come in many sizes, and are indeed handy drift material.

The bits look like a modified version of these: The center point is shorter and the spur is longer, with the center point still a bit longer than the spur. And you won't need the flat cutting part for the circle and dot. If you score an old one (these are a 17th-early 19th century pattern) and cut off the flat, you can use them to make center-hole bone button blanks as well.

Nice.

I find it extremely ironic that what I do for a living often involves talking to people who have had a similar experience to Arthur Dent's attempt to find the plans for a bypass scheduled to take his house. Our plans are only easier to get in that the locked filing cabinet is not in a disused lavatory in the basement with a sign on the door that reads "Beware of the Leopard."

Uncle Al's are the gold standard. They are obnoxiously loud, but utterly bulletproof.

Like that, or this, from Matthew Berry's blog: And here: The vents connecting back to the tree mean you'll most likely get porosity in the sprue, but who cares? It might also help if you re-oriented those little flat parts to be vertical, with vents coming off the bottom end and looping back to the sprue way high in the system. All these pictures are from vacuum casting, and as such they don't have nearly the amount of venting a gravity cast needs. Have you looked into centrifugal or even steam casting? Both kind of scary, and you're limited as to the siz

As usual, what Jerrod said. If you're using an anti-scale compound or a muffle tube with a bit of charcoal in it, decarb isn't an issue. Somewhere around here I posted some pics of what soaking and subsequent normalizing does to grain size in W1. A five minute soak at around 1600 degrees created table-salt-sized grain; one normailzation took that to a decent size, three made it fine as silk. The basic rules of heat treating straight carbon steels are few and easy. 1. Do not soak, no matter what you saw on YouTube. 2. Always normalize 3x after

That file will be either 1095 or W1, neither of which need more than a couple of minutes (like, seriously, two) at temperature. Longer than that and unless it's W2 and has vanadium in there, you'll get grain growth. On the one hand, this improved hardenability. On the other, it decreases toughness. Be sure to consider your alloy when adding soak time, most of the simpler ones don't need much, if any at all.

Yes, but you two are approaching the issue with a separation of about 2700 years of technology. I do agree on the vents. Small parts at the bottom of the sprue tree should have so many vents coming off the thinnest sections that they look like big spiders. The vents hook back into the trunk, unless you add a riser, which in some cases may not be a bad idea.

It never stopped, it just seemed to peak around 2014-2015, with minor resurgences since. Like now.

Ariel Salavierra was doing it back around 2004. Dunno if he was the first or not. It is a cool effect, but it's basically just a big braze joint. Not ideal metallurgically, and yes, it does increase corrosion via galvanic reaction, but keep it clean and dry and it'll outlast you. Drop it in wet dirt for 100 years and all you'll find is copper foil.

I continue to know where my towel is. Anything else, not so much...

Lovely! I like all these little Birka-style saxes showing up these days. It's just over 15 years since the first seax rennaissance (driven by this very forum, btw!), maybe a new one is arriving?

Yes indeed I did!