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Hi guys, I've been tooling up in my little shop getting ready to finally dive in with both feet. I made up a list of simple tools I feel like I'll be needing in order to make my work a little more efficient. I find myself using a guillotine tool more often than spring fullers when I go up to my local blacksmith school so I attempted to make a simple one that I found in the book "the backyard blacksmith." The dies are high carbon steel, leaf spring shims/spacers that spark tested the same as a piece of leaf spring scrap I had around. I heat cycled them 3 times to critical to soften them up and see no need to harden them. I'm not the greatest mig welder, so I'm not 100% sure this will hold up in time. But I've already noticed I need to reconfigure this tool. I tested it out yesterday with a piece of scrap lumber, and right away I noticed that because the dies are equal size the top die springs right out of the tracking. I'm wondering if any of you have attempted to build your own that's a simple design but better than this one. I'm only planning on working on stock sizes up to maybe 1/2 an inch bur for the most part probably smaller. I do plan on filling the center of the dies with weld to ensure then don't collapse over time and use as well as a striking plate on the top die. No I do not have a true anvil yet, and I'm not planning on using this with my little harbor freight cast junker. I have a good post vies I case mount it in until I find my anvil.

Hello, I'm recently made a pretty heavy duty guillotine tool for myself. I made some simple fullering dies for it out of mild steel, but as I plan on making other die shapes I'm wondering what others use for steel material? Is mild steel fine? Should I go for a higher carbon content? Should they be hardened? What do you use? Thanks in advance, Eric