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Hello, I am very new to knifemaking and bladesmithing and I am confused about hammering techniques and more specifically which side of the hammer to use for what. My hammer that I use is a 2lb engineer's hammer found at harbor freight that I modified into a rounding hammer on one side. I don't know if I made the "round" part well. I just ground off the edges until the face of one side of the hammer was dome-shaped. My understanding is that the rounding hammer is used to upset the metal in order to move it around quickly. This is because the force of the impact is concentrated into a smaller area when using a round hammer rather than a flat-faced hammer. So from this, I believe it wound be best to use the rounding hammer when forming the tang of the blade and forming the rough shape. Bevels are where I become confused. I'm not sure if I should use the rounding hammer or the flat side. Does anyone have a list of when/where to use the round and flat side of the hammer? Or is there another thread I can read?

Hello guys , I'm Emanuel. I'm a Brazilian and I'm very interested in knife making. I'm entering the journey of bladesmithing with my brother, we will build a little shop together. I have 3 books coming my way from Amazon (The Jim P book about the bladesmithing basics, the 50$ knife shop and The Backyard Blacksmithing) a few days and have been doing the reading on this forum for a week or two (i've a lot of free time right now, as I'm a response from a job interview). So I've read most of the basics from the beginners forum, but I still have some specific questions that I will ask in this post. First question (more of a tip asking): I've a right shoulder bursitis (it's like a permanent tendinitis), do you guys have any tips for hammering style so I don't hurt it more? As a doctor order, I've to do excercises and I think hammering would qualify as a pretty awesome one. Second Question: What would be safer for a forge in a house with kids? (Not that I will let kids play around the forge or any of the gear, but accidents happen and I want to minimize it as much as I can). Third question: I found many info about Venturi Burners and Blown Burners, but some of it was conflicting (specially about the psi involved). How much PSI is needed to run a Venture Burner? Do Venture really have a better temperature control? Can they get to welding temperetures? (I won't try my hand at welding at firt, but want to know that because I don't have enough space to build a dedicated forge to each task). And finally: Is this one a safe Venturi design http://www.rayrogers.com/venturi.htm ? Fourth Question: This is a picture of our usual kitchen gas canister, it has around 28lb 10oz of butane/propane mixture. Would it be a nice cannister or is it too small? With this cannister, will I generate enough psi to run a forge (my main interest is doing a venturi one)? In the space I've available to build my little shop, I'm thinking about putting it outside of the shop, dig a hole through the wall and put a hose to attach it on the burner (for safety reasons, if it blows up, it will be outside with a 8" concrete and brick wall between me and the cannister). Would it make it safer? Finally, my proposition: Could we try to create a pinned topic for steels and their equivalence on other steel name tables that aren't ALDO? I mean, for the most common steels used for bladesmithing (1095, 15n20, etc). We could post the steel and it's composition, and each of us find it on its country table. And after that, we create a unified table with the steels and their names on as many tables as possible. (I can try to explain better if needed ) Thanks for your time. Sorry for the long post and any english mistakes! If I find myself with more doubts, I will try to keep them all here Best regards, Emanuel Araújo