Shiiiii....

Well, the knife that I posted the photos of has turned out to be a failure. The heat treat came out alright but I discovered that the bevels weren't at all even, and there wasn't any way to fix it-- I worked on it but it was starting to not look like the knife I was trying to make and I wasn't getting very far with the bevel fixing anyway. So I bent it, chopped a 2x4 with it then shaved, threw it at the ground a few times and called it a day. The pisser is that I'd put about 10 hours in to the reclamation of what was a pretty ugly blade experiment (that includes the guard which was about 80% done).

grrrrr.....

First Bowie WIP

Here are some pics from the heat treat of the "bowie" I'm working on. I put bowie in quotes because no one knows what Jim Bowie's knife looked like and anything that's large anymore is either called a bowie or a seax. I digress, on to the pics:
Prepping for heat treat-

  

 Normalize cycle number 3

 

Burning off the oil from HT 1 prepping for second heat treat. I've never done this before, but I've heard of it and decided to give it a try. Dramatic, yes?

 

Quick thanks to Jaime Forero for bringing over several filters this weekend- I shot these with the UV filter and I think they came out really good.

Website

I've been trying to work on the Alchemy Forge website since the weekend, without much success. When my old computer (the stolen one) was running Vista and then Win7 I didn't have any problems with Yahoo Site Builder. Now that my new machine has Win7 Pro running, I can only make the smallest of changes, and only once. So when I fix a typo or smooth out a rough section of my prose I find that I can't save the file to then publish it.
The Mrs has been taking a mass media class about blogging and web design, and has moved her personal site and blog to a new provider. I may do the same and switch over to a WordPress-based format which will allow for easy creation of dropdown menus and embedding. I'll keep the blog up to date with major changes.

Catching up on life

It's been a while since I posted, and about as long since I've been in the shop. The 31 months it took to finish my BA kept me out of the shop more than I liked and it's been hard to get going again. I had a conract writing roject at the end of September, which overlapped my dealing with my backpack being stolen (including laptop and backup drive- long story). I've been trying to catch up on missed TV (Netflix is -not- helping me get back in the shop) and books that have been collecting on my shelves. Not to mention that I loooove video games and the BioShock2 multiplayer has been really addictive. I've also been reapplying to master's programs in public history, which has involved rewriting my statements of purpose and waiting for letters of recommendation from instructors.

In the mean time, I've been making slow progress on a bowie style that is going to have a coffin handle and "s" guard, a dragon-tooth dagger and a quasi-tanto (which is taking forever because I'm trying to do it the "right" way following the instructions in Walter Sorrells' DVDs). Using a sketch book has been helpful in figuring out how pieces fit together before I start mangling metal.

I'm hopeful that I'll finish that bowie in the next couple of weeks and I'll have it posted for sale in time to have it shipped for the holidays.

Rowan handled knife

Not much to say, OAL is about 2.5" the customer just wanted a simple knife for cutting yarn and other generally small things. I'm happy to oblige.

Anvil blocks

I made these a couple of years ago with the intention of selling them, then started school and forgot they were on the bench :) The blocks are cut from 2x2 1045 and each is at least 2" tall (the one pictured is closer to 2-1/8" ). I gave them all a coating of my Goddard's Goop and they all look like this one (no, it has not been touched up on a sander or anything like that). The one that I use looks almost as good. On mine I gave it four different radii so I have a nearly sharp edge through about 3/8" radius (I didn't measure, but if I had to guess it looks like a section of 3/8" bar). My anvil doesn't have a single square edge, so that's why I made these. I figured they would also be good for smiths who have radii ground into their anvils already, but maybe need a much larger radius than normal for a particular project. They fit a 1" hardy hole and each stem is at least 4" long.

These are $30 each plus $5 for USPS flat rate to the US- no international, and I'm talking to you, Canada :|  (UPS is $10 to ship plus $5 for packaging, also to US addresses only).

Ugh- paint...

The other night I started in on a new project- a fireplace poker like the one I made at Jerry Culberson's in 2007. The trick to this project is hot chiseling a tail onto the end of a bar and then forging it into a hook. Anyway, I noticed a smell that I thought was paint, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I haven't used the big forge since I relined it and thought the sairset mortar might have had some zinc in it so I chalked it up to the first firing burning off the zinc.

Imagine my surprise tonight when the smell came back. Well, I assume the sairset does not use zinc (because that would be stupid, seeing as how it's designed to be used in kilns). It took me a little while, but I finally figured out that it was the new shelf I added to the front of the forge so I can rearrange the bricks. Here's the lesson: if you're going to use something that has been painted, either make sure the paint is going to be burned off (as opposed to just offgassing repeatedly when it gets really warm) or grind that crap off.

Better photos are coming...

I just felt like updating the blog, and I think the most exciting news right now is that a friend and I built a diffuser box for taking photos. I'll post pictures of it, but basically it's 1/2" PVC pipe with some elbows and "t" connectors to make two squares that are connected at the top to form an open bottomed box (yes, pictures would -really- help). We tried it on a few simple items, comparing regular flash photogrpahy in ambient light, to forcing the camera to use the light diffused into the box and then allowing the camera to fill-flash the box. Both pictures with the box were vastly superior to the "regular" photos.

I also purchased a hot-shoe flash for my camera to help control the flash even more. I took some pictures at the Washington State Convention Center over labor day weekend and the onboard flash was just strong enough to give people red eye, but not really improve the photo. This flash should be strong enough to take pictures at 40 feet using ISO 100 eqivalent. I've seen some test examples that people have done and they look great. the unit reads the info from the camera and adjusts the power of the flash AND the distance of the flash bulb from the opening of the housing to give the perfect lighting for the situation (in theory).

So, hopefully no more flashy pictures that don't really show the detail I'm looking at. Which is more aesthetically pleasing for readers and more informative for potential customers.

EDIT to add picture:

New video- flint and steel firemaking

Two days, two videos. If I hadn't had tech problems, I might have been able to do even one more about primitive fire making.

First Video! One Brick Forge

My first published video. hooray!

A few updates

Greetings all,
I just wanted to let folks know that I have updated my beginner's page. It's new words for similar ideas. If you read through it and have questions, please let me know. If you know someone who's thinking about getting started, please spread the word.

The twin seaxes are in my flickr stream and should be on the website this week.

I still have part of my garage to rearrange/tidy up before I start on any projects, but I hope to be back doing work by the end of the week. It's amazing how much I'm able to get done in an evening- finishing that BA really made me see how much time there is in the 6-or-so hours I'm awake after I get home from work.
I have several pieces that were just sitting around half finished. At least one of them will be a fail, but I'm going to give it a try anyway. A couple of them are victims of my "must do everything by hand" mentality. They'll be on the belt sander and finished in short order- including a snake themed camp knife that should be awesome.

Burner Blowers

Though I didn't spend much physical time in the shop while finishing my degree, I did think about it a lot. One of the things I'd considered was a less costly blower fan for my burner. Now, you're probably thinking "BFD, it's just a fan" and that is true, but I like to aim for efficiencies when I can, and should I need to run this stuff off of a smaller power source, the issue of power consumption would be important. By way of comparison, a venturi burner uses more propane than a blown burner does, but no electricity which is one of the "selling points" when people discuss burner design- you can run it anywhere! If I had a smaller blower, then I could feasibly be able to use my forge wherever I had a car and power inverter- or even a car battery.   My long standing blower is a 120CFM unit with a 60CFM side blower that runs off of 110V pulling 1.1A to give 3000RPM. I don't recall if I have any pictures of it in action, but for day-to-day forging, I kept the piece of cardboard over the opening such that there was almost no air getting in (note, there is a side inlet so that the fan never pulls zero air, I assume this is a safety feature to keep the motor from burning out).   Last night I tried a 15CFM unit running off of 110V pulling 0.21A at 1750RPM. I was impressed. I made a restrictor plate out of an altoids tin and can adjust the airflow that way. I can choke it down to 1450degF if I mess with the propane input, and I "cranked it" up to 2101degF. That said, if I choked it down too low it would gurgle, burp and then report- so it was drawing propane back into the motor and igniting it. Or, more likely, the heat from the burner pipe was flowing up to the blower, taking the propane with it. If the burner outlet could be outside of the forge then I might be able to run this small blower. A backfire situation is not great, but it gave a lot of warning before it happened, and it's just a matter of not running too much gas with too little air.   It also doesn't give welding heat, but I kept the old blower choked out even when I made that billet for the twin seaxs so it was still overkill. I'm thinking something on the order of 30CFM pulling 0.5A might give me the air for welding with the control for "low temp" heat treating IF I were to want a single unit for all of the forging I could conceive of doing. In the meantime, the larger blower will stay on a shelf for those high heat needs. [EDIT: to add, the small blower became too unstable for long term forging. The gurgling and backfiring became an issue when the blower had any noticable restriciton. I have gone back to the larger blower, but will continue to look for a smaller unit.]

I'm baaack

What's up my faithful followers? I finished my degree (graduated Summa Cum Laude) and my professional writing certificate, so I'm free to spend more time in the shop.

Tonight I finished my twin Seaxes, and I completely revised the beginner's page. The seax pics are on my flickr feed and will be added to the galleries this week.

It's good to be back, I hope I can update far more frequently.

Laters.

5 Elements Forge Hammer-in

My friend Geoff hosted the 2nd hammer-in in what may be a series. He continued working on a blade that he started last time as part of his press-testing. This time it was surface grinding and heat treating. Photos are at http://alchemyforge.net/5EF-H2-jan2010.html The finished knife will be donated to the Northwest Knife Collectors as a raffle item at their next fundrraiser, and I think they decided to do a sort of rifleman's knife with a forged S-guard... but I wasn't privy to the entire conversation, so we'll see how this progresses.

He also had engraver Tom Sterling in attendance with a hands-on demo. I wasn't able to participate in that, but it looked like fun. Geoff's Mrs made some killer chili, cinnamon rolls and cornbread, and the lunch table conversation was interesting and stayed on-topic (i.e. it didn't stray into the political) which was nice.