Thursday, January 7, 2016
Feel Free
Please feel free to post on this blog, folks, just keep it family oriented and blacksmith related
Smokeless Shops
Creating a vortex
An
Iforgeiron visitor to my shop remarked that he didn't smell smoke in
my shop. I am posting this topic to explain the lack of smoke in my
shop. If you look at the forge pipes going up the side of my
barn/shop, you will see at the top of both smokestacks turbines like
you see on the top of exhaust hoods at restaurants, which act like
sails,catching wind and creating a vortex inside the pipes which suck
the smoke right up the pipes.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Lighting a Coal Fire
TO
LIGHT A FIRE
BY JACK LONDON
PATTERN(STEWARTTHESMITH)
The first impediment that the novice
faces is starting and maintaining a coal fire in a forge. In order
to forge anything with any level of efficiency and competancy, a
suitable fire for the project to be forged must be started and
maintained. Although other blacksmiths may make fires differently
from the way I was taught, perhaps this article can help some
incipient blacksmiths to heat steel easily, using these methods.
I recently attended a forge-in in
which the demonstrators took a lunch break. They let the fire go
out. When it was time for the next smith to give his lecture, he had
a hard time lighting up the coal for the next demo. I know there are
different kinds of coal, and different qualities. However, the
method for fire starting that I learned will hopefully enable smiths
to light up easiy, with a minimum of work to do so.
After cleaning out the ash basin
below the fire pot, remove all the ash, coal, and clinker out of the
fire pot. Ball up about five pieces of newspaper, and place them in
the fire pot. The next step is to tear up corregated cardboard into
four inch by four inch pieces and place them over the balled up
newspaper in a pile of cardboard. Take a piece of newspaper and roll
it up like a fuse, then light one end of it. That rolled up,
lit-at-one- end newspaper then gets used like an igniter to light up
the balled-up newspaper under the stack of cardboard pieces. As soon
as the balled up newpaper catches fire, quickly hand-crank your hand
cranked blower with your left hand, while shovelling coal onto the
cardboard with your right hand. You know you will be successful in
starting your coal fire if you see yellow smoke coming out of the
coal with the burning, fanned cardboard below it. If you have a
rheostat-controlled forge blower, perform the previous steps using
the electric blower to fan the cardboard with coal piled atop that.
After a short while, if you used
enough cardboard pieces lit up under the coal, that coal will turn to
coke…….very hot coke. To make more coke for your fire, surround
the ignited coke with more coal; the hot burning coke at the center
of the fire in the fire pot will burn off the water and sulfur in the
coal to form more coke. In this way, your fire is an organic thing,
needing to be fed while you use the center of the fire to heat steel
or iron.
After awhile, depending upon the
quality of your coal, a clinker will form in your fire pot after a
number of heats. Clinker is a combination of rock, slag, and
impurities in your coal, along with scale that came off the steel and
iron which you have been forging. Due to gravity, it sinks to the
bottom of your firepot, and impedes the flow of air which stokes your
burning coke at the heart of your fire. Clinker is an impediment to
heating your steel evenly. To get rid of it, quickly rake all of the
hot coke towards your cowl or exhaust in your chimney, shovel out all
the clinker down in the firepot, then turn on the fan as you scoop
the still-hot coke back into the firepot, FANNING it. Then, as your
hot fire is restored, rake more fresh coal surrounding the sides of
the hot coke, which will in turn replenish the coke around the sides
needed to keep your fire contantly running. To control the growth of
coke from coal around the sides of the fire, you can use a sprinkler
can dousing the edges with water to slow down the coking process on
the edges of your forge fire. I have had very poor results with
clinker breakers on standard firepots. They generally do not work
well. The way I just outlined cleaning a clinkered fire is far more
reliable. The master who taught me did his fires in this manner, and
it is how his dad did it, and his dad’s dad.
If you are going to take a lunch
break and want your fire still smouldering when you return, you can
do what is called “banking your fire”. Instead of putting a
small amount of coal around the edges of your fires in order to coke
it, make a large pile of coal at the edge of the fire away from the
cowl. Then turn up the fan four about two minutes, then turn it off.
That big pile of coal at the edge of your fire acts as insulation,
which holds in the heat at the center of your firepot. When you
return, and turn on the fan again, or crank your hand cranked fan,
your fire will restore to its former glory!
I sincerely hope that these
firemaking tips will help novices to start and maintain a coal fire.
Future articles of mine will cover the different types of fire for
different types of forging operations. Good luck!
Stewartthesmith
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
How I Became a Blacksmith
STRANGE
TWISTS AND TURNS IN LIFE
Stuart Geisler
Editor of
The Burholme Stamp Club Newsletter
As a ten year old boy, I was full of intellectual curiosity. Growing up in the New York projects, reading was the only escape from the daily vicissitudes of project existence. Reading provided a portal for my imagination and my soul. Rather than deal with the daily existence of crime infested hallways which intruded upon my sleep, and therefore my dreams, I could be anything and anyone I wanted to be, in the mind of a kid. Intellectual stimulation was my magic carpet which conveyed me from the dangerous and mundane elements of my life. I could hop from being John Glenn the astronaut to Kirk Douglas the Viking in my imagination. I was a happy child indeed!
My parents, striving for a better life for us, moved to Northeast Philadelphia, where my life drastically changed. This change allowed me to manifest every aspect of my imagination in concrete terms. Living in proximity to the beautiful Pennypack Park, I could build castles, tree houses, and examine the protozoans in a puddle with a microscope, which we could now afford for me. My father, who could now afford a 1957 Chevy, conveyed me to all sorts of interesting places in Philadelphia, from the Rodin Museum to the Philadelphia Zoo.
The place that absolutely captivated me was a little known treasure in the Philadelphia area, the Bryn Athyn Cathedral. Rising out of a small parkland setting, this place put me in mind of medieval castles seen in some of my favorite movies. Carved stone gargoyles sitting on parapets put me in mind of the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This beautiful place absolutely stunned me in its beauty and magnificence. They gave us a free tour, and I was captivated by every nook and cranny. Each and every part of this edifice was hand crafted by master craftsmen, hired by the industrialist John Pitcairn from European guilds back at the turn of the 20th century. They still give free tours of this cathedral.
On our first visit, my father and I stumbled upon the craftsmen’s buildings on the grounds of Bryn Athyn. This accidental discovery, little did I know at the time, would profoundly affect my life. There was an old world craftsman standing there, in the blacksmith shop, taking hot metal out of a fire and hammering it into different shapes on the anvil. His name was Al Walter. This looked like pure magic to me. This “Merlin the Magician” was altering a hot piece of metal, and forging it into the shape of an animal’s head, with sparks flying and the clang of the work he was doing on his anvil. Every aspect of his work reminded me of sorcery; he was creating something from nothing, like an alchemist. I was so excited watching this man ply his craft, I could hardly breathe. This was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen in my short life. Al Walter, taking a short break from his work, explained to my father and I that he had served an apprenticeship as a young boy my age in blacksmithing, stone carving, and wood carving. This master craftsman, and “magician”, was creating works of art for use in the cathedral that were pure beauty to behold. His kind explanation of the type of work he was doing had a deep impression on me. My father, very imaginative and full of curiosity like me, took me back to see this workshop many times as I was growing up.
Years later, while I was studying astrophysics as a graduate student at Villanova University in the late seventies, I was also searching for employment in my field. At that time, due to cutbacks in NASA, jobs in my field were hard to come by. Frustrated while looking for work, and being nagged by my dad to get a job, I perused the classifieds in the Inquirer. Looking in the “A” section for an astronomer’s position, my eyes floated to the next ad for an “apprentice blacksmith position”. My father was hollering-angry, saying “I didn’t spend all that money getting you an education to become a blacksmith”! Like any future blacksmith, I suddenly developed a deaf ear.
Stuart Geisler
Editor of
The Burholme Stamp Club Newsletter
As a ten year old boy, I was full of intellectual curiosity. Growing up in the New York projects, reading was the only escape from the daily vicissitudes of project existence. Reading provided a portal for my imagination and my soul. Rather than deal with the daily existence of crime infested hallways which intruded upon my sleep, and therefore my dreams, I could be anything and anyone I wanted to be, in the mind of a kid. Intellectual stimulation was my magic carpet which conveyed me from the dangerous and mundane elements of my life. I could hop from being John Glenn the astronaut to Kirk Douglas the Viking in my imagination. I was a happy child indeed!
My parents, striving for a better life for us, moved to Northeast Philadelphia, where my life drastically changed. This change allowed me to manifest every aspect of my imagination in concrete terms. Living in proximity to the beautiful Pennypack Park, I could build castles, tree houses, and examine the protozoans in a puddle with a microscope, which we could now afford for me. My father, who could now afford a 1957 Chevy, conveyed me to all sorts of interesting places in Philadelphia, from the Rodin Museum to the Philadelphia Zoo.
The place that absolutely captivated me was a little known treasure in the Philadelphia area, the Bryn Athyn Cathedral. Rising out of a small parkland setting, this place put me in mind of medieval castles seen in some of my favorite movies. Carved stone gargoyles sitting on parapets put me in mind of the movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This beautiful place absolutely stunned me in its beauty and magnificence. They gave us a free tour, and I was captivated by every nook and cranny. Each and every part of this edifice was hand crafted by master craftsmen, hired by the industrialist John Pitcairn from European guilds back at the turn of the 20th century. They still give free tours of this cathedral.
On our first visit, my father and I stumbled upon the craftsmen’s buildings on the grounds of Bryn Athyn. This accidental discovery, little did I know at the time, would profoundly affect my life. There was an old world craftsman standing there, in the blacksmith shop, taking hot metal out of a fire and hammering it into different shapes on the anvil. His name was Al Walter. This looked like pure magic to me. This “Merlin the Magician” was altering a hot piece of metal, and forging it into the shape of an animal’s head, with sparks flying and the clang of the work he was doing on his anvil. Every aspect of his work reminded me of sorcery; he was creating something from nothing, like an alchemist. I was so excited watching this man ply his craft, I could hardly breathe. This was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen in my short life. Al Walter, taking a short break from his work, explained to my father and I that he had served an apprenticeship as a young boy my age in blacksmithing, stone carving, and wood carving. This master craftsman, and “magician”, was creating works of art for use in the cathedral that were pure beauty to behold. His kind explanation of the type of work he was doing had a deep impression on me. My father, very imaginative and full of curiosity like me, took me back to see this workshop many times as I was growing up.
Years later, while I was studying astrophysics as a graduate student at Villanova University in the late seventies, I was also searching for employment in my field. At that time, due to cutbacks in NASA, jobs in my field were hard to come by. Frustrated while looking for work, and being nagged by my dad to get a job, I perused the classifieds in the Inquirer. Looking in the “A” section for an astronomer’s position, my eyes floated to the next ad for an “apprentice blacksmith position”. My father was hollering-angry, saying “I didn’t spend all that money getting you an education to become a blacksmith”! Like any future blacksmith, I suddenly developed a deaf ear.
Tools, Tools, and more Tools
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Anvil for sale. Expertly resurfaced 120 pound Peter Wright rings like a bell in Pennsylvania. stuarttheblacksmith@yahoo.com 375 dollars
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