[TheForge] Steel Stamps

[Stephen McGehee]

I have not been able to read any of the postings here for a month, been
too busy.  Sometime back I started shunting all the Forge messages into
a separate folder so I could go through them when time permitted.  I
started going through all the messages this evening and ran into the
thread about profanity, God, give it a rest, people!  A couple of folks
have done sorts through several thousand posts lately and discovered
some unsettling statistics, one of them being that only 29 percent have
to do with blacksmithing and 45% are folks bitching about what or how
someone said something, or how they spelled it.  This crap undermines
the value of the relevant threads, it wastes the time of all of us.
Someone said on the Junkyard a while back that a lot of internet
blacksmiths would better serve themselves and the rest of the world if
they actually went to the shop occasionally and built a fire and forged
something, if they actually even have a shop...  but then they might
burn themselves, which would invoke cussin'...  end of my rant, now
about blacksmithing:

Several years ago I needed a couple of stamps, both of them in Roman
letters, one straight with my name, another "PINNACLE" arranged in an
arc with a 1" radius, both 1/4" characters.  I got a'holt of a Thomas
register, picked out 4 names from the list of mfgs., and sent a request
for quotations, along with one to Centaur.  Of the 5, Centaur was, of
course, the most expensive...and more than twice the price of the
lowest.
I ordered them from True Mark Engraving, 1250 W. 76th. Cleveland, OH
44107  (216) 631-5530  I paid about $ 160 for two stamps with 5" shanks,
they are still going strong.  They use O-1 steel.
Then you need to make some really cool tongs to hold them.



 Stephen McGehee
 Publisher of
 Irony, the sketchbook of an apprentice blacksmith
 P. O. Box 9822  Pine Bluff, AR 71611
 irony@epowerc.net
 (870) 540-0142
 (479) 643-3299 (farm)
 You can see a sample of IRONY magazine here:

  http://lametalsmiths.org/news/page4.htm  )