[TheForge] Re: triangle bells/rebar

[Mike Spencer]

> On rebar. I've tried rebar from several different sources around
> here, and all of it I've come across is pretty much crap. It forges
> rather well hot, but as soon as it gets cold it really likes to
> break at stress points.

Back when I'd only had a forge and anvil for a couple of months, a
friend who had draft horses brought me his high-tech whiffletree.
Another friend who worked at an aircraft plant hand machined the thing
for him out of aluminum bar stock.  Pretty snazzy.  But the aircraft
guy had made the hooks from rebar: forged to shape, run thru holes in
the aluminum and headed over like a rivet.  One snapped off the first
time my friend hitched up his horse to a stoneboat.

The stuff you learn early on holds a disproportionate place in your
memory.  I never trusted rebar after that.  Even if it *does* hold up
bridges, overpasses and aqueducts.

[Yarn begins]

And I inherited the horse in question.  It arrived one winter night
without warning.  Seems Ol' Dick had gotten out of his stall during a
snowstorm and walked all over the hood and windshield of a late model
car that had failed by a hair to hit him in the darkness, then run off
into the storm.  Denny figured that when the driver, the cops and the
insurance agent came looking for the guy with the big, black, slightly
scratched up horse, he'd better not have that big black horse.  So he put
Dick in a truck and hauled him 60 miles to my place.  I had a huge
barn, plenty of hay and pasture and Ol' Dick had a real nice couple of
years of semi-retirement before I passed him on to a guy who did hay-
and sleigh-rides for kiddies.  Any of you New England guys know where
Denny Clifford -- horseman, general laborer and fiddler extrordinaire
-- is today?


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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