[TheForge] Re: hammer of the gods

[Mike Spencer]

> I have seen several examples of what I described, with some Little
> Giants sitting in the snow and rain for years and never getting hooked
> up.

Well, "You can't railroad until it's time to railroad.  Then you
*have* to railroad" applies to individuals as well as societies. :-)

I bought a Palmer Power Spring Hammer when my shop was a small room in
a rented farmhouse, my greatest smithing achievements were some of the
log dogs we were talking about recently and I had two hammers (neither
of them really suitable for smithing.).  It sat on a friend's field
for a year or two.  After I found a way to move it home, it sat in my
yard for 4 years.  Then I got a 30x40 shop and I set the hammer up.
It did lots of work for me and has now moved on to a new owner.

As for "traditional", those years when the hammer sat out in
the yard were years with a 9x12 woodshed for a shop and no electricity
at all.  In retrospect, I'm glad that I learned to do everything [1]
without mo-derny convienences but I didn't, at the time, go around
bragging about how "traditional" I was.

- Mike

[1] Well, *almost* everything.  I confess that a few times, I bolted a
    vise to the truck bed and drove down to a neighbor's place with my
    electric drill for something that needed a hole smaller and more
    precise than I could punch or make with an old post drill.

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

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