[TheForge] Re: inspiration

[Mike Spencer]

PeteF> Jesse; You win..and you are lost now...my condolences.

My thought exactly when I saw Jesse's post.  Congrats &
condolences. :-)

> But first, bring that junkyard crew a case of cold beer on the 
> next hot late afternoon.

Yeah, but late in the day, say half an hour before quitting time.  We
don't want any of those great guys to lose fingers or limbs and be
replaced by hard-nosed bastids.

> Comparing the amount of work it takes to forge using  a steel 
> shaft on end, VS a horizontal I beam of the same weight...say, 
> perhaps half the effort using the shaft?

Yeah.  A 4' long piece of 4"x4" (or any piece of scrap vaguely
resembling same) sunk in the ground to give you a 4x4 anvil face
would be better than any but the hugest I-beam.  I once jiggered up a
forge under desert island conditions similar to those Frosty
described.  The anvil was a wrought iron ship's knee with one arm
broken off, heavy enough that it was a bit of a struggle to lug it back
to camp on my shoulder.  About 3' long, 4" wide and tapered from about
1" thick to about 4"x6" at the nicely forged angle (what had
originally been the middle of the knee).  Driven into the sand, it
made a pretty passable anvil.

Porfirio, the Mexican smith who was at Seattle, apparently learned in
his father's and uncle's shop where the anvil was for years a piece of
shaft stood on end.  In the photo it looked like about 10" or maybe
12" in diameter.  Ship's shaft?  Railroad axle?  I failed to ask.

I feel really deprived because the nearest really good junkyard with a
permissive wander-around-and-scrounge policy is nearly 100 miles away.
The closer one went out of biz and turned into a toxic hazard site
when They discovered that they'd been scrapping lead acid batteries
for decades and just dumping the acid and lead sulphate, dumping PCBs
from transformers and the like.


- Mike

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