[TheForge] Re: inspiration

[Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer]

Agree on all points...let us morn the fading junkyard of yore...pf

Mike Spencer wrote:
> 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
>