[TheForge] Re: Learn something new every day...

[Mike Spencer]

schade> I have one of those with a short handle/helve. The guy who
schade> gave it to me years ago said it was for cutting stone.

The rail spiking hammer I have has quite a long, slender helve.  Quite
elegant, even.

Lee> I bought a bunch of these at auction this fall....they sold them
Lee> as stone chisels.

Two votes for stone chisels.  Huh.  Well, maybe.  I dunno.  But I'd
put my two bits on the horse that says they were for metal work and
Andy's rail-cutting anecdote is, at last, a candidate use.

They *are* kind big and clunky for ordinary light forging but if you
needed a hotset, it wouldn't be real hard to forge and cut one/them
down to a more useful size.  I never did that because I had a several
other nice, smaller hotsets and other top tools and these were
interesting curiosities.

Andy> 	AXDQ is great stuff.

Er, um, so what's AXDQ?

I recall seeing a Scientific American article (years ago before SciAm
was sold to some big German publishing house which gradually turned it
into Just Another Pop Marketing Rag) on engineering deep drawing
alloys and dies.  More  to all that than meets the eye when looking at
a fender or pop can.  I don't think you could even count on a piece of
sheet originally manufactured for a particular die-forming customer
being isotropic.

AFAIK, there is no industry in NS that does deep drawing (or even
exuberant shallow drawing, for that matter) so the nearest heap of
scrap, offcuts, mill seconds etc. is probably in Montreal or, more
likely, Hamilton, 1500+ miles away.

But I *do* have a salvaged washing machine that turned out not to be
usable for my purpose when collecting it. I'll have to put some
experiments with the material on the list (but, regrettably, pretty far
down on the list.)

So what's AXDQ?


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