[TheForge] Re: question for Bruce F. the Chemist

[Mike Spencer]

An old remedy for "women's troubles" -- haemoglobin loss due to
menstruation -- was to put a nail in a glass of pump water at night
and drink the water in the morning.  I have no idea if that antedates
scientific knowledge that blood loss and iron loss are connected.

> My slack tub is a used 1/2 whiskey barrel. Maybe I should change my
> opinion. 

>> What happen to the whiskey?

According to what an old cider miller told me circa 1967, a whiskey
barrel has about a gallon of whiskey in the wood.  So if you half-fill
the "empty" barrel -- 20 or 25 gallons -- and turn it often while the
cider is hardening up, you get a very nice result.  Bought a nice
white oak barrel from him and did that.  I had lots of friends drop in
that fall.

Then I moved away from the neighborhood.  When I went looking here
for a cider mill, I found only guys that would press a gallon or two
in a screw press or industrial buildings full of stainless plumbing
and 3-phase motors and no time for a mere 40 or 50 gallons.  Feh.  Now
my barrel has rotted away.

Forge construction, FWIW:

My firepot is 1" thick, allegedly had some nickel tossed into the
ladle before it was poured.  My hearth is 4'x4', 12 or 14 ga. m/s
supported around the edges with 1-1/2"x1-1/2"x1/8" angle iron.  That
just sits loose on a frame of square hollow steel structural.  The
frame has two HSS rails across it's middle to support the weight of
the firepot and workpiece.  The sidedraft smokebox just sits on the
left of the hearth.  It's all on casters.  The whole thing can be
taken apart into parts movable by one guy with a couple of wrenches
and a screwdriver although lifting the firepot assembly out of the
hearth is pretty awkward for one person.  The quench tub support and a
tool rack hang on the side of the frame and can be lifted off.

My smokebox is stainless because two 16ga m/s ones rusted away in 25
years and I found a great deal on some stainless sheet. The previous
firepot lasted 25 years but was pretty badly cracked so I replaced it
when I moved.  I surmise that the big bad cracks in the firepot were
due to rust. It would go unused for weeks and a bit of water came in
through the flue to keep it damp. Repeated cycles of that would cause
the dry oxides in tiny, unimportant cracks to swell and make then
bigger.  WAG.

Annnd... I think I'm about to go for a IH diesel engine for the air
hammer.  The old-truck idea got to looking less and less pretty as I
futzed with it.  More news Real Soon Now. :-)  Place looks a lot nicer
with the decrepit pickup hauled away, too.

- Mike

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