[TheForge] Re: tooting my own horn

[Mike Spencer]

Kirsten> I did try working over stakes, as you did for your maquette.
Kirsten> But like you, I just couldn't manipulate the metal, or even
Kirsten> stretch my arm over as far as I needed to.  I felt like I
Kirsten> needed a big wood or steel table with stake holes all over
Kirsten> it, so I could keep stakes low enough to work that way.

I remember seeing a demo by Tom Bredlow, repoosing [1] a 4'x8' sheet
of 16 ga. steel.   He had a set of stakes with round shanks to fit his
pritchell hole and collared so that when in the hole, they rose to
just the right height. "The right height" was the one that matched the
stands on either side of the anvil on which the big sheet lay.  It
looke terribly awkward but a few years later, when I was using stakes,
it became obvious that a piece big enough to handle that way would be
easier than a medium-sized piece that you had to struggle to hold.

The round shanks on Tom's stakes allowed him to reach under the
workpiece and rotate them to the desired orientation rather than
having that fixed and having then to rotate the big workpiece and
hammer from a possibly awkward position.

Kirsten> For annealing, I used the oxy-propane with a rosebud tip.
Kirsten> It's a bit wasteful, but I don't have any other options for
Kirsten> large work.

I bought the refractory brick and ceramic batt to make an oven the
right size, to be heated with a simple propane torch.  It didn't work
very well but at that point I hadn't read all the highly informative
chatter here on TheForge about gas forges.  I think an ad hoc gas
forge-type of thing would work well if you had to do numerous
annealings or had numerous pieces to do.

> I wish I could have hammered every last bit of the surface for work
> hardening, but that just wasn't feasible.

Yeah, same problem as using stakes to make it.

- Mike

[1] Is there a verb form of repouse'? And anyhow, I don't have an
    e-acute in my ASCII-only text editor.

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