Emmortal’s Weblog

Alright, so, I convinced Charlie to let me stay another week on Friday, which was ever so kind of him. So on Friday we came in for only a moment to begin a cast for the finial that will be placed on top of the entry gate at one of the jobs on Upper Mountain. I learned that you use the plexiglass to form a sort of open box for the piece to fit inside. Then you fill the whole thing with (in our case) silicon rubber and hardener and wait overnight for the mold to solidify. Now, I wasn’t there for the actual casting, but I gathered that you pour an epoxy into the mold to form whatever piece you are to create. This particular epoxy had iron filings in it so it actually resembled iron or steel. Neato!

And today, well, I started just forging something random. It ended up being a horribly formed flux spoon (man that spoon shape is hard to get), but meh, it works. By then, I wasn’t feeling very well and the extreme humidity wasn’t helping me in the slightest. So I tool the time to sketch out an idea I had had for a long time (which really can only be described with a picture, though I don’t have it on hand, but will at the presentation!). Basically, I wanted to make a taloned foot made of metal, and god it’s hard to visualize how one would go about it. So I made a spring fuller to help me accomplish the task, which went smoothly. The talon however was really quite hard to make, and i didn’t end up getting it that well. I resolved to simply get a picture and try another day.

By this point, I was beyond tired and dehydrated. For the rest of the day, I perused a binder on blacksmithing and the McMaster-Carr catalogue, and learned how to read the hardness scales. Something about today was just downright tiring. Anyways, Wednesday is the presentation at 12:30, boy that’ll be fun ^_^.

EDIT:

Well, uhh, I thought I posted this on Monday, but it turns out that I only saved it.  Silly technology.  Anyways, that post was referring to Monday, and this is for today, which would hopefully be Wednesday.

Presentation went beautifully, it was just Ms. Nagorka (my teacher sponsor) and myself, plus a few curious students here and there.  It was good for myself to set before me all that I had accomplished (that was transportable) and truly gauge my improvement.  It was quite astounding really, how much I’ve improved not only from one piece to the next, but over the whole month.  My pieces have become significantly more complete, and clean.  Execution is the capital improvement I see in my work, which is certainly good.  It was also nice to view the reactions to the pieces (which I’ll will now refer to as elements) I had created.  Ms. Nagorka and another art teacher admired my work, especially the Basket Twist.  What they found most impressive was how well I’d hid the weld (which from their standpoint was probably good).

I’m certainly pleased with myself and the elements that I’d produced in my time with Charlie.  And now Friday seems to be the last day, and I need to practice hooks so I can teach middle schoolers how to do it.  What fun!

Yeah, this was pretty much my last day at the forge, since tomorrow is a little scatterbrained and Monday will consist of cleanup and installation.  So what did I do with myself you ask?  Well, I figured out a MUCH better way of making tongs, making them out of flat instead of out of square.  The metal tapers SOOOO much faster and it’s much easier to get the two reins looking about the same.  The final product is highly functional too, and holds small pieces of square stock like a vice.

Then, I put a collar around my hot cut hardy tool so as to save me anvil from wear and improve its cutting ability.  Unfortunately, this took about two hours to accomplish, since the collar was made out of very small pieces of square stock and to clamp them so that I could weld accurately was certainly a meticulous task.  Ultimately, it came out great, and am looking forward to using it in my own shop.

Now I know I haven’t been very good about putting pictures up (which I attribute to exhaustion after a long day), so I’ll try to get a bunch up in a last salvo.  Got some interesting ones too.

And now I ask myself…what am I going to do with myself when this is over?

Wow, it’s the last week already.  That went way too fast, time really did fly these past 3 weeks, now that I’m on my fourth.  Well, today was a little strange in that the job was to repair a piece of cabinetry which had undergone steam damage.  Well, I have NO experience in wood beyond possessing the capability to hammer a nail.  So I ended up helping out with the heavy lifting and cutting into the sheetrock.  Thankfully, the house that we were working in was air conditioned and quite pleasant.  But, there did come a point where Charlie pointed out that from then on that he’d be doing finagaling (is there a correct spelling for that?) for the rest of the day, and although he invited me to stay, he said that it probably wouldn’t be very interesting.  Now I know I’ve said that I would take whatever I could get, I recognized that if I sat and watched, I would learn NOTHING, since my knowledge of what he was actually accomplishing was so far out of my scope.  So I took the opportunity to visit the high school and say hi to friends.

Other things have occurred, such as getting much better at making leaves and spreading material in general, which was a major problem of mine.  Well, tomorrow will be hellish since it’s supposed to be hotter than today.  Oy veysmir…

YES!!  I finished my hammer, and I have to say, it works pretty damn well.  Made a leaf that wasn’t so hot, but the point is that I finished my first hammer.  It took a good long time to drift out the hole for the handle, with Charlie holding the head and me wailing on it with a hammer.  There was so much burning oil, lubricant, and fluid that I think both of us got pretty light-headed.  After that, we went to Upper Mountain and chopped the entry gate down to bring back to the shop to work on.  Let’s see if I can’t get my hand in on that…

Alright, well, I didn’t get an opportunity to chat about Friday.  Charlie and I did another railing installation in a house in Glenridge.  Though there was no hot searing metal or shards of sharp things, it did present its own problems of aligning the rail, tightening the rail, drilling the holes in the rail big enough, and securing the rail with two brackets that Charlie had made ahead of time.  Thankfully, only the brackets fell through in terms of not working.  With that job done, I chowed down while Charlie drove us off to another job site where we’d be doing work outdoors on an entry gate and parts of a fence.  That will probably take us a few days, and since we have this summer weather rolling in (85-92 degrees F) I think I might pack two water bottles.

Back on Tuesday (I had Monday off) Charlie and I seemed to be on the same wavelength.  He asked me what I’d like to do and I told him that I was thinking about making my own hammer.  Turns out that he was going to make a new set of hammer dies for the air hammer for a job he’d been given.  So, fortunately for me, I didn’t slow him down to much (I think…).  The hammer is nearly done now, the hole just needs to be drifted and the hammer shaped to the proper size, perhaps some finishing, then POW!, handle and we are done!  That’ll probably be completed by tomorrow depending on pending installations during the day or the rest of the week.  Should be a fun time…

Soooooo, the installation fell through for today, and I hadn’t packed a full lunch.  My stomach was already grumbling at the thought of going through the day without enough food.   Fortunately for me, Charlie and I were having too much fun playing around in the forge to really notice.  I finished my third pair of tongs, which are the ugliest things, but they work on round stock pretty well, so I’m only mildly complaining.   Then Charlie and I both attempted to copy that Jim Wycoff hook, but once again, mine didn’t turn out well.  I spent a lot of time after that trying to figure out how to fuller the bar before the bulk of the leaf without A) smooshing it, or B) making it look ugly.   Then of course, the train of thought went to leaves and I showed Charlie how to make a folded leaf.  I bet he was pleased, I pretty much taught him how to do something today.

Then came the really cool part.  We were talking about how to perform a pineapple twist, got an idea, and rolled with it.  We both tackled twisting at the same time, handing off crescent wrenches to each other.  Maybe this is what the old blacksmiths had in mind with the apprentice stuff, except we were both experimenting this time, equally oblivious to the final outcome.

So yeah, great day today!

Even though Charlie might think that grinding the paint and wear off of a stair railing is boring, it’s still a pretty awesome thing to do for me.  Advantage of being young, everything is new and interesting, so the simple tasks are quite enjoyable.   The railing will probably be installed by us tomorrow at whatever time, that is if Charlie is feeling better.

After the excessive amounts of grinding (my hands wouldn’t stop vibrating), I tried to make a third pair of tongs out of some thick stock, 1/2 ” I believe.  Well, I made the jaws, the joint, and started drawing the reins and my arms just gave out.  Unlike Charlie, I didn’t have the power hammer to work with, so I was trying to draw them out with just a hammer.  Well, I took a break, like any normal human being, and Charlie and I started wizzing through the catalogue for McMaster-Carr and trying to figure out the numbers and purposes for different allows of metal.  I think we might’ve talked for a whole half hour before we realized that we weren’t going to get back to work.  What a day, looking forward to the next…

Wow, I’ve got no idea what the temperature was outside, but the combination of the heat from the weather and the forges with the humidity made for a particularly unpleasant day in the shop.  I decided to attempt a forge weld today, but to no avail.  I couldn’t get the piece hot enough or clean enough for a weld, so I moved on to trying to recreate a hook made by one of my instructors Jim Wycoff (certainly hope I spelled that right).  That too didn’t end so well, as the hook eventually broke into four pieces as a result of burning, breaking, and acts of God against me.  Oh well, I learned a lot about working metal at a very tiny scale and how delicate it becomes.

Also, I watched Charlie make a sample corner for a table.  It was interesting to see him work on it, and how quickly he got it done.  I guess when you do this for as long as he has, you get nimble.

Most of my experience lies in the realm of metalwork and fabrication. So when I say that I was slightly out of my element when Charlie and I installed a stair railing today, know that I am being generous. Nonetheless, I did learn quite a lot, most of the time I was in quiet mode trying to take in as much as I could. Thankfully, the installation went of without a hitch (on my part at least), and I’ve built a little confidence concerning the matter.

In other news, I was experimenting with good methods for upsetting steel yesterday and today, and I came up with two good methods.

First: put the piece to be upset in a vice and hammer down on it with zwei (two) hammers.

• Advantage- Moves the metal really quickly
• Disadvantage- leaves a bite mark in the metal from the jaws of the vice. Should be easy to resolve with a little aluminum plating or perhaps simply grinding the jaws to a nice curve (but it’s Charlie’s vice, so I wouldn’t do that)

Second: I made a hardy tool that allows me upset at a lateral angle to the anvil.

• Advantage- Makes particularly square upset, and can be done with a non-focused heat (with limits).
• Disadvantage- Unknown effects, but the hardy tool might be prying the anvil in a place it doesn’t like to be pried, but this has yet to be seen.

Today was a short day, so there isn’t much to say, except that I went to a great metal concert last night called Progressive Nation, with great bands 3, Between the Buried and Me, Opeth, and Dream Theater. Today’s song of the day is Bramfatura by 3, look it up when you get the chance.

That’s all, I’m off to Vermont for the weekend, cya all! Have a good Memorial Day!