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…