Here’s a picture of the forge in use. You can’t tell, but there’s a knife blank in there. It is currently annealing, cooling down slowly in a bucket of pearlite.
Small Fire Brick Forge
By request, here’s a post about the simple fire-brick forge that I made.
First of all, this is not designed to be a blacksmithing forge. I guess you could do some small blacksmithing with it, but I’m really just making it to heat treat knife blades.
The idea is to stack up insulating fire bricks in such a way as to form a small chamber. Inside that chamber, you can heat your steel with a torch, and it will retain its heat better because it’s not losing to the air like it normally would. This allows you to heat an entire knife blank with a simple plumbing torch.
So, first thing was to buy some fire bricks. I went to a wood stove store and bought several of these for three bucks apiece. They’re approximately 8″ x 4″ x 1.5″:
Then, to make things a little slicker, I cut them. This step wasn’t necessary, but it allowed me to make a small forge with only 4 bricks instead of the 7 that I started out with.
To cut them, I mounted up a cut-off wheel into my drill press, and using the tabble, scored a cut around the perimeter of the brick, approximately 0.25″ – 0.5″. Once it was scored, I was able to snap the bricks in half.
Now for the assembly:
Here are all four of the bricks. One is not cut, one is cut along the length, and two along the width.
You end up with an inner chamber just the right size for a medium-sized knife blank, and by moving the bricks around, you can easily make up to 3 openings — 2 on the ends, and one in the top.
Using it is easy — stick the lit torch in one opening, and open up at least one more to get things flowing.
With a Spoon
My brother pointed these out to me, so I had to try it myself.
This is a trade point arrowhead that I made from from a flattened out spoon I bought from the dollar store.
This was attempt #3, and the first one that I wasn’t embarassed by.
Steps:
1. Get spoon.
2. Hammer it flat.
3. Draw out the arrowhead shape.
4. Rough-cut with a hacksaw.
5. Clean up with belt sander, file, and finally sharpening stone.
6. Take pretty picture
PVC Bow #1
I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally made a bow following the instructions of The Backyard Bowyer.
It’s made out of PVC pipe, which has been heated shaped so that the PVC flattens out toward the tips, making it more flexible toward the tip, just like in a traditional bow.
It’s a very light bow, but it’s really fun.
The next one I’m going to try to make a recurve.
Arduino
OK, so I’m stretching the word “make” past the breaking point, I know.
But yesterday afternoon I received an arduino in the mail. In short order, following the instructions on the web, I had it hooked up to and flashing a LED to my command. So I did the obvious thing and wrote a program to make it send out morse code messages.
I haven’t really done much more than that, but I’m pretty excited about it and the possibilities, so I figured I’d share.
In the Beginning
There were plans.
Even before I really got into woodworking a few years ago, I was fascinated by the kits and plans that were sold for people to make mechanical clocks. They even sell kits so that you can make clocks entirely out of paper!.
And when I got into scrollsawing and saw some of the beautiful wooden clocks designed for scrollsawers, I knew that someday I had to make one. I even went so far as to order the plans for one so that someday I could make it.
Someday.
Well, I’ve decided that today is that day! The latest edition of ScrollSaw Woodworking & Crafts has full plans for an extremely simple (relatively) mechanical clock. I went out today and made copies of it, because I have no doubt that I will mess things up the first time. In fact, I really should have gone ahead and made two copies of everything so that I can mess up twice. Oh well…
I don’t know how long this will take me. But I’m closer than I’ve ever been to really starting, and now I’m even closer.
Spinning Tops
This is a bunch of spinning tops I made this last week out of wood and corian.
I used some of the best and brightest corian colors I have for these tops. I let everybody pick their favorite color out of what we had, and then on Christmas morning they each got a top made out of that color in their stocking.
Steampunk Ray Gun
We heat our home with two woodburning stoves, and having a working bellows will make it much easier for us to get the fires started in the morning.
So I made this bellows out of a foot pump (probably for an air mattress or something like that) that I picked up at a garage sale and a length of copper tubing. The tubing is so long so that we can stick one end of the tubing right into the fire and blow air into it without even having to bend over.
Wood Dolls
When Mary Cate was painting her recent nativity set, my two daughters were absolutely fascinated and wanted to paint some themselves. But we didn’t have any extras, so that couldn’t happen.
So I’ve made some for them, of various sizes, that they can paint however they want.
