Prospect Hill Forge

It's not too late to get new Wrought Iron Candlestick to grace your family table! Or, you could be looking forward to that other holiday... We don't have regular shopping hours at the forge, but drop us a note and make an appointment.

We're putting together one or two more introductory knifemaking classes, either in an intensive weekend format, or as two Saturdays, or as a "Lite" class that skips the letter-opener and procedes directly into knifemaking. Let us know if you're interested, and if so, which format (and what dates!) work best for you. Also, we're still planning on a Christmas Week knifemaking class, perhaps an introductory class, perhaps an intermediate class, certainly an intense experience. Drop us a note if you want to stay in the loop!

We have two spaces left in Blacksmithing Camp, this week, starting today, August 20, at 11:00 am.
We also have one space left in Rudiments II Monday evenings, starting tonight, August 20th.

A blower, all done up

So, here we are, with a new plan for staying in touch with people.

• Random blogging.  Probably roughly weekly, perhaps a little more often.
• Monthly Newsletter with standard content

1. - Current Open Classes
   
2. - Teen & Tween Classes
3. - Classes without Dates
   
4. - Open Smithy
5. - Special Events
6. - Special Discounts
   
7. - Words from the Smith

• Quarterly Newsletter -- the one we've been doing, only coming out more regularly.  
  

1. highlights of the blog
2. special events
3. new classes

OK, Now to try to make this page look like part of our website!

As folding knives go, it's simple.
As forged knives go, it's on the complex side.
Click to see it and read the story.

Thirteen hundred pounds of blacksmithing coal, shoveled, bagged, loaded, unloaded, and stored.

Just in time too.

Sunday night we got down to the last five or ten pounds of coal, and that wasn't gonna get us through Monday night's class. "Ah, that's ok," I thought, "I can pop down to Williams Coal and Oil and get more during the day on Monday."

Then it hit me like the math test at the end of a bad dream: Monday is Patriot's Day. Places are gonna be closed.

I immediately started to think of where I might find coal on a holiday Monday. I toyed with stealing some from Doug while he was running in the marathon. It's not like he's gonna be using it any time soon, but messing with his stuff the day before the insurance adjuster comes by seemed a bad idea.

Williams was open but they had no bagged blacksmith coal, so it was off to the smithy to gather up containers and re-learn the millers' knot, then down to Braintree (passing under the marathon runners). I got the truck weighed, bagged coal, loaded up, weighed in again, paid the difference, and headed home.

When I first started smithing back in... um... oh, a few years ago, most of the material I found was reinforcing rod, so that's what I used. And some of it was crap. Apparently it had too much sulfur  in it and that made it red-short. And that got pretty disappointing on occasion.

Tonight I played with some re-bar I picked up the other day. I was inspired by an article in the ABANA publication: The Hammer's Blow, wherein the author wrote of the different grades of re-bar and how it isn't necessarily crap and people oughta give it a try.

I made an S-hook, and left the re-bar texture untouched in the middle, 'cause I wondered what it would look like with a good twist on it. It's... interesting.

It has markings on it, I can't read the first one, it's very blocky though, the second character is a '4' and the third is either an 'S' or a '5'. I worked it at all ranges of temperature and it behaved rather like mild steel. I even managed a simple forge weld in it (once I got the clinker out of the fire). It's on its way to being a very big spoon.

I tried a new (to me anyway) bottle opener design. Instead of the hook-and-push-down design I've been making, it's a more typical hook-and-lift-up style.

It needed some tight, precise bends. It works but I'm going to have to play with the starting form and the order of operations to get it to be a straightforward piece to do, 'cause there was some weird hammering and angles to get the gripper to happen.

After goofing up forge 3 with the aluminum, I had to drill a new tuyeure-plate and since I had the thing apart, I decided to replace the ash-gate too. What it had was a quickie slapped out of a piece of sheet metal when we were just getting started, and it was time for something nicer.

On a bar of 1/2x1/2 I isolated the last 2 " with half-face blows on the far edge then cross-peined that part out to be wide enough to cover the end of the 2" pipe that is the ash-trap. It looked like a small spatula. I made some bends and an ornament on the end, and voila! an ash-gate that isn't embarrassing.