Giving Up

When I was younger, like all of us in our teenage years, I thought someone wearing wrap arounds was the sign of them giving up.

It usually coincided with not combing hair, maybe walking around with mouth open sometimes, and those jackets that had sort of the sock texture lining and the nylon outside that looked almost like it was waterproof, but wasn’t. That was before fleece was everywhere and in everything.

Wrap Around Infrared Sun Glasses on Top of an Induction Forge

A couple of days ago, I got my first wrap arounds. I’ll be 50 in a few years. Here in the burbs, a lot of people age 50 these days try to dress and act like they’re 20. 40 years ago, people who were 40 tended to be fine with looking like they were older than they actually work. I wonder what’s caused this difference, but maybe that’s something for another time.

I got my wrap arounds and i’m on my way to walking around with my mouth open catching the unexpected gnat. I have excellent distance eyesight but the close up stuff is going what seems quickly. It’s not really quick, but if you have better than 20/20 eyesight as I did for about 40 years and still do distance, any loss or eye strain is a foreign concept.

The point of the wrap arounds is infrared light. The induction forge has been a godsend for chisel making operations that involve a lot of heat. If you wanted to do so intentionally, you could put a chisel with a bolster blank in the forge and just melt it off. All of it in a shower of bright yellow sparks. But that bright yellow is eye damaging. I never read that it was until after noticing the strain.

I have another pair of IR glasses, and envisioned something much cooler, like those side shield glasses that you see people wearing in the old Hawley videos – the ones that glassworkers and steelworkers wear. However, they have some big mineral sounding name to the glass and all are expensive, and some indications are that they’re more suitable for glass blowing than metalwork. Who knows if that’s true. I eschewed the safety glass style glasses both so I can use my regular glasses, but more because a couple of times, I’ve walked away in a rush with hot metal with regular glasses fallen on the floor and nearly stepped on them.

Forge Welded Blanks on the Anvil

Now, i can just leave my glasses on and leave the wrap arounds at the forge. They only need to be worn when heating steel to the level that it will actually stick to itself. Even without hammering. Though the bolster in this case gets hammered to the tang to form it. One could make this kind of thing a science project, but in short, the blanks are square steel with a round hole drilled in them, and the rest of the shaping is just done by the actual chisel tang.

The chisel on the left, aside from dirt, is just to show what the tang will look like after it’s ground and filed.

This was one of the trickier parts to get down being self taught – getting the bolster and the tang hot enough to stick together and then hammer forming them without distorting the tang itself and making a chisel with a mushroom shaped bolster blank and a tang that looks like a railroad switch route.

The induction forge is the right tool for this job, but it’s not like stepping on a pedal and it’s on – there are still things to screw up. If there weren’t, it wouldn’t be that interesting.

Still, a device that’s ready to go all the time and that can have a chisel hot in 20 seconds, with hot basically being an unlimited term – excellent and I’m sure less detrimental to the health of the forger who sucks in a lot less particulate/smokey stuff than one does with a forge.