I’ve unlisted videos on youtube, but that’s just what this is, unlisted and referenced here. I’m decided that as long as rumble allows it, I’m going to slowly start putting my videos there.
someone I horse traded with gave me this dandy blower motor with a forward, off, reverse switch. It just doesn’t have the torque for this and the workaround until a better motor arrives in the mail is to lift the hammer part of the way, but I feel like the bones in my left arm are smashed from this – no kidding!
Two woodworking clamps on the anvil get rid of the ring and the thud and stuff dropping, i think I have solved by folding over a gel floor mat and folding an old bath towel in between like a cheese steak in a roll.
It’s not fast, but it will be faster than I could draw out steel by hand and it’s gentle. The gentle part is important. I have never had a forged item crack other than absurdly over heated steel that was sparking – it can be liquid inside of a rod and literally squirt out (dangerous!), but even if it doesn’t, steel that hot cracks easily. I wanted to find the limit early on – lessons learned.
Anyway, the reason I don’t have “forged in fire” cracks, at least I believe, is when it’s me and a four pound hammer, the steel doesn’t move much when getting cold. It doesn’t move much with this hammer once it’s cold and that’s a good thing. On the TV show, the contestants are getting greedy with a real power hammer that will continue to move cold steel.
With the replacement motor installed when it arrives, it’ll run a little faster and the carrier on the hammer handle can be set back further for a higher strike. The spring adding tension is the purple resistance band – the higher the hammer goes, the higher the tension and moving the carrier back several inches is plenty. Last thing I want to see is plaster upstairs starting to show small hairline cracks.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
That looks like it functions waaay better than you described it in your first write up. Sort of seems like the force and frequency of your setup is on par with a small power hammer, the difference being that your machine damping elements.
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Yes on both – the amount of force is kind of bound by the fitness band (a more proud person would use springs because it would look better). the problem is this thing cannot start from a standstill without me lifting the hammer, and I think the band on it is all the power it needs – if the carrier is moved back it’ll be slightly stronger. But with a stronger motor, the band could be ramped up, too.
It’ll definitely let me get past the 2 chisels a day that my shoulder will tolerate for several days in a row.
I had the anvil already, so my cost involvement here is a little bogus, but outside of the motor, anvil and fitness bands on hand, the total cost is about $100. And I finally found a use for some things I contemplated throwing away – like square foot pieces of uhmw. hard for a hand tool woodworker to find use for thick uhmw.
Once it’s fully straightened out nice, it should be easy to use just start and stop with a pedal.
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Hi David,
What an ingenious design and a practical piece of tool! I am guessing it would take some fun out of the chisel making, but just like hand tool woodworking, sometimes one just wants to use machines to skip preparing stock by hand and get on with making/building things.
Sorry to hijack your post again, but I have been really tempted to buy a metallurgy microscope, it seems there are a lot to learn in the field of microscope and it is not easy to grasp all the information at once.
My question is, in order to capture images like you do, what kind of features does the metallurgy microscope have to support? Do you take pictures using dark field illumination? Do you use any infinity corrected objective lens(very expensive lenses)? And one really dumb question, do you only check the scratch patterns on the bevel side or on both sides? I might be wrong, but I think you’ve posted some images of the back of a chisel/plane iron.
I am sorry that if I have overlooked your post on your microscope, it is a little hard to find older posts without a search function(I guess WP would charge more for it).
Thank you!
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So, first on the wood – I don’t much find myself in the group of folks who use power tools for sawing and planing, but I think that’s uncommon. I get it if people don’t like to do that, but it’s never really that much of a physical challenge to work wood by hand.
However, and this is a big however – to hand hammer with a heavy hammer to move metal is a whole different ball game. You can’t really do it for several hours a day like you could hand tool woodworking and the heat is coming out of the metal and even when it’s not, there’s a level of blown up forearms in 20 minutes that you won’t come to with wood in 5 hours. I just couldn’t get around that – two chisels a day I could draw out and my shoulder is stiff. It doesn’t seem like it’s sustainable in the long term on the elbow and shoulder to do the heavy hammering.
Interestingly, I believe the tools were made with power assistance (trip hammers, etc) – especially if the tools were solid steel and not wrought – before it was kind of universal to use planing machines.
Otherwise, I’d love to just hammer them out manually instead – I think I can’t. I think on a long saturday, I could make a full set of forged chisels with this hammer, though. At this point, it’d be 8-10 hours. I’ve made about 8 or 10 chisels now with this makeshift hammer and it’s just the right thing for now.
on to the microscope – I bought a radical or other brand indian microscope for $425. No extra lenses, no nothing. It came with a camera, and the only thing I’ve had to do is replace the camera due to the original one not being compatible with win 10 and later energy management. My old win 7 PC was dying at the same time, so I had to shell out about $200 for another camera.
Other than that, what you see is what you can get stock with the stock software. I just don’t have enough interest to go beyond because things get expensive really fast.
This type if you’re looking around has an X/Y sort of table on it, binocular eye pieces and a top tube for a camera. the light power control is a separate unit and the light is halogen on the end of a cord from the control unit. the halogen bulbs are common, which is good because once or twice I’ve forgotten and left the light on cooking itself.
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Thank you, David.
This insight will for sure save me a lot of time and money. I will just find whatever that is closest to yours and go from there. Optical equipment sure will get insanely expensive really fast!
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And yes. wordpress is only about one step better than reddit as far as making history disappear if you’re not very intentional or spend a bunch on widgets. I only have the basic page – it’s several hundred bucks more just to be able to use widgets and I can’t justify that.
But in this case, I’ve never really talked about my microscope. I ordered it from india, it showed up in two days, and I’ve used it hard with the intention of using what’s there, I guess, rather than getting caught up in wanting to do “just a little bit more”, which becomes a never ending upgrade circus.
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Hello David,
I’ve immensely enjoyed your videos and have been trying to go through them all as I think I’ve learned as much in your quick, offhand comments as I have in pages of other woodworkers posts and books. Can you post a link to your rumble account to watch them? I’ve tried searching but I haven’t found any on there. Thanks! And I really appreciate your no nonsense and evidence based approach to all your posts.
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Hi, Clinton – I haven’t yet uploaded them. Thanks for the reminder! In a world now where everyone takes their work PC with them, my main PC is now my work PC and obviously using that to manage videos would be in poor taste. I’ll dig out my other PC tonight or tomorrow and register for Rumble and start uploading.
In a world where most people like to watch something brief once, and later go and say “oh, it doesn’t work”, it’s nice to find the few folks who *do* like to see things that may take a couple of rounds to digest. Even if I didn’t talk in advancing but overlapping spirals, the videos would still be way too long for most people.
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