Just finished the first knife I made since I started blacksmithing (about a year ago). It's made from one single railroad spike. I tried to clay temper it, but I don't know if it worked very well. After one heating and oil quenching with clay, I heated it 2 more times and quenched it in oil, then once in water, then heated it once more and let it cool. The dark marks on the blade are leftovers from where I got carried away during forging. Total length is 11 inches. 7 inches of blade and 4 inches of handle and pommel.

But I learned a few things: Smaller lumps of coal (golf-ball sized or less) work better than large lumps. At some point, the fire got hot enough the coal and slag and everything else started to melt. It got sticky. That was when I got my best results. So it was a good learning experience.

I apologize for the quality of the photo. The downside to fluorescent lights is that the lighting sucks.

http://i441.photobucket.com/albums/qq132/Stormsforge/DSCF3428.jpg

Any comments or suggestions would be welcome.

Looks good to me.  Much better than I can do.  Make a tomahawk head from a railroad spike next.  Bill

Yes, it is a very nice work, congratulations!
I can't give you any very valuable suggestion, because I've got no much more experience than you (blacksmithing since a year and a half).
But one thing I've learned, is to focus my production on some particular stuff; in my case, these are knives and arrowheads.
This because those are small items but forging them is very useful; you learn a lot of thing e.g. how to make a straight blade and how to make a cylinder.

Just one question, what kind of coal do you use?
Because I don't do so many quenches, just one fits me, once I've forged the knife for a certain time, at the right temperature, using artisanal coal.
Greetings,
Mauro.

I usually only quench once, but my blacksmithing efforts have been pretty dismal so far. :-/

Ok, let me tell you my experiences.
I usually quench only once, too, and results have been different.
I use a coal made out of oak and chestnut, in my Iron Age forge (a pit in which leather is immitted by a leather bellows), and forge only raw iron, not steel. Despite the simplicity of the design, the forge is capable of reaching high temperatures: I melted the iron twice.
After all this time, I understood that a successful forging somehow depends on the ingot's dimensions, on the time it's been heated and hammered, and in the color it has when it's quenched.

Basically, a 3 millimeters thick ingot, requires about 4 hours of forging to get enough carbon molecules. Best quench is at cherry red, or bright orange. More will cause the iron to be too brittle.

Pay particular attention when you have to weld, for you need to work at very high temp (coal white, just before melting temp), and after the welding you'll have to quench; then heat again to mantain the weld but remove the brittleness.

This weekend I'm going to study temperatures and test different queches (water, frozen water, water with oil surface, oil) for my thesis, by making 4 blades out of iron ingots; I'll then try to bend them and see the differences. Stay tuned  :)
Greetings,
Mauro.

Well, I haven't tried welding yet.

For coal, I use plain black furnace coal. I know it's not the best quality or the right kind, and I started breaking the larger lumps up with a hammer. But it's all I could find.

I have melted a thin piece of rebar (I was trying to make a bodkin arrowhead), but that's about all.

My forge is an old boiler lid my grandfather converted to a barbeque grill. I inherited it, added the tyere (Spelling?), and filled in the bottom with adobe and grout to level it out. Then I got some fireproof bricks from work and built up the sides. Later on I added a piece of chimney pipe to vent at least some of the smoke out the window. Here's a picture of it the first time I fired it up, before I got the bricks added:

http://i441.photobucket.com/albums/qq132/Stormsforge/Forge%20Work/DSCF0955.jpg

http://i441.photobucket.com/albums/qq132/Stormsforge/Forge%20Work/DSCF2035-sm.jpg

For a blower I use the pump from an air mattress. I need to add a ball valve to it though. It's a little too powerful. :o

Better pictures I took this morning:

http://i441.photobucket.com/albums/qq132/Stormsforge/Forge%20Work/DSCF3435.jpg

http://i441.photobucket.com/albums/qq132/Stormsforge/Forge%20Work/DSCF3434.jpg

Congratulations on your efforts!
Perhaps the word you was looking the spell of was tuyére? Which is the scientifical term for the fireproof end of the bellows pipe.

Is that the first forge you make? I ask you because I've made 4, two of which are now destroyed, one has been converted to a Medieval forge (it was a rusty pre-1950's forge I inherited from a relative, too), and the last is the one I usually work with. By the way, you did a really good job, congratulations!

You do well in breaking the coal, that's something I soon learned, too. Even because it's easier to heat.
May I ask you where do you get your coal? Is there nobody who produces artisanal type?
Given the same thermal power, with a wood coal you can enrich your iron with carbon monoxide, which is what you need to make steel - very challenging!

By the way, should you be interested, here's the thread about my experiments:

http://slinging.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1304866605

Greetings,
Mauro Fiorentini.

That looks pretty neat for homemade, i bet it works good.

It works better now that I built up the sides with fireproof bricks. Doing that allowed me to concentrate the heat better. I also have one flat brick that I can place over the top to hold even more heat in. I'll try to get some pictures of it now.

When I placed the bricks, I didn't use any mortar, so I could change it around if I wanted.

Let me say... should you ever be interested in metal melting (bronze or brass, for making knives furnitures and so on), you should close your pit, that you make with bricks.
Then, put a pot full of water on the top flat brick.
As the water boil, you've reached the right melting temperature for any copper alloy  ;)
Greetings,
Mauro.

Do they still make the railroad spikes out of iron, or steel?  I know it used to be iron... anyway, I know very little about blacksmithing, but I do know that if it is iron, when you pull it out of the forge, if you blow cold air onto it, the iron becomes a crude steel (bessemer process; I think I misspelled it...)

I'm presently trying to learn to blacksmith.  I don't really have a good forge, though.  It's just a deep, angled pit, with a steel panel on top that has two vents for air circulation when I'm fanning the fire.

Somewhere I've seen a video of a rural African forge. A pile of coals on the ground, a rock for an anvil, and a kid flapping a rag for a bellows. The nice thing about blacksmithing is that it doesn't have to be fancy,it just has to work.

African blacksmithing is exactly what I'm studying with my thesis  :)
My Iron Age forge replica is build the African way, not having any archaeological finding.
Greetings,
Mauro.

For anyone seriously interested in blacksmithing, I suggest you check out Iforgeiron.com
That is an excellent source of information for any skill level.

ron

Mauro Fiorentini wrote on Sep 6^th, 2011 at 7:02am:

African blacksmithing is exactly what I'm studying with my thesis  :) My Iron Age forge replica is build the African way, not having any archaeological finding. Greetings, Mauro.

Check out YouTube. That's where I saw the video, but for the life of me I can't remember the title.

son_of_bluegrass wrote on Sep 6^th, 2011 at 3:47pm:

For anyone seriously interested in blacksmithing, I suggest you check out Iforgeiron.com That is an excellent source of information for any skill level. ron

What a great link! Thanks a lot!

Thanks!
I'm on the tube right now  :)
Greetings,
Mauro.

If you quenched that relatively long and narrow blade that many times without it warping, you're doing pretty good.  The first 2 knives I made I heat treated in a "One Brick Forge" with Mapp gas.  Each warped, but the first took a 75 degree spiral twist as well.  I could look down the spine and see the cutting edge on the right.  

It warped slightly to the side, but a few quick taps with the hammer before it cooled fixed it.

Kjev, that's a really nice knife.  Good work.

Kjev wrote on Sep 5^th, 2011 at 9:00am:

For coal, I use plain black furnace coal. I know it's not the best quality or the right kind, and I started breaking the larger lumps up with a hammer. But it's all I could find.

May I suggest switching to lump charcoal.
It works just as well (if not better) and you avoid making all those poisonous fumes that come from coal.
Seriously, sulphur fumes will do damage to your lungs and skin and eyes and ruin your clothes. (Sulphur dust turns water to sulphuric acid in the wash. Ugh!)

The best things about lump charcoal is that it's easy and cheep to buy, easy to light and you can Bar-B-Q while you work but I wouldn't do it until you burn out all the old coal dust.
You could even make your own charcoal, butthat's a story for another time.

Never thought of that. At least it'll be easier to find than coal. The only place I can find coal is an hour and a half away. Just barbeque charcoal? Briquettes?

Kjev wrote on Jan 28^th, 2012 at 11:27am:

Never thought of that. At least it'll be easier to find than coal. The only place I can find coal is an hour and a half away. Just barbeque charcoal? Briquettes?

I've read of people using briquettes but they report it doesn't work as well as charcoal from wood (natural or lump or "real" are terms I've seen applied).  Briquettes have binders and stuff to slow the burn rate down and that lowers the temperature achieved.

I've used both charcoal and coal and find charcoal does better with a side blast forge while coal isn't particular.  Also, while they have nearly the same amount of energy (BTU's) per POUND, because charcoal is much less dense you'll burn a greater VOLUME of charcoal.  That also means less air is needed for charcoal.  There are some other minor differences like generally very little clinker with charcoal.

If I may again point to iforgeiron.com   A search of that site will produce a lot of information on using charcoal and coal and the differences between the two.

ron