We were so close to being done, but hadn’t quite gotten it over the line. Just a few more hours work and we’d have a working pipe lock we could be proud of. And it is something that not a lot of blacksmiths have made.

Our big task of the evening was to get our key finished up and working smoothly to open the lock. Sounds simple enough, but it took a lot of tweaking to get the shoulders in the right place so that it would go into the lock deep enough to open the lock but not too deep as to slip over the spring and be forever stuck inside the pipe.

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A bit of grinding on the key, bending of the bow, filing of the key opening as well as the opening at the end of the pipe and it started coming together.

There was also a fair amount of fussing, pondering, and consternation about how things were coming together, but in the end there was a shout and a leap and success!

This really is a piece to be proud of. It’s a very clever, if simple in concept, design that’s a challenge to execute. I’d love to make another one when I had a couple of weeks to kill. Like everything, I’m sure the next one would take less time now that we know what we’re doing, but it’s still a whole lot of steps and and whole lot of fitting to make it work. The time to create a lock like this is going to far exceed what the market would bear, but it’s a fun thing to work on anyway.

And with our apprenticeship under Doug Swenson of Goose Prairie Forge coming to an end, we did celebrate in proper fashion with some Trappist monk ale and a toast.

Sadly, we are coming to the end of our apprenticeship. But first, we have a pipe lock to finish. We left off with encasing the pipe lock in clay and leaving it to dry so that we could “bake” it in the forge and braze the pieces together.

So the clay had a chance to dry out during the week, and perhaps a bit too much. There were some pretty significant cracks that we patched up with some wet clay before we were ready to put it into the forge. Without patching the cracks, the heat would get through there and overheat those sections of the pipe.

We had a bit of a discussion about the type of clay that’s best for this type of thing. Apparently not all clay is made the same. I believe we used stoneware clay (not earthenware clay) with a bit of grit and horse manure mixed in. The horse manure has fibers in it that burn up during the heating process that provide just the right amount of venting to keep the clay from exploding open.

It was interesting to get the clay heated until it was glowing orange and then keep it there for quite a while. The whole process took somewhere around an hour. As it happened our clay did crack a bit and gave us a hot spot on the project, but it didn’t affect it too much. When it was “done” we pulled it out of the fire and rolled it around on the floor using “Viking chopsticks” which were basically pieces of kindling. They were the same tools we’d been using to turn in in the forge too. The rolling about helps get the melted brass to flow around and cover as much of the project as possible.

After several minutes of rolling it about, it was time to drop it in a bucket of water to cool it off. Believe it or not, as the water was still bubbling from the heat I plunged my arm into the water to grab the project and start breaking the clay off of the metal. It sounded insane, but it only got hot a couple of times right after I peeled off a good chunk of clay. Good news! We’d made it that far without it going completely sideways!

With the pipe part of the lock now mostly complete, it came down to details. Time to file off the rough edges and make sure the key was going to fit through the opening. It’s a lot of hand filing and you can imagine that it may have been someone’s job to do nothing by filing all day long. (And another person’s job to keep the files sharpened!)

The other piece that needed attention was the bolt. We had forged the spring onto the center, but we needed to make sure that it was the right length to lock, but also to allow the key to unlock it. That was interesting to figure out as there needed to be a gap between the shoulder of the bolt and the top of the spring, but that was inside the pipe so much of it was just guessing.

At this point in the process it was a bit of a dance between the bolt and spring, the bow that goes over the spring to lock it, and the key that goes over the spring to unlock it. Getting the sizes just right for all the moving parts took a lot of back and forth. There were times we were convinced we were going to get it locked never to get it unlocked again.

But by the end of the 35th session we had a working pipe lock with one exception – there was still a bit of work to be done on the key.

Our 35th session was technically the last of the sessions covered by the North Dakota Traditional and Folk Arts Apprenticeship grant. Looks like we’re headed for a bonus session. But mead was toasted to a successful apprenticeship and good journeys for the journeyman phase of our learning!

After the disappointment at the end of the last session, we worked during the week to get the rings ready to go. They weren’t quite perfect, so we did wind up making a few adjustments (namely grinding the ends down so they connected better). But It didn’t take us long to get those finished up.

So the next step in getting the pipe ready was to cut out the plate that covers the one end (the end with the tail) so that it fit the pipe and had a big enough opening to get the key in. It wasn’t to hard to cut the notch for the key, but we first attempted to hacksaw the thin sheet of metal to bring it closer to the shape we needed for the pipe – and then abandoned that approach pretty quickly. It wound up being a lot easier to just grind it down. So we traced on the sheet around the end of the pipe and just whittled it down on the grinder.

Now the pipe is ready to be brazed. The first step was to cut up some old brass bullet casings into small pieces that we would then lash to the pipe lock. The idea is that we need to hold that brass in place as close to where we need it to flow to seal up the joints between the pipe, plate, and rings. So we used a linen thread (which will burn up during the brazingbrazing Brazing is a metal-joining process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and flowing a filler metal into the joint, with the filler metal having a lower melting point than the adjoining metal. Brazing differs from welding in that it does not involve melting the work pieces and from soldering in using higher temperatures for a similar process, while also requiring much more closely fitted parts than when soldering. process) to carefully tie down small “tidbits” of brass in the key areas. It took a lot of tidbits and a lot of lashing to get enough pieces in place to cover all the spots we needed.

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And while all this cutting and lashing was going on, we were also working on the lock piece and fullering another neck on it with the guillotine. While it takes it a bit of effort to make that happen, it’s quite a different type of job than lashing the brass pieces to the pipe.

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So the last thing at the end of the day was to pack the pipe to prepare it for the actual brazing process. The first thing that got packed was the center of the pipe with the small bits of brass and charcoal. The brass will line the interior and the charcoal will help support the pipe and keep it from collapsing. Then the exterior needed to be packed in clay. The clay needs to be a certain type, stoneware clay I believe, with a bit of sand (you should be able to feel a bit of grit), and horse manure (which adds some fibers that will allow steam to vent out of the clay rather than crack it). You just pack the pipe, being careful not to disturb the brass lashing that was done, in about 1/4-to-1/2-inch thick clay all the way around, including inside the tail part. (I sure hope I got it packed in that tail part good enough.) The clay should have at least 24 hours to dry, so that’s where we left it for the day.

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Next session we’ll get to do the actual brazing process which I understand to be “cooking” the clay for about an hour. We’ll also be working on the lock fitting and getting a spring made for it as well. I suspect that’s all we’ll get done and we’ll have one more session to make the key.

This pipe lock has introduced us to some very different skills than we have done in the past. It’s hard to imagine trying this project on our own without some guidance. The North Dakota Folk and Traditional Arts Apprenticeship grant has really allowed us to push our boundaries for sure!

P.S. We were late for our session today as we were hiring a contractor to build our house. Looking forward to getting our own workshop set up soon!

So the tasks for the day were to get the bands in place and ready for brazingbrazing Brazing is a metal-joining process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and flowing a filler metal into the joint, with the filler metal having a lower melting point than the adjoining metal. Brazing differs from welding in that it does not involve melting the work pieces and from soldering in using higher temperatures for a similar process, while also requiring much more closely fitted parts than when soldering. and to begin work on the locking mechanism.

We started by adjusting the loop and tail on the pipe itself just a bit to make the tail just a bit longer as we’re going to be wrapping two bands over it. That went pretty well.

Then we moved on to making the bands themselves. We need three total: two to go over the loop’s tail and one at the bottom end of the pipe. The two that go over the tail need to have a small “bump” in them to accommodate the tail and that’s where our work began.

We used a fullering swage in a vise and a piece of round stock as the upper fuller to hammer in the bump. Then we put that over the tail on the pipe and started shaping the band to wrap around it.

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Once again, sounds easy enough, right? Hammering that square stock to fit around the pipe was much fussier than expected and took a fair bit of time. Then, of course, the challenge was to get two of them to look the same.

Then we needed to somewhat guess where to cut the stock so that the ring would either just meet or fall just short of meeting; this is one place where we didn’t want it to overlap. You can see from that photo that where we initially put the bump in the stock became a pivot point when we started to bend it and it got a bit of a crease in it. As it turned out, that was an important development that would bite us a bit later.

After a bit of fussing, some of which involved hitting the ring simultaneously with two hammers while it was on the pipe, the first ring was looking pretty good.

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So we worked on doing the same thing for the second ring and had it nearly complete. We were working on the last finishing touches to shape it around the pipe when that stress point where the bump had creased finally gave up and broke in two. Ugh, but this stuff happens in blacksmithing. We quickly then shaped the much easier third ring, the one without a bump, in the last few minutes of our session.

In the meantime, while all the work on the rings was going on, we were also starting the much harder work of getting the locking insert started. Beginning with something like a 2-inch long, 2-inch diameter piece of round stock the first task was to fuller a neck around it. Once again, simple enough, but this time it’s just plain work. A chunk of steel that size takes a bit of effort to get it moving.

By the end of the day we had one of the bump rings finished, the circle ring ready for cutting, and the lock insert with a decent looking neck fullered into it. The time went quickly!

Next time we should be able to finish up the rings and get the top plate on and perhaps get the brazing done. Then it will be more work on the lock insert and finally the key for it all. I think we’re going to be lucky to finish this before our time under the Folk Arts grant is finished.

After finishing our hinge experiments, we turned to our next interest – locks. We’re starting with a pipe lock, which is pretty ingenious for a simple lock. This is going to be like nothing we have made so far. It’s going to take a bunch of tricky cutting and filing and fitting and brazingbrazing Brazing is a metal-joining process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and flowing a filler metal into the joint, with the filler metal having a lower melting point than the adjoining metal. Brazing differs from welding in that it does not involve melting the work pieces and from soldering in using higher temperatures for a similar process, while also requiring much more closely fitted parts than when soldering. and …

What have we gotten ourselves into?!!!

So this is the example piece we are after. Ours will of course look much different, but it’s good to know where you’re headed.

So we started with a pretty hefty pipe for our pipe locks and cut the end at an angle with a hacksaw (and or angle grinder) and then cut it just a bit more to leave a “beaver tail” piece that we will draw and taper for the loop at the one end. Once that was cut it was into the forge to start drawing it out. It was fun to watch the smoke come out the end of the pipe, but it was also potentially dangerous to quench the pipe as hot steam can also come out of the pipe so you need to be careful how you hold it.

With that tail drawn out to resemble a tang, we turned our attention to the angle cut. There needs to be a small notch in it to hold the plate that seals the end and that’s a bit tricky to cut. It also has to be just right in both the depth to match the thickness of the plate and the angle to not be too sloped or too abrupt. We fussed over that for quite some time with files and rotary sanders and whatever it took to get it the to something near 45-degrees and flat and smooth.

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It was a bit tough to work around the tail we had drawn out and we bent it out of the way for a bit of the process.

The next step was to cut the hole in the other end of the lock so that the clasp can be inserted into the pipe. The cuts perpendicular to the length of the pipe were easy enough, but the lengthwise cuts eluded us. Doug showed us how to do an X-cut to get that opening, well, open. We were confused about how the X would actually work as we were imagining the X on the top of the pipe where it would connect the two parallel cuts we made. And while that was technically what was needed it didn’t create the X looking at the top of the cuts, but rather from the side, which allowed the unwanted metal there to be “scraped” away. We would have never come up with that.

The last bit before ending this session was to bend the tail we had drawn out and get that ready for fastening later. We talked a bit about cutting the plate to cover the end and made a couple of initial cuts, but the time had flow by once again and it was time to lay it aside until the next session.

So with the strap part of the spade hinge finished it was time to move on to the pintlepintle A pintle is a pin or bolt (male component), usually inserted into a gudgeon, which is used as part of a pivot or hinge.. We were starting with the basic spike / bolt design for our first hinge. Our first session consisted almost entirely of taking a 1-inch by 1/4-inch piece of 1020 bar stock and creating the pin that the loop of the strap hinge would fit over. (I believe that loop part is called a gudgeongudgeon A gudgeon is a socket-like, cylindrical (female component) fitting attached to one component to enable a pivoting or hinging connection to a second component, the pintle..) Once again, it sounds simple enough, but creating shoulders on the bar stock and then drawing out the pin and rounding it to size took a few hours. We weren’t able to finish that in one session as Rob was on call and we had to cut it short after 2-1/2 hours.

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So when we returned the following week it didn’t take too long for us both to get the pintle sized to the gudgeon. Then we moved on to creating the spike that would be driven into a timber to hold the hinge. The first step was once again to create a shoulder that would define where our tapered spike would begin. Once that shoulder was set it was just a matter of a lot of hammer blows to get the spike drawn out and tapered. There’s always a certain amount of fussing about keeping things square and straight, and we had to revisit our shoulder a few times to keep that crisp.

Once the spike was the length and shape we wanted, the last step was to bend it 90º so that it could be hammered into the wood. It required a yellow-hot heat and we had to make sure we weren’t burning the tips of either our pin or spike. But once it was hot we put the spike part in a vise and hammered the pin and the square below it until it got to the correct angle. After that it was just a matter of dressing any remaining bits up and then we were done!

They turned out really well and seem quite functional. We might try to use them on a garden gate in the future. We specifically kept this project simple and a bit old school because the next one is going to kick the hinge design up a notch.

So today we started on what we’re calling a spade hinge. Something “simple” like the ones shown in this photo, though ours will be a bit shorter.

While the spade part of the hinge is something I think we could handle, the business end of the hinge where a pin of some sort is used is something new to us.

So as expected we started with a piece of bar stock and chose one about three feet long where we would each work one end of it and then cut it in half. We started with the business end, so our first task was to fold over the end about two or so inches, while maintaining a space for the pin, and then forge weldingwelding Welding is a process that joins metal by using high heat to melt the parts together and allowing them to cool, causing fusion. Welding is distinct from lower temperature metal-joining techniques such as brazing and soldering, which do not melt the base metal. it back onto the bar stock. Sounds simple enough but keeping the tube for the pin makes it a bit more challenging. We used the swage block and a piece of round stock for the pin to make sure the fold to create the tube was round and allowed the pin free movement. Then it was a matter of forge welding the stock – keeping that round tube for the pin intact. You have to get the crease where it transitions from round to flat tight without smushing the tube.

We each managed to get our ends rounded up and welded and they came out pretty even with each other’s. Next time we’ll be working on the decorative spade end, but we’ll also have to work on the other half of the hinge that attaches to the door frame and get it to match the tubes we made. I’ve no idea how that is going to happen. Stay tuned!

We finished a project in one session!

Today we started on our first door/cabinet hardware project which will be the focus of our work this year. We made a simple strap hinge similar to those on the Måstermyr chest. I had attempted to make one of these before but had not finished, so this was going to be the first actual hinge we had made.

The first step was to take a piece of bar stock and hammer it to thin it out a bit. We were trying to match the dimensions of the Måstermyr hinge as best we could and came pretty close. Then the next step was to draw out a “tang” for the loop that would connect the two pieces of the hinge. This involved tapering one end, setting shoulders, and then rounding the taper. On the other end of the bar stock, we used a chisel to punch a hole through and then drifted it into a circle.

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After that the two ends needed to be cut to length and hammered a bit more to make the dimensions we were going for.

Next was to make the holes for the nails to go through when you attach the straps to the chest, or whatever you might be using them on. The holes actually went farther back on the strap than I initially expected, but it made sense in order to give the strap clearance around the wood joint so that it could move freely. While traditionally we would have used a punch to set the holes in the straps, we opted to use a drill press – partly for time’s sake and partly for the experience of drilling through metal. We’ve punched holes through metal several times, but never drilled a hole before. It turned out well and was very quick (and fun to do), but it felt like cheating. Not going to be our preferred way to do that going forward.

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We also invented a word today – “schmoogle”. A schmoogle is those fold marks that appear when you are working the edge of a piece of metal. Apparently they can happen because the hammer you are using is too light and is only moving the surface of the metal and not getting all the way through. It happens to me a lot. Like every time I make something. It’s why we swung the big sledge hammer making our nail header, and after that experience I’m determined to start using bigger hammers when called for. I guess my arm will just have to get used to it.

“Schmoogle” is a great word for this. “I schmoogled this piece.” (Adverb) “The drift hole is starting to schmoogle.” (Verb) “My schmoogle isn’t too bad.” (Noun) Perhaps there is an official word for this phenomenon, but until we learn what it is, we are going to use this term.

The last step in making the hinges was to connect the two pieces. We started with a small curl at the very end of the tang end and then heated up the tang and slipped it through the hole of the other piece and curled it into a loop. Ideally, you’d like to do that in one heat. Then we curved the one piece that would have gone on the lid of the chest to match the curve of the wood. We used a leaf spring as a guide for the curve. And there we had it! I finished – and matching – set of strap hinges.

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Something that once again I underestimated the effort to accomplish. I figured we’d be done in under three hours, but it took us nearly five. And we’ve gotten much quicker with our work, especially on a project such as this that didn’t really introduce a lot of new techniques. Really makes you appreciate the work that went into simple, every day items.

We continued work on our nail header today. Last time we had drawn out the taper on one end for the handle. It was heavy work, even on the soft steel we had chosen. It was looking pretty good, but we all agreed that it was a bit too short. So we decided to add another inch or two to it – and we also decided to speed things up and use the trip hammer. Rob and I had never used the trip hammer before and it gave us an opportunity to experience that. It’s easy to see why folks like those as it turned several hours of hard hammering into about 5 minutes of mesmerizing pounding. Doug helped us set the shoulders for the handle. It might have been a bit of “cheating”, but we got introduced to a new skill and got our handle where we wanted it in short order, which left us the rest of the day to work on forming the business end.

We took another short cut and used the chop saw to trim the stock down. We could have hot cut it using a hardy tool, but once again we wanted to use our time working on the more important aspects of the tool.

So the next step was to thicken business end by hitting the edges. Since this piece is a large mass of steel, using our usual hammers (800-1200g) would only really slide a portion of the edges rather than compressing the entire piece. So we got out the 14-pound sledge hammer to see the difference that would make in how the material moved. Boy did it make a difference! Besides moving it much more quickly, it moved it better – meaning no sliding toward the end and creating a fish mouth, no creating lips on the edge that then have to be hammered back in place (and really accomplish nothing). It was a beast to swing, but it sure felt good when it connected with the hot steel.

After we got the bar to the size we wanted, the last step was to punch a hole through. The Måstermyr nail header had five holes in it, but we opted to start with one and then decided later what other sizes/types of holes we would want to add. The idea would be to have the bigger holes closer to the handle, so we could have some pretty good sized ones before we’re done.

Since this was such a large, hot piece of metal we’d be punching through, we chose to use an essentially throw-away piece of round stock and taper the ends. It wouldn’t pay to harden it since it would lose that as it went through the hot bar. So we found something in a size that would make a decent nail, tapered the end, and started punching. It was surprising, actually, how easily and quickly that hole punched through. But we did have to cool the punch after every hit (sometimes in water and sometimes in a beeswax/olive oil mixture) and straighten it out a couple of times. When we finally got it through we just kept driving to push it all the way through. That didn’t go so well. We had failed to taper the top end of the punch which would give it some relief and allow it to drop out. So we basically had our punch stuck in the nail header and with the kind of heat involved there was a risk of it weldingwelding Welding is a process that joins metal by using high heat to melt the parts together and allowing them to cool, causing fusion. Welding is distinct from lower temperature metal-joining techniques such as brazing and soldering, which do not melt the base metal. or simply permanently getting stuck in there.

The fix for this situation was brilliant and shows why we are apprentices and Doug is a master. He opted to cut the top of the punch to about an inch above the bar and then grind a taper on it. We then heated it up to orange-red and the cooled one side of the punch in water to harden it. Then we hammered on that end and lo and behold it went all the way through and fell to the ground. Disaster averted!

We had done it! We had forged our nail header and punched a hole in it. It was ready to be used and we just had to give it a try. We found another piece of round stock, set the shoulder, hammered it square, and then cut it off about twice as high above the shoulders as the diameter of the nail. There’s a trick to cutting it off with only cutting on two sides, but we’ll have to practice a bunch before we’re ready for that. For now, the goal is to cut equally from each side of the square nail but not quite fully through. Then you heat it up, place it in the nail header, twist the excess stock off, and hammer the nail head. The goal is to have a nice, even, , flat, centered nail head. It didn’t quite come out that way at first, but a second heat allowed us to improve it quite a bit.

This was a massive undertaking for a small, everyday tool. If a person (or actually a team of people) had to make these, you can bet they’d take care of them. They are not easily or quickly replaced.

The last of our official sessions under the FY20 NDCA Folk and Traditional Arts grant had us working on our hammer and starting an axe. Yay! We’re finally getting to the axe, which is a project I’ve been looking forward to for a long time.

Hammer

Last week we started our hammer head and had managed to get the eye punched and drifted and the cross peen started. We still had a bit more drawing and shaping to do on the peen end today, and of course there’s still the heat treating, hardening, and dressing to do as well.

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So we dug right in and started pounding on that cross-peen end. This is a solid block of tough steel and it doesn’t want to move too quickly. But after a while it started to shape up and we then turned our focus to the langetslanget Langets are the "ears" associated with a drift hole, such as on a hammer or axe, where to flatten the sides you pull the mass up into ears instead of pushing it to the sides which would distort the hole..

Langets

Langets are formed when you take the mass of metal that was pushed out when you drifted the hole for the handle and pull it upwards. Why would you do that? Because you want the side of your hammer to be flat and not have that bulge in the middle. Why is that important? It keeps the hammer from sliding off the anvil when you set it down and you can scrape the hammer scale off the anvil with the flat side. So if form follows function, you want a flat side to your hammer.

It sounds easy enough, once you understand what you are trying to do and why, but once again it’s harder to do than it sounds. The trick is to not change the shape of the hole you’ve created too much. So much of the time you are pounding on the sides of the hammer, you have the drift punch in the hole rather than using tongs. That helps keep the shape a bit and gives you better control too.

And as much as moving this rather large chunk of hard steel takes a bit of oomph, it’s surprising how it also requires finesse to get it just right. Keeping the bottom flat, the sides flat, the slopes of the langets straight, and the hole straight and true means a lot of little taps on top of the big hits from earlier in the process.

We finished the day with the shape of the hammer head where we wanted it and began the heat treating by thermocyclingthermocycling Thermocycling is the process of heating steel to critical temp (non-magnetic) and then letting it air cool. Usually done three times in a row. it three times. The final heat/quench and tempering will have to wait until next time.

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Axe

We started with a chunk of 4140 bar stock to begin making our axe. It begins a lot like the hammer in that you need to drift a hole in the middle. It’s a bit tricker though as the stock is rectangular instead of square and you’re trying to cut through the narrow end. So we started with the same trick of putting the stock low in the vise and scoring it to mark the middle. This hole is further to one side since, unlike the hammer, there’s really only one business end of an axe.

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Doug had spotted a jig for making axes in one of the Norwegian/Swedish blacksmithing books and had replicated it. We were a little worried that the heated block would get stuck in the jig or it wouldn’t fit in it in the first place, but it worked brilliantly and was much more sturdy than having another person hold the block with tongs. It seems nearly impossible for a solo smith to do both hammer and tongs work on this and get that hole drifted at all, much less straight. The jig makes it easier and better no matter how many folks are available for the work.

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After nearly 6 hours at the forge today (time always seems to fly at the forge) we called it a day when our arms gave out. We still have next weekend to do the final touches on the hammer and get the axe into shape as well.

While this marks the “official” end of our grant work for FY20, we learned this week that we have been approved to continue our apprenticeship for FY21. Exciting! We won’t be starting on that work until July, so look for a separate post with information on our plan for the new grant and the projects we’ll be working on.

This one was a doozie as it was double, maybe triple, long. Today we focused on getting one hammer made. Sounds easy enough, right? One hammer, one long day, two (or three) people, no problem. Uh, we got a long ways but we did not get it done in the 5+ hours that we spent on it.

Because a good start to this project is everything, we started by scoring our block of 1045 square steel (maybe 1-1/4 inches) with some lines to make sure that we got our hole for the hammer centered and straight on the block. While you can make some adjustments as you go, it’s better to take your time at this stage. It’s hard to recover from a badly placed hole. So we marked some lines on the top and bottom to find the center down the longest dimension (length) and copied those to the opposite side. We then wanted to mark our “center” in the narrow dimension (width), but this mark needed to be off-center just a bit to allow for the lengthening of the one side as we draw out the cross peen. It was about a 60/40 split. We used a straight edge and a drill bit to make the score marks.

After we scored all the lines we needed, we got out a chisel and marked the spot where we wanted the drift to be. It was a fairly significant pilot cut as we were going to need to be able to see it when the block was heated to yellow hot. We made the same marks on both the top and the bottom of the hammer head.

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Next was to get the block good and hot and begin to punch a hole through the block. As you can imagine, it took a lot of heat and a lot of times in and out of the forge to get the chisel to go all the way through. We punched from both sides and met in the middle. It was a two-person job as one person worked the tongs to pull the block out place in on the anvil, hold it in place, and then flip it over while the other person carefully placed the chisel and hammered the bejeezus out of it. It is a best practice to switch sides of the anvil (and therefore the block of steel) to compensate for any thing that might not be quite plumb or level. It became a bit of a dance as it was two or three strikes with the hammer, dunk the chisel in water to cool it off, switch sides of the anvil and repeat.

We finally managed to get the chisel through the entire piece and it was relatively straight. Next step is to make that hole big enough to hold a handle, so we used increasingly larger chisels/drift tools until we had a good, straight eye formed. It was easy to check if it was straight by lifting the hammer head up on the drift tool to eyeball how it was sitting. We did need to make some minor adjustments along the way.

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Once it was large enough and straight enough it was time to start drawing out the peen end. That’s a pretty solid chunk of tough steel to try to get moving, but if you heated it up enough it started to move. This was where having a team of people was really handy as we had a fireman/tongs person, a lead blacksmith doing some hammering, and a striker delivering some powerful blows to get it into shape.

Due to some other commitments, we weren’t quite able to finish the hammer head in one day. We still need to finish the peen and draw out the langetslanget Langets are the "ears" associated with a drift hole, such as on a hammer or axe, where to flatten the sides you pull the mass up into ears instead of pushing it to the sides which would distort the hole. around the eye, plus there will be some work to finish the face of the hammer as well. We’ll get it done at our next session.

A couple of other things we learned today. One reason that it is preferred to drift the eye hole rather than to drill it into the block of steel is that steel has grain and fiber, somewhat like wood. Rather than break those fibers by drilling a hole it is better to split the fibers by drifting to maintain their strength.

Since we’ve lost so much time this spring, today was an extra long session and we actually got to work on two projects: cooking utensils and our bellows.

Cooking Utensils

I had seen these utensils – I dunno what we should call them, maybe bread bakers? – at a couple of reenactment events we had attended. They looked interesting and reminded me of the “Tonka Toasters” we use over campfires to make pies and sandwiches.

While the coiled spiral shape is something we’ve done plenty of, it’s usually been of round stock with no gaps in between. We had discussed for the past week what might be the best way to approach making these. Take round stock and flatten it out? Take square stock and flatten it out? As it turns out, the way we wound up doing it is actually one we discussed – as the most difficult – which is to coil rectangular stock on the narrow edge.

As with most coils, the start is the most critical part. There’s no fixing the taper or curl (at least very much) once you’ve started the coil. This was only a one-sided taper and I nearly forgot what those were like as most of the recent ones have been two-sided or round. That went pretty well, but continuing the coil proved to be heavy work that went much better with the stock held tight or braced up against something when striking the opposite end. One really nice thing about a coal forge is that we were able to heat specific sections of the coil to have them bend while keeping other sections cold for striking. That’s not possible in a gas forge – you have to quench sections in water to cool them off to get a similar effect.

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While the concept of a one-sided taper followed by a narrow-edge coil is simple enough, the execution is another thing. Nearly every blow wants to bend and twist the piece since it doesn’t like to move on that narrow edge. And trying to keep the coil smooth and avoid flat sections is easier said than done. I found it reasonably easy to keep the outer edge smooth, but the inner edge would get some straight areas that are harder to deal with.

In the end they came out pretty well and we were able to make some small tweaks to the spacing at the end using tongs.

The last step was to work on the handles. There are lots of choices there. We could draw them out, twist them, round them up, make a tang and put on a wood handle, and so forth. In the end, Rob punched a hole through his so he could hang it and I drew another one-sided taper and made a thumb loop at the end.

This is the kind of project that will get better with practice (don’t they all). But I’d like to give this one another try and have some fun with different handles. Looking forward to cooking some bread on these!

On to the second project …

Bellows

We had started making our bellows back in August but set them aside for our trip to Scotland and then the winter and then all the challenges that the spring brought. But it’s time to get them finished up!

We had left them after we attached the hinge to one set of bellows (you can catch up on that here). So we needed to get the hinge on the second set before moving on to the next steps.

Once that was complete, we moved on to getting the snout ready. We are using about a 10cm length of 2cm diameter copper tubing and attaching it to a thin sheet of copper that will sit on the end of the wood part of the bellows. We started by cutting a hole in the middle of the copper sheet that was about the size of the INSIDE diameter of the copper tube. Then we punched a few (four, to be exact) holes so that we will be able to tack it to the wood. Lastly, we soldered the tube to the sheet – something I’d never done before. It was really cool to see the solder melt and seal up the joint!

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There’s still a few steps left before these will be complete. We are going to use canvas rather than leather for the sides. During the Viking-age they may have used textile, most likely wool, rather than leather for some bellows as leather may have been too expensive for such a tool. We just don’t know for sure. So we used a pattern to cut it out and that’s where we left if for the day.

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So what’s left to do before these are done?

1. Attach the copper tube plate to the snout
2. Attach the canvas to the sides
3. Attach the handle
4. Treat the wood (with linseed oil)
5. Treat the canvas (with a beeswax/tar mixture)

Our homework is to complete four of those steps and then bring them back to the Goose Prairie Forge to complete that last, messy, smelly one to get them done. Can’t wait to see them in action!

So after a break of a few months due to the death of my mother and the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we returned to making progress on our projects. Part of today’s session was simply regrouping after the recent events, but some of it was planning for the remainder of the projects. We’ve got several things yet to accomplish and a short time to get them done, but we’ve made a plan to make it happen.

So to get back into the groove, we decided to work on a cold-cut chisel project today. It was a great choice to get back into the swing of things (see what I did there? ? ). The hammering skills were simple enough – just tapering one end of a piece of octagonal steel stock. But tool steel hammers differently than milder (aka softer) steel, so that was a good refresher. On top of that there was a bit of grinder work to do and we hadn’t been at a grinder in months. That too seemed simple enough, except you have to have a pretty steady hand to get a straight grind and we struggled with that just a bit. But after a few pointers and tips, we got the grinds looking pretty good.

So the steps to making a chisel (or pretty much any hardened tool) are essentially:

1. Forge
2. Thermocycle
3. Grind
4. Heat treat (quench)
5. Grind (polish)
6. Temper

Chisels have a tip that has two angles on it, one that is forged in (about 15º) and one that is ground in (about 60º). So we started with forging in the taper. Then we thermocycled the pieces before we started grinding. (Thermocycled means that we heated them up to critical temperature where they become non-magnetic and then set them aside to air cool, repeated three times.) After that it was time for a heat treat. So we heated the pieces once again to critical temp and then quenched them in oil and then water. They had the nice gray color we were looking for and a file just skated off of them. So the last step was tempering the steel and we did that by heating a 4-inch length of 2-inch pipe to red hot and then holding the chisel inside the pipe for short periods of time (maybe 10 second or less) and then looking to watch for the blue almost purple color we were looking for. That means the chisel is done!

The chisel was a nice quick project that called on a variety of skills we have learned. They turned out pretty well!

P.S. We also learned about the various types of chisels. These are really broad distinctions and there’s much more to them all than this.

• Hot-cut chisels: have a longer, narrower taper so that they slice through hot metal rather than push it aside.
• Cold-cut chisels: have a more blunt edge to put some weight behind the cut.
• Stone chisels: have a flared out edge to prevent the chisel from getting stuck in the stone.
• Wood chisels: have one sided taper (they’re flat on the back).