Wednesday, April 23, 2014

This Week in My Forge

Finally, the weather is getting nice so I've been able to get back into my forge for some tinkering around.

The first project I made was a trivet. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be, but I am happy with the results. Getting the circle shape is harder than it looks, but by trial and error, I got the circle close enough to round. This made me really want to get a blacksmith cone. The other fun thing with this project was the forge welding of the circle. This was the best weld I have done to date and after filing the edge I could see I got good fusing.

The next project was a trammel and grease lamp. In use, the lamp has a wick in each corner so it puts out a lot of light. The traditional fuel for the lamp is tallow, but I use olive oil. I burned the lamp for two hours on a filling of olive oil with all four wicks going and I still had a little oil left to go.

My dog is my chief engineer and security consultant with all my projects and today was no exception. She would not get out of the way until I took her picture.

5 comments:

Gorges Smythe said...

I'll bet she keeps you on your toes! I'd never seen a lamp like that before. Interesting!

Frontier Carpenter said...

Yes she does! She likes to try to lay down under the forge so she is banned from the shed

Jonas Jensen said...

Nice looking trivet.
Maybe a bit of the topic, but have you tried making our own coal for the smithy? I read in a Swedish magazine some years ago that while making wooden tar out of pine, a by product was some excellent charcoal.
I figured that it would probably be how they made tar in the early US as well.
I have attached a couple of links (from swedish homepages)
Brgds
Jonas
http://skogssverige.se/node/38621
http://www.gardochtorp.se/tjara-vart-karaste-traskydd.aspx?article=4450

Frontier Carpenter said...

Jonas,
I have never made tar or charcoal.

I read in a journal by German Immigrants that migrated to Grand Island Nebraska in the 1860's that the first thing their group did upon settling was set to make charcoal out of cottonwood for their Blacksmith. With all they had to do it is interesting that that was their priority. Just goes to show how important a blacksmith was on the frontier.

Thanks for the links I enjoyed them

Ron

Jamie Bacon said...

Very cool lamp! I'd love to see pictures of it in use, or at least with the wicks in place; I can be pretty dense sometimes with descriptions when I don't have a picture.
I really admire your multiple talents. I always wanted to learn traditional black smithing and had even only half jokingly threatened my wife that I was going to build a forge next to my woodworking shop. So many cool, traditional 18th century style projects you can achieve at the forge.