Well, The day turned out more impromtu, and not quite so much hammer-inn, but we did have half a dozen guys come and go over the course of the day, and I was even beaten to the shop by a Nice guy named Troy Brown who was visiting from Oklahoma. The day started out slow, as the guy with the bloom (Jesse Frank) was running late, so I fired up the coal forge, and worked a little wrought iron for later use in some san-mai.
Had some great conversations with Troy about forge work, equipment, and just knife making in general, untill about noon, at which point we where pretty sure Jesse was lost beyond hope! Eventually he did show up though, and the fun got under-way.
We started by cutting the bloom a little to get it into slightly more manageable chunks, the oxy/ac rig was quite handy for that, as Jesse had already all but burned up one chop saw trying to cut it up, and still hadn't managed to get all the way through it. I didn't feel like sacrificing mine.
We only made one or two cuts, and started forging the chunks that we cut off in the coal forge (running on charcoal since I'm out of coal) and got some to weld up nicely, and decided to move on and try forging a larger portion of the almost completely solid center.... I watched, let other guys forge... I'm not that interested in holding a 20+ pound bloom on the end of a pair of 3 foot long tongs.... after 2 heats, they decided further cutting was in order.
We cut the rest of the bloom up into 5 or 6 pieces, and forged one into a nice plate about 3/8" or 1/2" thick, and about 6 inches on either side. We got all the pieces down to the size that Jesse, who will henceforth be known as "
the hippie viking" can use in his propane forge. unfortunatley, since everything got started 3 hours late, we didn't get to carbuerizing at all today, but Jesse did leave a piece of the bloom for me and I may get to that at some point, but there's too much on my to-do list right now.
As the day wound down, the totals where:
40 pounds of charcoal burned
1 knife forged
2 pieces of consolidated bloom
4 pieces of bloom needing consolidation
1 cool new nickname
2 very nice burns, some slag cought Troy in the ear early, and later on Stephen realized it really was hot, even black
4,200 calories consumed at lunch.
And I acomplished absolutely nothing for the entire day. I cant afford to do this often, but it was a lot of fun.
I'll try to give more notice next time, and I'll post pictures at some point soon. but for now, have a good night, and I hope next time we'll all get there on time, and more folks will join us!
Tony
Edited to add apicture of part of the bloom being forged, before it was re-cut into smaller pieces.
