Whats in your bucket?

Raymond Richard

Raymond Richard

Joined
Jun 17, 2001
Messages
5,705
Normally this time of year I'll stick my forging hammers in one of my quench buckets and just let them soak for days. Yesterday morning I had the forge going and took out a couple hammers and started noticing a strange smell. It wasn't quite foul enough to set me into action but when I went back out in the late afternoon the smell had gotten stronger. My shop is pretty open to critters and I knew of one sparrow's nest out there so I figured most likly a baby bird fell in the bucket and couldn't get out. Turn's out it was a field mouse. Big stink for a little critter......
 
Yuk.... :barf:

I just emptied out my grinder water bucket and it had about six inches of metal dust at the bottom. No critters I couls see though.
 
I always dump mine on a big mum outside the garage. It is huge now from all the iron I think.
 
Mine had some sort of flesh eating disease for awhile I think. Something got to my hand a couple years back after grinding a bunch of knives and was pretty nasty.
Now its got a healthy dose of soap mixed in with it. It gets boiled pretty good when I'm welding and need to cool stuff off too. It is time to clean it though, got a bunch of bugs floating in there dead right now. Damn things drive me nuts :grumpy:
Anyone tried hanging a bug zapper in their shop?
 
I have lumps of something in there it's about time to go back in I guess
and battle it,, wish me luck,,,
smilegoofy.gif
 
I cleaned out a slack tub the other day to move a power hammer into place, this is one of two tubs in the shop, the contents where:

a few pounds of satanite from clay coat heat treating

7 leaves that got dropped in, but never fished out (for roses, I make leaves in batches, forge, cut and throw in the tub, fish them out later)

1 damascus arrowhead (I was looking for that)

1 pair of tongs (I was looking for those too)

1 billet of wrought iron/ 52100 san-mai (I don't even remember making that)

a bunch of small pieces of damascus

30-40 nails (same procedure as leaves, forge, and drop in for retrieval later)

$5 bill

1 small piece of a bloom

10+ pounds of coal dust, iron dust and dirt in a nice soupy mess on the bottom

Aparently, I should clean out my slack tub more often, after all $5 is a lot of money :)

Tony
 
Gee, all I have is cruddy water, rust, steel at the bottom and the bag from my wet-dry vac. How boring!
 
Hey Tony,
Next time you should have a lottery drawing for the contents of you tub before you clean it out..... $1 a ticket.... everyone makes out :D
 
Tony, Sounds like it hasn't been cleaned out in years. I had been missing my cut off hardy for a number of years. I changed containers for my quenching oil awhile back and there it was. I'm still looking for that 5 bucks........ :D
 
Believe it or not... that's less than 6 months accumulation!

I'm used to finding other crap in there, but the $5 was a pleasant surprise :)

I'll have to do that Craig.... I can see the newspaper headline now "Working blacksmith sells crap for good money" Kinda reminds me of my ren-faire days.... "yup, some poeple call it a clinker, but I call it a dragon ****, that'll be $10 please"

Ya'll have a good one... still no luck on the computer front, working at the office now.

Tony
 
Well there's another advantage of having the shop in my basement - less chance of the odd critter falling in and stinking up the place. There's nothing in my bucket but a couple inches of sludge, I feel really lame. You guys have all the fun losing valuable stuff like that!

But Ray I need to know why you're soaking your forging hammers? I am stumped.
 
Dave, Dan hit the nail on the head about the hammers. I set up shop in my old rental house down in the basement and used it for carpentry. I had built a partition wall to keep the dust and what not contained to just the one side. A few years after we had moved out and rented the house I had to go check on something down in the basement where I had built the shop. There was a ledge on top on the wall that I used to store things on. I noticed some branches and leaves on the ledge and wondered what was going on with all that crap. I went to move the mess and this paw comes down. I about **** my pants! A possum had found away to get in and built itself a home down there.
 
I soak mt hammer heads in antifreeze, works for about a year at a time... just gotta be careful to keep the pooch away while doing it.
 
ysforge said:
I soak mt hammer heads in antifreeze, works for about a year at a time... just gotta be careful to keep the pooch away while doing it.
Click to expand...

tip of the day right there. :thumbup:
 
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