Enough with the dishes already! I know I know! Too many bowls and not enough other stuff. I'm working on that - promise! Just one more to show a bowl in its "natural habitat". She replaced the coffee can lid that was working overtime to contain all the junk on my desk. I call it 'organized with style!' Next post.... railroad spikes!
As promised...... If you want to make some hooks out of railroad spikes, you've got to get set up to do some bending! First step is to hunt through your bucket of odd pieces so you can cobble together some kind of bending form. Then you've got to make a bending fork big enough to get the job done. Being 5/8" square, those spikes aren't the easiest thing to bend, so make the fork plenty meaty! Bring it all together..... Of course, this is done while the steel's plenty hot. I couldn't manage that and operate the camera, so it is what it is. After doing a few of them, I can see that the bending form needs some tweaking. Other than that, though, I'm pretty satisfied with how everything went. Now I just need to make a top tool so I can drive the countersink divots deeper without getting my hand so close to the scorching-hot steel.
So, I said no more bowls.... but this isn't technically a bowl. I bought a few of these blanks from a fellow on the internet and forgot all about them. Then I ran across them this morning while cleaning and generally putzying around the smithy. As a test piece, I'm pleased with the ladle portion, but have to figure out what I'm going to do with the handle. I think I should have forged on the handle first because it's now going to be a bear to hold onto the ladle portion while trying to hammer on the handle.
Don't put me on a pedestal quite yet, friend. You can do just what I did in about 30 minutes if you start with what I started with. There's a fellow over on eBay called Plank-n-Ingot who sells the laser/water cut blanks. Rich is a good fellow and I've always had great service from him, so I recommend him in general. I might even try his frying pan blank.
@JAD Outback steak house is that the name of a restaurant? Has to be beyond the black stump to be authentic. @VaughnT Foster's is only for export because it's so good nobody here drinks it
The finished ladle on the pucks my father designed for working steel. I wasn't sure if he was ready to debut the things, but he gave the all-clear so here we are. The puck works much like the rings and tank ends that you see folks using, only it's better. Maybe I'm a bit biased since my old man came up with it, but I'm sticking to my story. Honestly, I like the idea of using an old O2 tank or the like, but to date I haven't been able to find anybody that had one to spare. When my father decided to buy an old Southbend lathe, making something like the bottom of a tank seemed like a good practice project. Since neither of us are machinists by trade, there was a lot of learning to be done! What I've found so far, is that these pucks are a dream to work with. They start life as a 1" thick slice of 5" 1018 round bar. He then turns one face to have a 21º conical shape with just a little bit of flat in the bottom. The whole thing is about 1" thick, but the depression only goes down about 5/8" so there's plenty of mass in these things. I use mine on my anvil and it doesn't jump around at all. Of course, my anvil is blessed with a flat smooth face which might help, but I was really surprised I didn't need to weld on a hardy stem. Currently, we're trying to come up with the right techniques and tooling to produce a smoother finish in a timely fashion. Easier said than done.... To stiffen the junction between the handle and bowl, I borrowed some real-estate from the bowl portion and created a run-through fuller in the handle. This worked, but the whole thing still has the look and feel of something you'd see in an industrial kitchen supply. It's not nearly as "artsy" as I'd like and I'm hoping it will look better once it's been seasoned. Because it's plain steel, it will rust after every wash so you need to treat it like you would a cast iron skillet.
@ozbushy -- That was my weak attempt at humor regarding exotic foreigners and my suggestion that I eat at a restaurant chain in America that has an Australian motif. The joke is humorless without the context of our American food chains designed to resemble everything. @VaughnT -- you hit it out of the park and right back at me. I will end this silliness by just saying "cheers mates".
