Forging Ahead Friday

I have had an incredible weekend, Progress, struggles, frustration, joy and successes all in small measures.

To begin the weather was quite windy all weekend but bright and mostly dry :) I had been gifted a canvas tarp by the Lady AJ that had been used to shelter many a girl guide fire so it was tried and tested against sparks and all I needed was to hunt for the right wood to make a nice light sunshade. 

Shelter secured and permission to set up the forge (above ground only due to site concerns) had me scrambling all week to cobble together a small 'pit forge'/ sand table out of an old corner cabinet and some determination.    

I went into the scrap bins I have, and every piece of copper 'too' small, bent, twisted abused or failed scrap that I have kept over the years was cut up finely to use to make the bronze.  

 I portioned up a series of bags each with 50 grams of copper and then poured off a number of ingots of lead free pewter to hack up into 5 g bars.    I used a counter weight balance scale,  a small step away from the Norse versions but low tech all the same.  I had some fun distracting myself from the possible ideas regarding another avenue of "hey I could make one of those..."  In the end practicality won out and contented myself with thinking through the steps to use one to weight and portion out alloys while I continued the monotonous task of hacking up copper bits.

There's a ton of really good info out there on norse and anglo weights and measure but I fount this authors brief post especially interesting http://vikingmetalwork.blogspot.ca/2012/11/standardised-viking-weights-part-1.html  She has written a few books on the subject of viking jewellery and I hope to have some more book purchasing power soon to indulge my curiosity beyond the teasing peaks I can get with google books.

So in short order I had a nice display area set up and roped off.  The sand and stones were acquired and laid out in a small pit about a hand-span wide and half that deep lined with rocks and with the bellows set on only one of the pits.

Starting up the charcoal fire with some handy teasels, 

Now there's not much more to show in images on this day because I spent most of it forging a pair of tongs and was kept too busy to remember to take more shots.  The only blacksmithing I had done prior to this was by using a torch for small projects like chasing tools, working this way was completely foreign to me and a great adventure. Learning how and where the heat was and keeping the iron in the right spots in the fire was enough to keep us playing till dinner.   The bellows preformed reasonably well though the valve on the 'lefty' is a bit slow to close and requires a wrist flick to get to work well.  

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It was around an hour or two in when some of the hairline cracks in the ceramic stone succumbed to the internal thermal stresses and gave up the ghost.  Two main brakes were visible, but since they were well keyed into each other I left them and just ensured that the stone was well staked up so that if parts fell it wouldn't be into the hearth.  It was a sad event but not unexpected in the grand scheme of things.  I will have to get a line on a slab of soap stone or some other fire resistant stone when I have the time to make a nice one again, In the meantime I learned that the size and shape of it did indeed work very well. 

At the end of the night when everything was cooled off and put to bed we made a trip out to get more charcoal just in case because it looked like, by the consumption so far it would be a good idea, and boyo was I right, the brand I bought the first time was the big blue bag, Royal king I think, and it was a bit of a pain because there was a huge range of piece sizes and some of then weren't even charcoal yet!  At the local grocery we found a different brand and it worked very well and was in nice small and even pieces.  So much better,  I understand that bag to bag there'll be some differences, but to boot, this other stuff (Duraflame lump charcoal, 100% natural) was a few bucks cheaper so I will keep my eye out to pick up another few bags for my next demo at an upcoming event (Trillies).