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.