Subject: On Line at Last

From: garland franklyn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 08:54:39 -0500 (CDT)

Greetings All!!!

I am pleased to announce that the Upper Midwest Blacksmith Association is 
now online with their very own website!!!  Although it is still in 
various stages of construction, I invite you to take a peek at it:

http://www.mcs.net/~umba

The UMBA Web Team is still working and learning, but feedback would be 
appreciated.  Please, rather than clutter up the mailing lists with your 
comments, address them to:   [email-masked]

Thank you all for your time and your patience.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Franklyn Garland
WebMaster for The
Upper Midwest Blacksmith Association
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

---

From: "[email-masked] 415.855.5707" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 07:23:01 -0800 (PST)

Hi all,

(sorry about the cross post...)

I am putting together a newsletter aimed at folks interested in automotive
sheetmetal shaping - coachbuilding or fabrication of one-off bodies from steel
and aluminum.  Anyway, I wrote a little blurb about basic blacksmithing as part
of an article in the newsletter on making special hammers.

If you could give me some feedback I would appreciate it.  Mostly I want to
make sure it is complete and technically accurate.  If anyone has some simple
line drawings I could use to illustrate these operations...well I would be most
grateful.

I'll make a copy of the finished newsletter available on-line when it's
printed.

Joe McGlynn
[email-masked]
415-855-5707

+++begin excerpt+++

Making the hammer head is basic blacksmithing, useful skills to have in your
arsenal of metalworking tricks.  A skilled blacksmith can make an amazing array
of tools and parts using just a fire, hammer and anvil.  There are six basic
hot metal techniques which we’ll just list briefly.  For more information see
the RESOURCES section.

Note: each operation requires that the metal be heated to a different
temperature, usually judged by the incandescent color of the hot metal. 
Different metals call for different temperatures, for instance high carbon
steel welds at a lower temperature than low carbon steel.  Incandescent colors
begin at a dull red and move through a bright red to orange, yellow and finally
white.  If you see sparks coming from a white-hot section of metal you have
probably burned it and that section is ruined.

Ø UPSETTING: Heating a localized area of a bar and forcing the metal to expand
or widen in that area by hammering on the end of the bar.  The effect is to
reduce the length of a section of metal and increase its cross section.

Ø DRAWING OUT: Heating an area of a bar to be reshaped and hammering equally on
all sides.  The effect is to reduce the cross section and increase the length. 
Sometimes done to produce a tapered point.

Ø BENDING:  May be done hot or cold, hot bending allows you to create perfectly
square bends in thick metal by first upsetting the area to be bent and then
forging this “extra” metal into a perfect 90 degree bend.

Ø PUNCHING & DRIFTING:  An area of metal is heated and punches are used to
create a hole of any shape, round, square or oblong.  Drifting involves using
tapered punches to finish a hole to a specific size and shape.

Ø HOT CUTTING:  A area of metal is heated and split or cut with a sharp chisel.

Ø FORGE WELDING:  Two or more pieces of metal are heated and hammered together
using a simple borax flux to remove oxides and scale.

+++end excerpt+++

---

From: Michael Spencer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 96 00:42:08 EDT

> I am putting together a newsletter aimed at folks interested in
> automotive sheetmetal shaping - coachbuilding or fabrication of
> one-off bodies from steel and aluminum.

What you wrote seems to be accurate enough. But I would think that
repouse and stake-working of sheet metal would be of more interest to
the coachwork guys. I took a workshop with Chris Ray (You there
Chris?) in 1980 that just blew me away. You can get started and do
remarkable stuff in 16 ga. steel with a couple of  reworked 8
oz to 16 oz. ballpeins, some stakes forged up from m/s or junk and a
couple of flapwhels to polish the tools. And the same techniques port
to soft aluminum and copper and even 10 ga. steel. Of course, as you
go along, you add hammers and improve stakes and add collected
ready-made tools from the sheet metal or silver shop.

Not that I'm a wizard at this -- I saw a couple of pieces in the
Yellin Museum to which my reaction was like that of the good ol' boy
from up the holler when he saw his first giraffe: "They aint no
such animal!" -- but I've been real tickled with what I've been able
to do with a collection of ad hoc tools that look like a cargo cult
silversmith's set. And there are several guys out there who *are*
wizards at this stuff -- Chris and Tom Bredlow and Nahum Hersom.

One of these times I just gotta pull the hood off my pickup and work up
somthing wierd in it -- acanthus leaf doo-doo or a trilobite fossil or
or a bust of Chris Ray ;-) or whatever. 

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer               (902) 543-8375
[email-masked]
URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html
---