Collaborate Disseminate
If you think you can’t do investment casting because you don’t have a safe place to melt metal, think again. Metal casting in the kitchen is possible, as demonstrated by …read more Continue reading More Microwave Metal Casting
Depending on the chef’s skill, many exciting things can happen in the kitchen. Few, however, grab as much immediate attention as when a piece of foil or a fork accidentally …read more Continue reading Radio Waves Bring the Heat With This Microwave-Powered Forge
If you own a CNC and have kept tabs on metal prices these past few years (honestly months), you might shed a small tear as you watch chips fly off …read more Continue reading 3D Printed Forge For Recycling
Cookware isn’t something we typically build ourselves; you’d want a well-equipped metal shop to do the job and do it right. [Torbjörn Åhman] has just that, however, and set about …read more Continue reading How To Forge A Skillet From Scratch
Melting aluminum is actually pretty easy to do, which is why it’s such a popular metal for beginners at metal casting. Building a foundry that can melt aluminum safely is …read more Continue reading Flip-Top Foundry Helps Manage the Danger of Metal Casting
You know the funny looking side of the anvil? That’s where the best curves come from. It’s called the anvil horn and is the blacksmith’s friend when bending steel and shaping it into curves.
The principle of bending a piece of steel stock is very easy to understand. Heat it …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: Curves And Rings
For the past few months we’ve been running this series of Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated posts, exploring the art of forge work for a novice. It’s based upon my experience growing up around a working blacksmith’s business and becoming an enthusiastic if somewhat inexpert smith, and so far we’ve spent …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: Your First Time At The Anvil
When you grow up with something as the constant backdrop to your life, it’s easy to forget as an adult that not everyone else shares your instinctive knowledge of the subject. My dad is a blacksmith, he’s now retired, but as I was growing up his very active forge was …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: Let’s Talk About Anvils
Blacksmiths were the high technologists of fabrication up until the industrial revolution gained momentum. At its core, this is the art and science of making any needed tool or mechanism out of metal. Are you using the correct metal? Is the tool strong where it needs to be? And how …read more
Continue reading Blacksmithing For The Uninitiated: What is a Forge?
Both “Nixie” and “Steampunk” are getting a bit overused. It’s hard to count the number of clock projects we’ve seen recently that combine the two, and normally we’d be loath to feature yet another variation on that theme without a good reason. This is a good reason.
The single-digit Nixie clocks that [Claes Vahlberg] built are, simply put, works of art. There’s a small version of the clock, featuring a single IN-16 Nixie, and a larger version that uses a Dalibor Farny custom Nixie, a work of art in its own right. Each clock has features like time and date, …read more
Continue reading Hand-Forged Cases Make Nixie Clocks into Works of Art