Forge Improvement Update!

Fox River Forge resides in Wisconsin in what was primarily a storage shed without electricity or insulation. This means that for a good portion of the year it is cold in the shop and there are weeks where it's just too cold to work. It's cold inside the shop and the tools, specifically the anvil, are so cold I end up burning way more fuel that is tolerable to make even simple items. This is hugely inconvenient as the time off leads to atrophy of skills and potential degradation of equipment and supplies.

This year that changes!

My folks, with some guidance from my Jessie I think, presented me with a gift card to get a torpedo heater from a regional hardware store called Menards. This is very exciting as I will finally be able to continue working and learning and building up inventory on through the winter.

After taking some measurements and figuring out what size I needed I settled on a Dyna-Glo Delux. I went and picked it up and spent some time reading about how to set it up and use it safely. I am, admittedly, the type of person who will only look at directions if I can't get something to work or have already hurt myself using it incorrectly. However, I did a bunch of research on it this time as it has the capacity to not only burn down my shop but severely hurt or kill me in the process. So having done my research, a couple days ago I gave it a test run and let me tell you, IT WAS GREAT. It was snowing out and I was smithing away happily in my apron with a t-shirt over a thermal undershirt. I was able to work comfortably the whole time.

One of the things I made that day was an appreciation gift for the Fastenal representative who supplies the business I earn a living at. He supplies a variety of hardware we use in the shop including bolts and nuts, so I made him a bottle opener out of one of the bolts he supplied.
My good friend Cliff, who was the one who hand-crafted my apron, came up to visit while i was working and took some pictures.

I’m looking forward to being able to keep the shop open and productive. I hope everyone had a great holiday season and wish all of you a wonderful, happy and healthy New Year.

December Update

One of the most popular items I currently make are bottle openers made from scrap steel diamond plate (also known as check-plate or treadplate). These are fairly popular because of the material and, modesty aside, they work well and are a conversation starter. After making several of these I got the idea that I’d like to try to make a corkscrew.


So I started messing around with some scrap square stock and came up with a design I like wherein I heat and twist the bar in a couple directions then use a grinder to sand of the edges into a square again. This gives it a very neat pattern while providing a texture that's comfortable and easy to grip. Next was the screw. This turned out to be a little more tricky. The first one I made ended up being too big to fit in the cork or even the neck of the bottle so I used thinner stock. The thinner stock heated up and cooled really fast and getting a tight uniform coil was quite a challenge. I decided to make a jig. I found some round stock that matched the inner diameter I was looking for, cut a slot in the top to hold the tip of the round stock, heated my piece and wrapped it around the jig a few times. Once it cooled a bit, I tapped it off the jig and began trying to tweak the coil and tip into proper shape. This became quite frustrating as heating it in the forge meant that the whole coil was heating up and as I was moving the part I wanted to adjust, the whole thing was moving around and I seemed to just be making things worse so I stopped for the day to do some research.


A few days later I was working on a truck at work and needed to heat up a bolt shank that had frozen in place and broken off but it was in a location where I couldn’t use an oxy/acetylene torch set. I went and got the shops little Berz-o-matic bottle torch to heat it up. As I was heating up the shank I realized that this might do the trick for getting the corkscrew adjusted. I went and bought my own bottle torch, wrapped a new coil and then, using the bottle torch, i was able to heat exactly what I wanted to move. Within a few minutes I had a coil that I was confident would thread into and pull out a cork.
Then came the matter of attaching the coil to the handle in a secure but aesthetic way. I opted for drilling a hole, threading the coil shank through the handle and welding it on the top and bottom. I then used a sanding disk to clean off the top weld leaving a smooth finish. This worked out very well. After spraying some clear-coat on it I suddenly had a corkscrew!

Neat….now what?


I decided to give it to a friend of mine for her birthday. I got a wood box and a wooden “N” ( her first initial) and made a display box for the corkscrew and one of my bottle openers and gave it to her. She was thrilled and I was pleased this little experiment had gone well.

Sometime later, I decided to make another one to see if I could sell it. I made one up and took it on a group camping trip to Illinois in October and a friend of mine bought it immediately. It got posted on Facebook and after a while I had seven orders for these sets! WOW! So I've been working on those fairly steadily. People wanted them to give as Christmas presents so I had a deadline to meet. I got them all finished and have all but one set delivered as of this posting.

In addition to the beverage sets, I've been experimenting with other designs and essentially “doodling” with some scrap and have come up with a bottle opener with a twisted handle that I quite like. I've made some “S” hooks and a prototype twisted double hook which looks pretty rough but is still functional.

Outside of the forge itself, I've been brainstorming with my Jessie regarding branding, packaging and forge swag. The ideas are flowing and I think some neat things will be coming out in the new year!All in all, the activities around the anvil recently have been very productive and rewarding. I'm looking forward to seeing what else emerges from that fire.

I wish for all of you the happiest of holidays!


Sincerely,
Chris

Filling in the blanks

Astute readers of this blog will notice there is a significant gap in time between my posts last year and my post this year. I would like to shed some light on that period of absenteeism. The first sentence in my post from Thursday, August 20, 2015 says “It has been a while since I posted here and it’s time for that to change.” Well, it seems as though I may have spoken a bit hastily. I wrote that with the firm belief that I was going to focus more on smithing; building up my skills and possibly my inventory. Little did I know that in 8 days, my whole life would change.


When I’m not pounding out things on my anvil or pounding out work for my employer, I’m pounding on drums in a hard rock band called 50 Breaks. I’ve been a musician far longer than I’ve been a blacksmith and playing gigs is quite a regular thing for me. Meeting the person I wish to share my life with is considerably less common though. There I was, calmly sitting in the bar where we were playing a show, when Jessie introduced herself and with an off-handed and quite obscure quote referenced from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, our lives were welded together.

The early stages of any relationship will usually take precedence over one's hobbies and social life and we spent a good amount of time getting to know one another. I would still doodle in my shop here and there but not with any amount of progress. My time was not only occupied with learning everything I could about this wonderful new person, but also with the full length album the band had decided to record. We began working on the album and progress was made, however, as time elapsed and I was getting the need for some deliberate hammer time (and not the kind with baggy pants).


December 15, 2015 was a normal Tuesday right up until the chain I was installing on a Terex 5TC-55 Aerial Device slipped out of my grip, caught the middle finger on my left hand and pulled it sideways; hyper-extending and severely spraining that area of my hand. At the moment the injury happened I was wearing gloves and I was up on a scaffold. I pulled my hand back from the machine and just held onto it until I could gather enough courage to remove the glove and inspect the damage. Eventually I did just that. I was delighted that there was no blood and that I was able to move everything so nothing seemed broken even though it felt kind of weird. Yet slowly I came to realize that not only did my hand feel weird, my middle finger wouldn’t stand up straight and, in fact, sort of lolled off towards my ring finger if I didn’t deliberately spread out my fingers. I could move everything so I didn’t think there were any breaks but something was obviously very wrong. I notified my supervisor and headed off the the clinic where after some poking, prodding, pulling and x-raying, the doctor explained what she believed had happened.

I was then splinted, bandaged and sent on my way with directions to keep my hand immobilized for the next week after which i could begin a prescribed physical therapy routine to build up strength in that hand. It was four or five weeks before I could make a closed, tight fist and quite a bit longer before I could hold it that way without pain. Eventually I was able to get back behind the drumkit to help record the album and behind my anvil to enjoy the creation but the effects of that injury will likely be with me for the rest of my days.


I have had other things that took priority over the forge during the early and middle part of 2016 including various family duties, some health issues that have developed for Jessie but also a cohabitation with Jessie and her cat Jezebel who I’ve come to adore even though allergies make this a challenge sometimes. Really though, if you like animals at all, how could you not adore this cuteness!

Recently, and with encouragement from Jessie, I started to refocus on what I want to do with Fox River Forge and have begun working in that direction. This includes a rearrangement and organization of the shop, acquisition of some much needed tooling, setting up a proper PayPal account and putting together a spreadsheet to track orders, inventory and all that other glorious data. Being the tech oriented woman she is, she bought the Fox River Forge URL to make it easier and more professional to get people to this blog and included a dedicated email address which is chris@foxriverforge.com.

I want to thank everyone who has traded a moment of their life with mine in reading this blog. I also want to try to post a minimum of once a month here (hopefully much more) in order to share what's going on. I look forward to seeing what this new determination will deliver in return. So until next time, may your fires burn clean and your hammers strike true.

Two months in a row?

What's this? It's not going to be months before a new post is put up? WTF? (What The Forge;)
In all seriousness, I am looking to keep this more current as I refocus my efforts at the forge.

Anyway!

A couple days ago I turned 42 and my wonderful girlfriend, who is far more tech-savvy that I am, set me up with my own custom URL for the forge which includes an email address so now in addition to going to www.foxriverforge.com,  you can email me at chris@foxriverforge.com with any questions, orders, sarcasm or whatever you wish.

I have also set up a PayPal account to make purchasing some of my stuff and little easier for anyone out of the immediate area. I am looking into ways to show what I have available for purchase and as soon as that is worked out in will be sure to post about it. I know Etsy is popular for this sort of thing but I'm not sure it's right for me. It is in the list of options I'll be researching.

Hey, Have you heard....

When you have a hobby you suddenly become an expert to everyone you know on all things even remotely related to that hobby. It's a natural phenomenon. People interact with you, discover your hobby and, either out of genuine interest or mere politeness, they try to engage with you on that topic. Sometimes it's a bunch of questions on the origin of the hobby and how you came to be involved, or it's a story about a friend or relative who is also into that hobby. Sometimes they relate a time when they, themselves, dabbled in that hobby.

As a hobby blacksmith, there is a minimum of 5 common points of conversation that come up.

1. Ancestral blacksmithing, either mine, theirs or someone they know
2. Horseshoes
3. The Renaissance Faire
4. Civil War Re-enactment
5. Have I heard about the blacksmithing shows on The History Channel called "Forged in Fire" and "Milwaukee Blacksmith"?

These are all fine topics and talking about them is a pleasure. I appreciate, just like anyone else, someone taking an interest in me or the things I like to do.

When "Forged in Fire" came out, I heard a lot about it because it had the word "Forge" right in the title. I don’t subscribe to any cable or satellite service nor do I even have an antenna hooked up for broadcast television so I couldn’t watch the show on schedule. My TV viewing experience is limited primarily to my Bluray player for disks, Netflix or YouTube. It wasn’t until I discovered I could cast the programs on the TV via my smartphone using The History Channel App that I started watching these shows with some regularity. Most people know I carry a knife with me most of the time and have a small collection of them that I rotate through. People naturally thought a show about making knives and swords and axes and all kinds of other weapons would not only be a show I would love to watch but also, since it's a competition show, try to compete on.

They are partially correct.

I very much enjoy the show. It's style is identical to a competitive cooking show on The Food Network called "Chopped". Four smiths use their skills to complete a challenge in a set amount of time with one smith being eliminated after each round. The winner gets $10,000. It’s a wonderful show, the panel of judges are tough but fair and often act as cheerleaders for the people competing. There is a minimal amount of drama and the show mostly focuses on the craftsmanship of the smiths competing. You can see some truly wonderful work and if you're not too jaded, you might even get swept up in the action. I watch this show with my wonderful girlfriend Jessie and we both find ourselves gasping when something goes really wrong or oohing and ahhing when something goes really right. We look forward to watching whenever we can.

However, as much as I like watching this show, there is NO WAY I want anything to do with being on it. I don’t like working under that kind of pressure and I cannot stand having someone scrutinize and judge my work. When I’m working on stuff I like keeping my own pace and having the piece naturally come to fruition. I will happily remain a spectator.

Milwaukee Blacksmith is a whole other matter. That show appears to be closely modeled after “Orange County Choppers” where there is a family business and they have a crazy deadline or challenge to meet and or overcome and there are family arguments but in the end there is success. There is also an unnecessary recap after each commercial break taking away from overall content. The show has a much more scripted feel about it and some of the drama of the episode can induce a bit of eye-rolling.

That does not keep it from being a show I’m very fond of. Jessie and I have watched the episodes as they have become available and quite enjoy a good deal of the programming. The projects that come out of that shop are wonderful and seeing scenes from around Milwaukee and the surrounding area in a program like this is pretty cool. Earlier today we were at the Kenosha Harbor Market and afterwards stopped by the Dinosaur Museum to check out the T-Rex Statue they created in the most recent episode.

We have already planned on adventuring to see other projects on display. The show is also good for Milwaukee in that it promotes a city that has a long history in manufacturing. There are also some really beautiful shots of Milwaukee in the transition scenes. Providing the show doesn’t turn into the drama-filled screamfest that O.C.C. turned into, I expect we will be watching regularly. I may even look into taking their Blacksmithing 101 class offered on their website. Learning is an ongoing adventure.