Watching industrial processes is a bit of a hobby of mine. I think we often take for granted the level of difficult effort that goes into producing things we more or less take for granted.
That’s not a complaint, by the way; that’s what engineers and builders do and I’m just enough of an existentialist to agree that our meaning is what we do – therefore, I raise a glass sometimes when I discover that some unknown engineer made something better or safer and nobody noticed. Their work mattered and maybe they got some satisfaction from that. For example, I freely admit that I never gave any thought at all to how my anvil was made and how it was quenched and tempered – what, don’t the anvil gods just make them that way?
From Master Bladesmith Hailey DesRosiers’ instagram feed: [instagram]
Some little part of my brain keeps screaming that anvil-making is a perfect application for explosive welding. Right? Stack a bunch of wrought iron on top of some a substantial amount of high explosive, and then top it with a 3″ thick chunk of S7 into a great big sandwich and blow it up! It’d be heavy; I don’t think it would fly far! And now Hailey’s shown how to heat harden it afterward! And since we’re on the topic, does anyone have any depleted uranium they can spare? I think it’d be hysterical to have a little bitty 3-lb forging hammer; “it only looks like a jeweler’s hammer, that’s actually a +10 Inertially Compensated Linear Impact Generator of Thor.”
A bit about what’s going on here: the DesRosiers’ shop had a fire and a lot of their metal equipment survived by was annealed by slow-cooling after the fire.
I dearly wish I could go back in time to 1900s Pittsburgh with some modern camera gear and shoot footage of them making the great turrets of the battleships, etc. That stuff is largely unrecorded. Did you know that entire battleship turrets were sand-molded and poured? The machines to make the machines were pretty amazing machines!
At an infosec conference, recently, I met one of the security team who works at Newport News shipyard and we were talking about welding. It went kind of like this:
Him: “I see on your blog that you’re learning to weld.”
Me: “Yup! I suck!”
Him: “Wanna come see what real welding looks like?”
That is definitely going to be on my schedule for sometime in 2019. He says they have things like 250 ton presses and cranes that will lift entire segments of ships. I wonder if they have any depleted uranium…
what *I* would do with a red hot 200lb anvil is stand very far away and make sure it doesn’t set fire to anything…
Lick it?
LOL! Hooray for quenching the anvil! OMG that must have been amazing.
Yeah, you see a 150 lb blacksmith’s anvil and never think about it. (Well, you do if you have horses.) But how did it get so hard? And it makes a difference. You can’t forge on soft steel, hot or cold.
That will be a cool upcoming blog post. Looking forward to it.
You need a frozen lake for your red hot iron lump.
I’m a civil engineer. I went to school for many years, and I have a fair bit of debt to show for it, and I dedicate a disturbing amount of my professional career to making sure your shit disappears when you flush. We live atop a very very delicate tower of expertise, and some people are dedicating their lives to hitting that tower with a sledgehammer. Everyone is taking everything we have right now for granted. Anvils are cool, but our bridges are failing and our sewage and water systems are scarily under-designed.
On the other hand, blacksmithing skills may suddenly come into high demand when society falls apart.
I’m more interested in a red hot 200 pound person, wocka wocka wocka.
Depleted uranium is probably commercially available from dealers with government contracts to dispose of it, although I assume most is reserved for armor of US military items. Although I don’t have any specific knowledge here.
But don’t forget that DU is depleted of its U-235 and is mostly pure U-238. While U-238 is not useful for nuclear fuel and other stimulated fission, it is STILL radioactive by spontaneous fission. And while a DU anvil would mostly stay where you put it, every time you hit it, it would probably release microscopic bits of metal dust particulates that would mix with the dust in the room and in your lungs. This sort of radioactivity is about the same for U238 as for U235, so being depleted doesn’t mean much for safety re cancer from this. I think there’s a reason people are avoiding doing this.
Err…umm…ahh….
Uranium _burns._
A flint lock works because the flint scrapes microscopic particles of steel off the frizzen and sets them on fire. We see that as sparks. (You’re a knife-maker, you know how to tell the different sorts of steel by the sparks, right?)
Normally, a gunsmith would repair a worn frizzen by annealing, flattening, and then re-hardening the face – often case-hardening it with proprietary treatments.
In the 1980s, some people were offering extra-special treatments guaranteed to increase the number of sparks and eliminate flashes in the pan. Those treatments consisted of inletting uranium into the frizzen.
Worked great, until some MDs and biologists in the NMLRA (National Muzzle-Loading Rifle Association) convinced the board to ban the practice for health-safety reasons.
I can just imagine your ” +10 Inertially Compensated Linear Impact Generator of Thor” hitting the edge of your anvil and catching fire – or at least spraying flames all over your workshop.
fusilier, who dropped his NMLRA membership for pretty much the same reasons he dropped his NRA membership
James 2:24
fusilier@#8:
I can just imagine your ” +10 Inertially Compensated Linear Impact Generator of Thor” hitting the edge of your anvil and catching fire – or at least spraying flames all over your workshop.
You just crushed my dreams. Like that. Bam.
Next you’re going to tell me that when uranium burns it produces some kind of noxious toxic gas, too. It’s pretty amazing that the US was able to take a look at those properties of depleted uranium and decide, “no, that’s not a chemical weapon.”
Dave, ex-Kwisatz Haderach@#5:
I’m a civil engineer. I went to school for many years, and I have a fair bit of debt to show for it, and I dedicate a disturbing amount of my professional career to making sure your shit disappears when you flush. We live atop a very very delicate tower of expertise, and some people are dedicating their lives to hitting that tower with a sledgehammer. Everyone is taking everything we have right now for granted. Anvils are cool, but our bridges are failing and our sewage and water systems are scarily under-designed.
What’s the joke? “Mechanical engineers make weapons systems, civil engineers make targets”? It’s not very funny, though.
Maybe there needs to be a holiday for appreciating basic engineering. I do appreciate hot showers and being able to live in a house with heat and hot and cold water. The Roman engineers who arranged water for cities like Arles and Nimes and Rome, probably were not appreciated as much as the legionnaires that went forth and killed under-powered foes.
The Air Force “elephant walked” a few billion dollars worth of F-35s in an utterly pointless display of “look, they actually can taxi around” and “oh, and you can see them” but infrastructure like rotting bridges? Fuck that.
I don’t. Whenever I travel to some new place, I tend to see cities, ships, bridges, railroads, etc., and I keep on thinking about how amazing it is that humanity has made all that. I’m also frequently reminded about how workers who made all of it often were wage slaves (occasionally even actual slaves). Even the engineers didn’t always get a fair salary.
I cannot make up my mind between this one and “all human work and effort is pointless, life has no meaning, and thus all that matters for me in life is experiencing as much pleasure as possible as long as I’m still alive.”
Firstly, everything humans make is bound to disappear eventually. The children we rear will get old and die, the houses we build will fall apart some day, the artworks we make will turn to dust, rust, or broken shards. On top of that, in a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. Although, it’s highly likely that life on this planet will die out even before this, there can be various random events like an asteroid collision. But, fine, just because something isn’t eternal doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. If a scientist figures out how to cure some disease, or a doctor saves a human life, or a builder makes a comfortable home, or an artist creates something pretty that makes others happier, then that all matters. Some human being’s life has gotten better and happier. There certainly is a difference between humans living in misery or being happy. And the humanity has the power to make a difference. So what we do should matter, right? If so, then what we choose to do is what gives meaning to our lives, our actions define who we are.
The problem is, lately I’m becoming more pessimistic and sceptical about the whole notion that there’s hope for humanity and that working in order to improve human lives is worth it. Humanity seems determined to destroy itself. We are trashing the planet, polluting the environment, and changing the climate to the point that large chunks of this planet are likely to become uninhabitable by humans. So why bother? Maybe it makes more sense to just fiddle while the Rome burns. Hence the hedonism. I probably still have a few decades left to live a reasonably comfortable life. I might as well just enjoy myself while it lasts, and once things on this planet get bad, I can just kill myself. Ultimately, once I’m dead, nothing will matter for me anyway.
Yes, definitely, people who live in Fallujah, Iraq, would be more than happy to give you some of theirs, considering how it is likely causing cancer rates and birth defects to skyrocket among their population. /sarcasm
I assume that you were joking when you mentioned depleted uranium, but, considering how this crap is killing innocent civilians, I don’t think that joking about depleted uranium is appropriate.
Yep, so do I.
Marcus @#10
Yes, that’s how it always happens, and, on top of that, engineers and builders also earn less income. I hate it how humanity rewards those people who make everybody’s life worse, and fails to reward those people who actually help making our lives so comfortable and enjoyable.
I used to work with a machinist who used to have small but incredibly heavy plastic covered weight. One ob the smallest, that looked to be about the size of a tube of lipstick, weighed a pound. He said they were DU cored weights used by people who balance airplanes after they are worked on. It wouldn’t go to have one wing substantially heavier than the other. DU because they were small and easier to move. He had ones up to ten pounds in his tools and said he had much heavier ones. If they sell DU as weights then they can’t be that hard to get.
Dave, ex-Kwisatz Haderach at #5:
“making sure your shit disappears when you flush”
IMHO, despite being poorly cerebrated, that is a truly noble undertaking. People like to thank doctors for saving lives but it is the engineers that really save lives by the thousands. Before we got the hang of keeping the drinking water and shit separated it wasn’t uncommon in some communities for 8 out of 10 kids died before the age of four. Cities and civilization can’t exist without those vital systems. Sewers are the mark of civilization and designing and creating them are noble professions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
Ieva Skrebele@#11:
Whenever I travel to some new place, I tend to see cities, ships, bridges, railroads, etc., and I keep on thinking about how amazing it is that humanity has made all that
If you just take a look at something – pretty much anything – and look at how much of it was made with human hands, it’s often surprising. The awning over the bus stop? Someone welded that together, but first someone cut the metal. The bar everyone’s drinking from? The metal top of that bar is a work of art: zinc-clad, hot-bent and soldered.
So much of what surrounds us is “one off” construction. We don’t notice it because usually it’s so solid we just rely on it.
Marcus@#14:
If you just take a look at something – pretty much anything – and look at how much of it was made with human hands, it’s often surprising. The awning over the bus stop? Someone welded that together, but first someone cut the metal. The bar everyone’s drinking from? The metal top of that bar is a work of art: zinc-clad, hot-bent and soldered.
So much of what surrounds us is “one off” construction. We don’t notice it because usually it’s so solid we just rely on it.
Then think about the tools, and how they form a complex lineage — not in that they’re derived from earlier versions, but in that they are made using other tools. The bootstrapping of that bus stop awning is awesome. Its dependency tree is staggering. If you had to start with no artifacts at all, even if you knew exactly how to do every step, how to build every tool, even where to dig for resources, it would take a good fraction of humanity a good few years of concerted effort to make one awning like that.
How to make the tools that you need to make tools? I wonder sometimes how the first tongs and anvils were made. (well obviously with non-metal tools, but still). Somethat like the first millling machine… .
Yeah, Uranium is pretty toxic. Consindering how a kinetic penetrator gets essentually ground to dust after smashing the inside of a tank, they should count as chemical wapons.
That video.. what exactly am I looking at there? Because it looks like people deftly handling rods of red-hot metal or, just possibly, solidified lightning with metal tongs while wearing no protective gear whatsoever. These days I’d expect them to wear something looking like a spacesuit while standing 50m away behind thick walls making sure the robot doing the actual handling is working properly.
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Re: Uranium hammer:
A suggestions: Make the core out of uranium for the weight and give it a tungsten mantle. It’s also very dense*, so it should add to the heft while also blocking the radiation and making (I hope) a fairly robust tool.
However it might be easier, if not quite as exciting, to go straight for a tungsten hammer. That way you could avoid the trefoil logo on the toolbox altogether, and perhaps even (another?) flag on someone’s watchlist.
*Almost the same density as U (for pure elements, from wikipedia)
—
Engineers? Meh. It is the guy (definitely the guy) in charge who gets the appreciation. Look at the Pantheon in Rome. A grand building, no doubt about it, and right over the door it says that Marcus Agrippa built it. While not impossible I suspect he didn’t spend much time on calculations or sketches or anything of the sort. Same goes for the Legionnaires. Caesar defeated Pompey. The rest is detail, so hail Caesar!
komarov@#17:
That video.. what exactly am I looking at there? Because it looks like people deftly handling rods of red-hot metal or, just possibly, solidified lightning with metal tongs while wearing no protective gear whatsoever. These days I’d expect them to wear something looking like a spacesuit while standing 50m away behind thick walls making sure the robot doing the actual handling is working properly.
It turns out that I am a noob as far as social media go. I hadn’t realized that Instagram does not keep URLs static and rotates images. So, instead of the scene you were supposed to see, you saw something else. Sorry!
What you were supposed to see what a short clip, starting with a pretty normal looking bonfire. But, wait, there’s … what is that? Oh, it’s a chain! Why is there a chain going into a perfectly normal bonfire?
Wait, it’s MOVING! The chain is hooked to the bucket of a back-hoe! And there’s something on the end! OMG it’s an anvil! And it’s freakin’ RED HOT and emitting a huge cloud of sparks as it emerges like some industrial-age phoenix-egg from the heart of the bonfire! And now the back-hoe is swinging it…
…LAKE!
The back-hoe operator carefully pans the spitting and hissing anvil back and forth through the lake, as sheets of steam explode from the lake. Sometimes you can see the glowing hot metal in the water.
If what you actually saw was people twisting bars of lightning, what you saw was a ritual of making twist damascus.
(That’s how Jazzlet’s bread-scorer’s metal was made) What the blacksmith does is stacks a bunch of bars of different steel, surface grind them so they will weld cleanly, then clamp them as tight as possible (drive out the air) and weld them together along the edges. Those are heated in the forge to welding temperature (flux is usually added) and then rapped gently with a power hammer or hydraulic forging press to set the weld. Then they are “drawn out” – manipulated into roughly round or rectangular bars which are brought out of the forge, clamped in a vise, and twisted with some kind of pipe wrench or similar (I use a huge pair of channel-lock pliers with 24″ handles) Once that is done, the bars are put back into the forge and squared back up again.
DeRosiers and @antesjulian are fond of making “mosaic” patterns, where you then take those bars and cluster them into 4 and weld them into a solid mass, section them with a bandsaw, then clean-grind them again and make a pattern with them on a table-top, then horizontally weld them and form a knife from that.
I, personally, do not like mosaic damascus much because it’s premise seems to me to be “look how hard I can make things!” which is legit if you’re a professional trying to establish a barrier to entry, but I don’t think that’s a great motivation for art. Granted, there is some art that is “look how hard I can make things!” and it’s great, but I like simpler stuff.
Make the core out of uranium for the weight and give it a tungsten mantle. It’s also very dense*, so it should add to the heft while also blocking the radiation and making (I hope) a fairly robust tool.
However it might be easier, if not quite as exciting, to go straight for a tungsten hammer. That way you could avoid the trefoil logo on the toolbox altogether, and perhaps even (another?) flag on someone’s watchlist.
“I hammered so hard my hair started to fall out!”
Tungsten would be cool. There’s a shop in Clearfield that makes molds for abrasive blocks, and that’s what they use.
I’m probably going to leave the depleted uranium hammer on my Shelf of Not So Great Ideas. That reminds me, I need to put a couple new supports under that thing, it looks like it’s ready to detach from the wall and spill all the ideas across the floor.
lorn@#13:
I used to work with a machinist who used to have small but incredibly heavy plastic covered weight. One ob the smallest, that looked to be about the size of a tube of lipstick, weighed a pound. He said they were DU cored weights used by people who balance airplanes after they are worked on. It wouldn’t go to have one wing substantially heavier than the other. DU because they were small and easier to move. He had ones up to ten pounds in his tools and said he had much heavier ones. If they sell DU as weights then they can’t be that hard to get.
If it’s for airplanes, it’s gonna be $spensive.
When I was at Hopkins, there was a guy who had a complete titanium tool set. He was the world’s first (probably only at that time!) MRI repairman. I thought the kit was beautiful. He said it cost about $115,000 (in 1987) – my guess is that some very grumpy old machinist personally machined the whole thing, grumbling the entire time.
Edit: I’m sure that there are some tools specifically for adjusting F-35s and the cost is measured in “Panamas” (number of times the gross national product thereof)
komarov @#17
Yes. So it goes.
A politician/a king/a dictator gives an order to build something.
An engineer/architect projects it.
A group of builders make it.
A large number of taxpayers pay their money for it.
Why the hell the end result is the politician getting all the glory and being named as the person who built this thing? The politician did the least amount of work and barely participated in the whole process.
It’s amusing how politicians/kings/rulers take credit for all the good things that happen in their country yet blame others for all the crap that goes wrong.
This vaguely reminds me of Christians giving credit to God for healing their family members (when doctors did all the actual work).
Marcus @#18
The way I see it, what matters is the final artwork. If some ridiculously complicated process results in a beautiful artwork that couldn’t be replicated with any simpler techniques, then that’s amazing. I admire artists who have ridiculous skills and who make amazingly beautiful artworks that are on the verge of what a human can possibly make with their hands. However, needlessly complicating your technique when an identical look/result could be achieved with a different and simpler technique is just a waste of time.
By the way, some of the mosaic damascus I have seen in photos is amazingly pretty. And super cool. Sure, I also like the look of simple knives, there’s definitely elegance in simplicity and minimalism. But I also like the look of intricate mosaic damascus. Simple and complicated artworks can be both pretty, and each artist is free to pick what they prefer to make.
NO! BAD! BAD ANVIL!