Making My Lap Desk

I do most of my writing and design work sitting in a chair working with a laptop computer.  About 25 years ago I designed a platform which I could place in front of me to rest on the chair arms and support the laptop - sort of a lap desk or table.

The general concept wasn’t mine and there were some products on the market.  I just checked and this is one sold currently.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/bamboo-wood-contour-lap-desk-with-cotton-hopsack-pillow/17354676?ean=9780641970009&itm=1&usri=9780641970009

Mine is somewhat different and doesn’t cost $40.  My design has gone through several versions.  The dimensions of my current version hasn’t changed much from the beginning but almost everything else has changed.

The prototype was made from Masonite with a couple of pine one-by struts underneath.  Each time I made a new version the product got lighter    I’ll skip the details of the evolving design and show what I use today.

I had some 2-inch extruded polystyrene insulation sheet left over from a modeling project and traced my lap desk top perimeter on it and cut it out.  Next I cut a rectangular piece to fit on the bottom.  It is narrower than the chair arms and allows the desk to rest on my thighs as well as the chair arms.  I glued the two pieces together with styrofoam adhesive and smoothed all the edges with a rasp.

When the glue was dry I wrapped the foam board in paper mashie using a paper and thin white glue paste.  As I recall, I covered one face and let it dry, then turned it over and covered the second face.  After a week or so it was entirely dry so I sanded it and painted it with a white gloss paint.  The design worked rather well and didn’t shed any polystyrene debris.  It was rigid and very light weight.  The slick surface, however, tended to let the laptop slide toward me rather than staying in place for optimal typing.  At the moment that is addressed by laying on a non-attached sheet of a non-adhesive product called Easy Liner which I picked up in the “Clearance Sale” aisle at Walmart.

http://www.duckbrand.com/products/shelf-liner/select-easy-liner/1725?swatch=true

It has worked to keep the laptop from sliding around and is comfortable  for my forearms to rest on as I type.

Speaking of typing, I recently discovered that the Dictation feature on my Mac now works almost perfectly with OSX 10.9.1.  I did download the program rather that use it through the Apple server so the function will be available when I am offline.  I just hit the fn key twice to turn it on - dictate - hit the fn key again to turn it off.  It uses the built-in microphone, types as I speak and was near perfect from the get-go.  Supposedly it learns with further use, but if it never gets any better than it is now, I’ll do a lot less typing.

Removing Fire Scale

Another point about firescale which follows creating it, is removing it.  

That discussion sort of breaks down into, “‘Why are we doing it?’ and ‘How much are we talking about?’”

Often the first step is just wire brushing vigorously and frequently during the forging process.  I use three types of butcher block brushes, short wire, long wire and blade.  For the handled scratch brushes I prefer the stainless steel wire type over the carbon steel type.

Brushing might not be necessary when forging large stock and in the early forging steps but with smaller pieces and when forging toward the finished state the brushing keeps the surface clean and visually appealing.  Lightly hammering the total surface when hot or even cold can pop off a lot of scale.

There are a lot of power devices which will remove scale and I try to avoid most of them.  The wire cup brush seems to be one of the most dangerous things in the shop and I don’t recall using one for a year or two.  First, I used a stainless steel knotted cup on an angle grinder, but rather quickly added a router speed control to slow down the rpm.  Later someone suggested using a buffer rather than an angle grinder.  It naturally ran at lower speed and had a variable speed control built into the paddle switch.  However, it was a lot heavier and bulkier.

During one phase I used some wire wheels mounted on a bench grinder.  It only works for small surface areas and I didn’t like the way it flung off little wires.

Grinding wheels, flap sanding wheels and mounted stones of various types and grits work well  and I use them a lot on small ares but they don’t have much use is large area scale removal.  Other types of composite strip discs extend the options but purchasing all these abrasive consumables can add up to a lot of money.

In my situation the tumbler proved to be the most economical way to remove coal fire scale, rolling mill scale and other surface contaminants - wholesale.

Another, wholesale, scale removal method is pickling.  I usually use hydrochloric acid.  To make sure the acid activity stops it requires rinsing and perhaps neutralizing with sodium bicarbonate and more rinsing to get a clean bare surface.  The only time I’d do that is in the process of creating a patina finish - copper coating, perhaps.

For smaller, more delicate scale removal torch heating and more wire brushing by hand serves me best.

This is one old reference about industrial cleaning.

http://infohouse.p2ric.org/ref/27/26922.pdf

Controlling Fire Scale

Figuring out how to control the inevitable surface oxidation of steel which results from forging can take some time and work.  Finding a source of information about the subject can also take some work.

When I started my search I used the term firescale - one word.  That led mostly into the world of copper and silver work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firescale

When I started with fire scale as two words, I got the same choices.  When I searched for Blacksmith I found the two word explanation under the origin of the term blacksmith in relation to the black iron oxide scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksmith

Iron oxide isn’t always black.  I encounter shades of red fairly often.  When I tried to learn more about the chemistry I found there are 16 known oxides and oxyhydroxides of iron.   That’s way more than I need to know.  In general, Fe2O3, hematite, is red and is the main mineral source for the iron industry.  Fe3O2, magnetite, is black.   Mill scale is black but oxidizes toward red which is more stable.  The blacksmith’s black magnetic scale is a combination of FeO and Fe2O3 (Fe3O4).  There is a lot more information readily available about oxides of iron and to the makers of pigments it is a big deal, but I’m not so much interested in colors as I am in the oxidized surface texture and it’s visibility.  

When working bar stock I don’t have a lot of trouble getting the appearance I want.  Partly, that is because only a small area of surface is usually visible.  The problem seems more difficult when working sheet.  Both are HR A36 but the surface texture is more obvious when a larger area can be viewed.  I try to get all the sheet pieces I need out of the same piece of stock.  I once had a project which used sheet acquired at different times and I never got the surfaces of the various pieces to look the same.

The cycles of scale formation and scale removal and forging leaves a record which is akin to weathering in a landscape and individual artists develop opinions about what they like.  With practice, how they manage their fire and how they use their tools yields the result they want.

  I have become very familiar with how my finishes work on pieces which I have coal-fire forged and tumbled.  Once I have something figured out the way I like it, I am usually reluctant to make any changes unless it is in the spirit of experimentation.  Yet, when I think back to when I used a gas forge a lot I recall noticing differences in how scale formed in the coal and the gas forges.  I tried to look up information about it on the web but got nowhere because the results were swamped with how coal fired power plants compared to gas powered plants.

I think it would be interesting to set aside some time and do some well thought out experimenting with fire scaling.  It could be handy to master a variety of reproducible textures.  I’ll put that on my “goals for 2014” list.

Hot steel scale.

Blacksmith's black magnetic scale.

Fire scaling an element.

Prominent fire scale texture.

Family time

Over the holidays I’m taking time off from the shop to spend with visiting family members.  Only once a year can we get everyone together for a few days.   I’ll still have some time to do design work and catch up on one of last years resolutions to learn more about the Mac laptop I got about a year ago. 

I’ve got the hang of the dictation feature now and downloaded the program so the text appears as I talk.  It is impressive and requires very little editing.  I anticipate using it a lot.

I also worked with the text-to-voice feature which seems useful for dealing with longer text documents, but it is not something I would need often.  Maybe it would be useful for reading those long fine-print documents we have to agree to and accept to download a program.

I worked more on scanning blacksmith references I want to keep handy and getting them into a pdf format so I can run them through a PDF OCR convertor and extract the text component.

Betty has listened to audio books for years, but I’ve just come around to it.  I’ve learned to download some free ones and let them play in the background as I work.  Not the best way to do a book justice but better than nothing and it goes a lot faster for me than when I read the text.

One of the most useful projects was to go back through all the files I made when learning SketchUp and purging useless ones.  Also, I wanted to watch some tutorials covering features I haven’t been using and learn a few new tricks.

The snow seemed to reinforce any excused for not walking down to the studio for almost a week.  It is one of my longest absences.

No footprints to the shop.

Task Pails

Because I work on several jobs at once I use metal paint pails to keep elements sorted and grouped for forging.  They are not built very sturdily but they don’t burn up when hot work is placed in them, they can be labeled and they weren’t expensive, especially when their cost is amortized over about fifteen years.

The pails get rather beat up as they are used and after they accumulate enough deforming damage around the rim they don’t nest well, so I repair them.  I forged a piece of flat bar with the same radius as the pail lip.  It fits in a vise and I can quickly true the rims with a light planishing hammer.

I often spray a light coat of WD-40 on the outside so they can be separated easily when stacked.  The downside is that the lubricant will vaporize when hot objects are dropped into them and the fumes are, at least, annoying.

In typical use, they store blanks until they are forged.  When each has been forged it it returned to the now empty pail.  When it is filled I just take it to the tumbler and dump it.  It’s just one more part of keeping the forge work moving along quickly and the work area cleared.

This information is an extension of the “Using Task Labels” post on 11/8/13.

Truing the deformed rim.

Pails stack neatly after repair.

The Prairie Enso

For me winter is never very far away.  On a wall across the room from where I write is an art photograph by Dave Leiker titled “Fence wire in winter.”

I saw this image at a local Toad Hollow Art Show several years ago.  I recall visiting with Dave about it but I don’t recall the actual content of that conversation.  I do know I was fascinated by it and it rolled around in my mind from time too time.  Then I would meet it again at another show and I’d think about it some more.  It seemed curiously worth thinking about off and on.  

After I stopped doing art shows I realized I would have fewer opportunities to see this favorite image, so I bought it.  I love to study art works, but, only occasionally do I buy something even if I really like it.   Largely, because I have run out of space to give each piece it’s due.

I can take a shot at trying to explain why I think it has resonated so strongly with me but, I’d suggest not taking it too seriously because I really don’t understand it well myself.  Is it the simplicity or the complexity?  Of course at some level it’s always about line.  Is there subtle symbolism here?  If so, what?

I think I first seized the image from a zen-like, wordless, unparsed  perspective.  But later I began to dissect it from different directions using the contrasting pairs of concepts so dear to our western, rational mind set.

One of the curious loops in my rational mode selected the wire out as a version of enso, a zen concept and I started calling the image “The Prairie Enso” in my mind.

After it was on my wall I could study it as often as I wanted and I began making a few notes because I thought I might someday write something about it - some winter day.

Sometimes I would just sort of unleash my mind and let it run wild across that landscape.  Finding pattern, even where there isn’t any or it is stochastic, is a human thing.  Does that horizontal line of vegetation work with the post and wire to make a Celtic cross?  That could be fitting as ranchers seem to feel their stewardship relation with the land and their herd is practically a sacred thing.

Do the intersecting lines of vegetation resemble a lazy Z - like a rancher’s brand. Or does it remind me of the mark of Zorro from my childhood.  Or, is it a Z for zen pointing to the enso.

Is there a play here between the natural and the artificial?  Could that coil be a stockman's Christmas wreath?  The leaning vegetation implies the wind.  Would the image be as interesting if is taken from another perspective?  How about the coil of wire?   How much unruliness is just right?  And the post - It has a thumb which allows the wire to hang securely.  What’s the back story of how the wire got its post or the post got its wire?  And why does the loose roll of wire, curiously seem to defy gravity and hangs wider than tall - stretched laterally by what?  Perhaps it is the ineffable force of the pull of the expanse of the prairie.

Finally, there is the issue of the frame and matting.  If they are well done, they are like a great assistant - one you don’t notice much while they are making you look good.

Unfortunately, the image I’m posting certainly doesn’t do justice to the real thing.  I’ll point you to some of Dave’s work with much better quality images.

http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/photo-project/dave-leiker/

http://prairiedust.zenfolio.com

http://www.prairiedust.net

After I wrote all that I began to feel a bit like Marco in “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” by Dr. Seuss.  Imagination is a wonderful thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_to_Think_That_I_Saw_It_on_Mulberry_Street

White Christmas

Where I live, it is about a 50/50 chance that we get a white Christmas.  This year we did. We got one snow before Halloween, which was early for us.  Then we rained dry with temperatures jumping up and down every few days, but on the 20th the icy precipitation arrived followed by 3” of snow and very cold temperatures.  It will remain cold enough that the snow will easily last beyond Christmas.

I’m not a big fan of winter and snow and short daylight hours but it was enjoyable to sit and watch the snow falling outside.  We used the fireplace for the first time this season when the forecast was for a 0º overnight low.

I’ll take a few days off to enjoy family time.

The winter mix moving over us.

The first log fire of the season.

Workspace Lighting

Three of the eight foot ceiling fluorescent bulbs high up on the studio ceiling recently went out.  I noticed that several other bulbs had black ends and were showing age.  Only a couple had been replaced in the last 17 years.  I called my electrician and he came out and recommended replacing all the old bulbs and the one ballast which had failed.  It’s a lot brighter now.

The overhead lighting is indispensable but addition lighting is needed at each workstation.  I used standard hanging 4’ shop lights where I could and a couple of 500 watt halogen portable work lights with tempered glass lens and metal safety grill.

It didn’t take long for most of the halogens to fail.  Maybe they naturally have a short lifespan naturally but it seemed to me that the ends of the bulbs shorted out from airborne conductive dust particles which accumulated around the contacts or maybe just corrosive fumes from the forge.  The replacement bulbs sometimes didn’t work because the contact area had been damaged by the short.  

I have abandoned halogen lamps in favor of clamp flood lights which are less expensive, not so hot and not temperamental. I use them mostly for the bench grinder and belt sander work stations.  They are set up so the light must be turned on before the tool is turned on.

Inexpensive clamp reflector flood lamp.

Coal for Christmas

About a week before Christmas a fellow called me and later came to the shop to buy 50 pounds of coal for his Dad who was interested in learning how to forge.  It is to be a Christmas present.

It is an unusual gift and not in the same spirit as the lump of coal in the stocking tradition.  I never got a lump in a stocking, although I surely deserved it once in a while.  I do recall my folks talking about it.

I went to the web to see what was there to explain the origin of the practice and found this interesting link as a starter.

http://www.squidoo.com/lump-of-coal

Merry Christmas!

Oleh’s Urella

When I recently reviewed the images I took at the ABANA La Crosse conference in 2002 I saw the folder for Oleh Bonkovskyi.  Incidentally, I have seen his first and last names spelled in a variety of ways.  When I arrived at that conference I almost immediately visited the gallery and was impressed with the pieces he had on display so I resolved to spend time watching him demonstrate.  I had seen his younger assistant, Sergij Polubatko (again, spelling uncertain) at the Flagstaff 2000 conference. There are both, now, well known Ukrainian artist blacksmiths.

I did enjoy watching them work, took a few pictures and their creation, Urella, was the only piece I bid on in the auction and was lucky to get it.  His work has appeared in the Anvil’s Ring on at least two occasions.  In the 1998 Spring issue on pages 36 and 37 there are four variations of the same candlestick theme displayed in Urella.  Additional pieces of his work were in the Fall issue of 2001.

I had been intending to write something about this for quite a while but when I stumbled onto the following two archival links it sealed the deal.

http://www.bgop.org/newsletters/2002-01.pdf   The Blacksmiths’ Guild of the Potomac helped to arrange for Oleh’s 2002 USA visit:  And in the issue which followed the conference 

http://www.bgop.org/newsletters/2002-07.pdf  there appeared an image of my Urella.  So, I decided to post a couple of images of Urella today, although they aren’t of professional quality.

I found some additional information about Oleh and will post the link although I don’t have any personal connection to the events.  The site said, in “2007 and 2008 Oleh Bonkovsky and Charles Hughes preformed demonstrations for the Pittsburgh Area Artist Blacksmith Association at the shop of the association's President, John Steel.”

http://hughescchd1.com/about_us

I was fortunate to pass Oleh after the auction and we posed together.

Urella today without the usual blue and yellow candles symbolizing the flag of the Ukraine.

The touchmark.

Questionable Terminology

I can clearly recall my Mother describing some particular tool, cooking tongs, hanging with arms akimbo.  I’ve used that expression many times especially in relation to blacksmith tongs.  I don’t like them to hang that way so I pay attention to making them with the reins coming off the box at an offset and angle which lets them hang straight down and not sticking out “arms akimbo.”

After trying to find a source on the web which verified the use of the term in the manner I was using it I was disappointed.  The term seems to be highly specific to the human posture of standing with elbows crooked so the hands rest on the hips.  There was one reference to it meaning using a weapon in each hand  in a computer game.  I didn’t find anything related to a tool hanging with arms diverging.

I did happen to turn up some images I took at ABANA LaCrosse in 2002.  One showed a person standing with arms akimbo.  Actually, it is a photo of Maegan Crowley and Corinna Mensoff demonstrating.  That gives me the opportunity to point to web links to these two very talented artists.

http://corrinasephora.com

http://ironmaeganmetalworks.com/home.html

I’ll probably just keep using akimbo in the same non-approved way I always have, at least in my mind.  Who knows maybe it will even catch on.  That’s one way language changes.

Tongs hanging with reins "akimbo."

Corrina and Maegan at ABANA LaCrosse in 2002.

A Monogram Boot Scraper

I have made and used a number of different types of book scrapers and have developed some opinions about their design features.  But, in a commission project it is the client who gets the final say.

Recently, I was contacted about making a monogram boot scraper which was to be mounted on a large stone from the client’s property and presented as a gift to a friend.  The client had already worked out a design he liked.  I liked it too and it incorporated most of the features I favor.  Probably most people would take such a pattern to a fabrication facility and have it cut out with a a plasma cutter or water jet.  That would, of course, work just fine, but it would be “hand crafted work.”

I took the Client’s drawing and converted it to a SketchUp file where I could work with all the individual pieces.  I selected 1/4” x 1.5” flat bar as the parent stock.  I built the book scraped in the SketchUp file and mounted it on an imaginary rock, did an image capture in jpeg and emailed it to the client for his inspection and got the “go-ahead.”

I made a cutting list with measurements taken from the graphics file.  With coal fire heat I textured the surface of all the flat bar, working with pieces about three feet in length.  The pieces were tumbled then each individual element was cut to size and fire scaled again and tumbled again.

The pieces were fitted on a layout table and MIG tacked in places where the weld wasn’t easily seen.  Rivet holes were drilled.  The rivets were placed and peened.  I wrote about how that was done a short while back.   http://persimmonforge.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-rivet-buck-helper.html

The lettering assembly was welded to the base through two rectangular cutouts, working from the bottom side of the plate.  Finally, the rust patina was developed with hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide, washed, dried and the satin polyurethane and sealer coats were applied.  For outdoor ironwork I prefer this rust patina finish because it is essentially maintenance free and I think the color looks nice with our native limestone.

The end result is a custom item with a rustic, aged look.  The design, in my mind, is clever.  It has individuality and it will have a back story and it should be highly functional.  The edges and open spaces are ideal for scraping every part of the boot, sole, toe, instep, sides, and heel.  If I’m lucky, maybe they will send me a photo of it in it’s new home.

The client's drawing.

The SketchUp version.

The finished monogram boot scraper.

Mini Quench Can Handles

I have found it handy to keep a couple os small quench cans on had for quick cooling of a localized area.  Here I explain how I have made them with a simple spring handle.  The small cans once held Vienna sausage, but anything similar should work.

1. Cut 1/8” x 1/2” x 28” flat bar.

2. At the mid point heat the bar and bend 180º the hard-way.

3. About 2” from the hairpin bend heat locally and twist each arm 90º in opposite directions and align.

4. About 2” from the ends locally heat and bend each arm outward about 90º.

5. Heat and form the ends to conform with the radius of the can.

6. Heat the area of the hard-way bend and bend the apex over 180º the easy-way ( there is no other way, it seems to me) to create a hanger hook.

Mini quench cans.

Spring handles.

Mini quench can on a bucket.

Perfect Tumbler Aggregate

Right now the collection of aggregate in my tumbler is close to what I find is perfect.  I thought about this as I was writing about the nubbins which made up the majority of the aggregate when I was starting out with the new tumbler.  Later I added all the carbon steel balls I was storing elsewhere and, later still, a lot of punch drops collected from the Piranha punch machine drop bucket at Kan Fab.

I have found that it is a good idea to think specifically about the aggregate from time to time.  I have an intuition for how much aggregate material work best.  Too little and there won't be enough contact with the work pieces.  Too much and the tumbler is over loaded.  It seems to be as important as getting the tumbler rpm right.

By experimenting I decided to cull out all the pieces larger than approximately 1” square and all pieces smaller that about 3/8” square.  Anything much smaller than 3/8” can escape from the tumbler and irregular pieces larger than an inch square can cause unwanted surface gouging.

I remove the drop nubbins after they have been polished and deburred.  The main reason for that is it makes it easier to find small work pieces I have tumbled.  With only punch drops and carbon steel balls as the vast majority of the aggregate mix there is less visual confusion when searching for small parts.

I’ve also developed some intuition about how the pieces to be tumbled will fare and what the selection can and cannot include for me to get the result I want.  For instance, tumbling table legs forged from 1” square bar 34” long will get an even surface treatment and no end upset because that can’t rotate end-to-end in the 18” inside diameter of the tumbler.  Some blanks made in 14 gauge will deform unacceptably while the same pattern cut in 12 gauge will do well.  Short pieces of bar with sharp edges will upset and also get an edge cold shut.  In the image “Perfect aggregate closeup” careful study will reveal the edge fold-over cold shut phenomenon on the larger punch drops which had tumbled through many cycles.

Most of the pieces going into the tumbler are covered with fire scale and that scale also acts as part of the aggregate mix until it escaped through cracks around the doors.

I will guess there is about 50-75 pounds of aggregate in the tumbler now.  I usually only tumble one load of forging each day and the weight will vary from perhaps 10 pounds to 200 pounds.  The tumbler is powerful enough to carry more but I must manually rotate the cylinder into the position where the doors are on top to unload it and the heavier the load the harder it is to turn.

The current mix of aggregate shown in the images does an excellent job of removing coal fire scale, mill scale, paint, and rust and leaves a cleaned surface well suited for welding.

One feature which I did not anticipate is a characteristic surface appearance which seems to have a lot of “tooth” to aid adhesion of finishes.  I use several types but the most common finish starts with a light spray of Minwax fast-drying satin polyurethane applied immediately upon removal from the 

tumbler.

Optimal size, shape and amount of steel aggregate for me.

Detail of aggregate.

Nubbins

I was raised by parents who said their worldview was established by the Great Depression.  It was over by my time but I didn’t escape the effects of it.  Our operators manual must have been some version of Poor Richard’s Almanac - a penny saved - a penny earned and such.  We paid cash, saved every way we could and were frugal with a capital F by today’s standards.

I’m not complaining.  I think we could use a lot more of that mentality today.  Thanks, largely, to my parents I am more well off than they were but in a number of ways I carry on their attitude of wise use and simple living.  In some other ways I am more extravagant - I have a more expensive and larger house on a larger lot.  Actually, that may be about the only difference.

My training was not as severe as another friend who told me one of his parents said, “You tell me why you think you need it, and I’ll explain to you why you don’t.”

Well, with that as the background, I was reflecting upon my habit of collecting all the cutoff nubbins of scrap for reuse.  Most go into the tumbler to serve as aggregate until I find another use for them as filler metal or some more specific role.

I have  written about this earlier in the context of the “no scrap” shop, added value and probably elsewhere.  I trimmed some die saddle tangs so they would hang in their racks better and picked up the drops, tumbled them and kept them for adding onto other tangs which might be a bit length deficient.

I’ll never break the habit of picking up all the nubbins and using them for something.  That is part of who I am.

Small drops removed from the tumbler ready for other use.