Metal Stocks & Sizes Guide

Located in Owen Sound Ontario, Krueger Custom Steel may not be convenient for many reading this.
I have been purchasing from Krueger pretty much since they started business in 1994.

What has set them apart in my experience has been the acceptional level of service they have provided.
- They 'talk blacksmith' - understanding the (now old) British Gauge system as one good example
- Extremely reasonable 'local' delivery policy (less than the gas cost!)
- Good stock of standard sizes kept on hand
- Availability of specialized materials on order, usually within a week.
- Ability to provide cost quotes / order specifics via e-mail (so written down!)

At the Wareham Forge, my normal practice is to order in bulk, usually once a year for all my standard sizes. I am thus purchasing the smaller hot rolled, structural and pipe materials in multiple hundreds of feet. It is true that I might be able to get my order a wee bit cheaper at those volume levels from one of the larger industrial suppliers. Once delivery costs are added from major centres, that price advantage disappears.
Most importantly for me, the extremely high level of personal service I have always received from Krueger completely overweighs any slight cost savings.

What will be quite handy to the general member of OABA is a brand new feature available on their web site.
They have placed a complete metal stock guide available as a downloaded PDF. This kind of guide is invaluable for telling you just what sizes and materials are easily available. It includes 'weight per foot', which is handy for figuring out just what that wild idea of yours is going to total up at. (I've been caught by that one a couple of times!)

The Steel Guide PDF is available at : http://users.sitewaves.com/index.cfm?page=803&r=13615
Just hit the 'View Steel Book Catalogue' button at the top of the page

Krueger Custom Steel
1610 20th Street East
P.O. Box 187
Owen Sound , Ontario
Canada , N4K 5P3

Phone: 519-371-7930
TollFree: 1-888-244-4187
Fax: 519-371-7852
Email bkrueger@bmts.com
WWW.Kruegersteel.ca

All the Myriad PIECES...

(An echo from today's posting on 'Bloom to Bar')


Now that the layout table is not needed for the assembly of the hydraulic press (being modified specifically for this project), it was time to empty the milk crates full of blooms:

Click to *greatly* enlarge
Yesterday's work in the shop consisted of sorting all the pieces into historical order. Each piece was then photographed and weighed. There are over 60 individual pieces, ranging from full sized blooms (the largest at over 7 KG), down to small fragments. With luck even the small pieces can be welded as part of stacks towards creating layered steel billets.

I also spent a good hour attempting to work out some kind of useful method of measuring the volumes via water displacement. This in aid of determining the density of each bloom. This may not be critical towards artistic use of the individual blooms. However, keeping my archaeological slant in mind, once compaction and forging into working bars starts, the original density information will be lost. Better to record seemingly useless information - than work past it had find out later the data was significant.

Although I really have made a serious attempt to keep each bloom labelled, what I found was that the process of shifting around sharp edged metallic blooms had shredded bags and obscured labels. There are a number of pieces that obviously have been mis-labelled, a few (some of the largest!) with no labels at all. At least one distinctive bloom is missing from the pile.

I am attempting to keep notes relating the specific process used to create an individual bloom / bloom fragment to the compaction to bar process. Most specifically as it relates to individual carbon content and general ease of forging.

Hydraulic Forging Press (continues)

I had mentioned in an earlier posting that I was building a hydraulic forging press.
This piece of equipment is critical to my OAC Crafts Project. This is centred around forging my (huge) pile of iron blooms down into working bars - and hopefully time for some objects as well.

My problem is that I just can not manage, from both an equipment and physical standpoint, to effectively work such large masses of iron.

Although I do have a 50 lb throw air hammer in the shop, its die surface is only 4 x 1 1/2 inches. Given that even the smallest blooms in the pile are considerably larger surfaces than this, I just can't manage. This is compounded by the irregular shape of the blooms. *I* certainly can not manage to hold a bloom in place over the small die. Its even worse attempting to cut the blooms into smaller chunks (of course one possible direction to go).

And some of the blooms are in the 10 kg range - about the size of a basket ball cut in half.

So this is the piece of equipment I invested in:

Converted Log Splitter to Forging Press
A wood block holds the head in place for the photo

If you refer back to the Log Splitter to Forging Press. article, you can see more or less the direction I took. The working parts of the original log splitter have remained pretty much as intended. The main modification is lifting the engine / pump combination and moving it to the opposite side and mounting it lower. The heavy frame lifts the tank / beam combination off off the floor (to comfortable working height),

Right now I'm still waiting for a fitting to allow attachment of a working pressure gauge and a longer length of tank to pump hose to show up.

One other major modification was replacing the standard splitting wedge head.
I had originally hoped to be able to just swap different heads in and out. On closer examination, the way the machine is engineered (largely for safety) does not make that possible.

So what I came up with was adding two 1/2 inch wide flanges made of angle to the bottom side edges of the head block. These are set to a piece of 1/4 thick plate can be slid into the flanges. If all works as intended, this will allow fairly easy switching of the actual striking surface mounted below the head block.


The photo above shows the angle flange on one side. In use the replaceable die would actually slide all the way back to flush with the front edge. (Right now the supporting wood block is preventing this)

The die here is a flat 'accessory tool' plate - to be used with handle mounted tools. This plate (made of 1/2 inch thick) is roughly 3 inches wide by 8 inches long. A generous surface for tool placement.


This is a slightly wider view, showing the second die I've made up. This is a 'striking' die, made of a single block of 1 3/4 wide x 7 inch tall mild steel. This block was originally ordered to make a second head block. I've left the slightly crowned surface of the hot rolled material for the bottom surface.

There is a third die I have made up - which is a cutting wedge. This is a piece of 1/2 wide bar stock welded between to pieces of 3 inch flange by 1/4 thick web angle. This both adds extra support, and will allow the cutting die to slot into the flanges. I still have to grind the welds smooth and grind in the edge itself on this die.

You can also see that I need to be able to extend the hydraulic ram slightly to bolt the new head block into place. This can't be done until the final fittings arrive and have been installed (of course!)
The last piece to be added is a flexible metal hose to vent off the exhaust from the gas engine to outside the shop.

For now I'm going to leave the hydraulic operation leaver where it is (about head height). The ideal would be a foot operated control. Mounting that will take some fooling around with levers and springs, and the completed press will function correctly as it is right now.

Cross your fingers - expect the parts by the end of the week and then its a function test!

Bad Archaeology

This is something that I know many of my readers will appreciate.
Passed on to me by Laura Travis of An Droichead :

" Bad Archaeology is the brainchild of a couple of archaeologists who are fed up with the distorted view of the past that passes for knowledge in popular culture. We are unhappy that books written by people with no knowledge of real archaeology dominate the shelves at respectable bookshops. We do not appreciate news programmes that talk about ley lines (for example) as if they are real."

...

"The aim of this site is to explore the main strands of thought within the ‘fringe’, to explain how and why they are different from orthodox archaeology. Although much of what we have written is aimed at debunking the misconceptions and distortions of the past promoted by fringe writers, we are always open to the idea that they may be able to tell orthodox archaeology something of value. The fringe is interesting and entertaining in its own right; this site can only scratch the surface of such a huge area of human endeavour but we will continue to dig away, exposing Bad Archaeology wherever we find it."

With a Web Site : http://www.badarchaeology.com/
And a Blog : http://badarchaeology.wordpress.com/

Sometimes a scratch on a rock - is just a scratch on a rock...