Thanks for showing the process as well as the troubleshooting! The spot of sunlight on your anvil reminded me of the Three Stooges trying their hand at laundry, haha.
Thanks for showing the whole process here. So much more educational to learn from the process rather than a straight-through success generated by editing out your learning steps.
Fabulous, so enchanting, learning something completely new to me, seeing the transition from first prototype, noting its limitations and then progressing on to the second, the making of the tool, the changing of hammer weight till something so much better than the first was born. Beautiful, educational and motivational! Thanks for sharing!
The devils blacksmiths project would be so much fun to try but your project today’s shows how much work goes into these masterpieces. Thanks for taking the time to share your work with us.
I often see things like these leaves and wonder how they are made. So thank you John for showing the full process and the do's and don'ts. Your teaching methods remind me of a old mate from Ukraine he was a master of his trade as well ,and he had that ability to teach just by as we used to call show and tell . {RIP Ugen} .
This is a great video. You always astonish me with many of your projects. We see things like this day in day out and never think of how they once were made. Thank you for taking the time to show us.
Very nice little block...great to see your process and the end product looked fantastic. I think it's important to be critical of our own work, just as you are. That way we improve and find new ways of doing things instead of just being happy with the first try. Often then products that we are still finding fault with are actually far beyond the expectations of the intended recipient.
John, I have a couple things to say on this video. 1: the sample piece, to me, looks like they are supposed to be pine cones maybe. 2: If you ever decide to make a few of those dies, please let us know! I'd be very interested in procuring one myself!
John I have been studying the hinges for years. It seems that instead of the knobs being round they were pyramids and weathering has made them round on the outside of the building there's one hinge from the inside of the building that's probably more modern. But the pieces are all filed not round dots also if you look closely at the handles of the doors the the pieces on the hinges are embossed and on the handles they are all rounded
Great looking raspberry the second go around. The first was nice, and resembled small-ish grapes. I prefer the second though. Well done, John. Thanks for sharing.
Nice work John, I really like the way the second one turned out. I suppose the possibilities are endless when it comes to decorative elements like this.
Thank you for yet another awesome and informative video. I can see how this technique can be used for making quite a few copies of something if you were going to make something with a lot of decorative elements on it, or even curtain rod ends. I really enjoy the way you take us on your experimental journey as you figure out how to best do things. I like it. Thank you John 👍
@@BlackBearForge , of all the Blacksmithing channels I watch, yours has become the "Go To" channel for most of what I want to know. Thank you for the great content of your Channel John.
For a hardy, if you're making multiple dies the same size, could you make a jig that fits the hardy just to hold it in place? That way, you could use the same dies on the hydraulic press as well.
Hello John A very dekorativ Element and thank you for sharing the tool Produktion with us and i look forward what you do with this Element Greetings Yours Frank
wheat sheave. as with much French heraldry there were wheat heads or bundles ( sheaves ) of wheat in or on the insignia I would say the "leaf shape" was a wheat sheave. If they were thinner and pointed it would be a stalk.
The second one is defiantly more refined but I suspect that the first one would be useful in work that was a bit more rustic in nature. I had no idea how that would have been produced without seeing the entire process.
I was actually just thinking about decorative dies. We've got a relatively simple stainless silverware set, with a specific pattern in one spot, but lost the large serving spoon, and I was considering trying to make a die to replicate it.
Loads of different fruits and plants seen by different folks. I see a raspberry, but after reading your comment, I can see a strawberry as well. Thanks
Very very nice. You got quite close. I've done similar for simple designs too. For this though, I personally would have cast a reverse master die, but that requires a crucible. It's overall less work and more precise.
what would you have cast it from? Cast iron would be to brittle to hammer against, maybe could be used in the press with caution. Casting it from malleable iron could be as involved as forging. John is trying to duplicate the processes that would have been originally used.
@@dicksargent3582 yup, cast iron would be too brittle. You can use high quality steel nowadays to do it. My family does. But we do have way more than a homemade crucible too. It's a little more involved, yes, but not that much more so. Blacksmiths in older times would have sought out a caster to do it. Especially if it required little finicky bits and designs. That way every die was exactly the same. Casting has been around for ages. Even longer than smithing proper. The plate sheets for plate mail were likely cast in a similar way, only flat and oversized to then be fitted to the person (we do it that way)
To be fair, my family have records going back several hundred years most people don't have access to. And our main forges don't use any electricity (except for lighting or propane forges, tho we mostly use coal) Plus add in oral tradition and apprenticeship and a lot gets passed down
@@stephniewilliams9350 your talking a few hundred years. At the time the hinges for Notre Dame were made the only steels available were made thru a carburization process similar to case hardening or in an open charcoal fire. Wrought iron was the primary material and produced in small 30" high furnaces. The ability of casting steel did not exist until much more resently.
The second one looks great and kind of reminds me if a thistle flower. I'm wondering if that's what they were originally going for? Someone probably knows 👍
Congratulations my friend, you are an artist. I would like to ask you, how did you weld the leaves? If you make a video, it will be great. Thank you for all.
Thank you for sharing, great die you got there. I would just like to mention that at 21:28 I saw you start annealing the steel at a temperature way above what is normally done with these alloys. S7 is a hypoeutectoid steel, and indeed this type of steel requires supercritical annealing in order to recristallize secondary ferrite phase (as opposed to hypereutectoid steels for which heating only above Ac1 temperature is required, because it results in almost complete recristallization of the structure whilst leaving secondary cementite as is). However either the camera doesnt show colors properly, or your workpiece was actually much hotter than Ac3 temperature for S7 steel, which in this case is suboptimal, as it increases grain size unnecessarily. Just my 0.02, things from university metal science course. If that sounds too sophisticated, trust me, its actually not. Of course all of that is neither magic nor secret and everyone willing to study thermal treatment and Fe-Fe3C phase diagram in detail can do that on the web. Cheers from Russia
Could those florets represent barly? Very interesting, Making a tool to make a tool that makes a tool lol John if you've mentioned it I hadn't seen it, but did you ever get to take the making padlock class?
I saw it as barley as well. There are lots of medieval imagery using barley-corn and I immediately thought of that. The whole Devil's Blacksmith sample looks very symbolic "sheaf-of-wheat' to me.
Knowing nothing about nothing, my instinct is to create a die holder for the hardy hole that open die blocks like this would seat in to, to make that kind of work a bit easier.
@@BlackBearForge I thought it might. Not sure how I'd go about shaping the square (well, 1x2ish) internal. Heck, maybe the exact same way you form the primary internal feature of the die? I'm setting up my forge over the next week or so at my new house so I'm thrilled to ruin a bunch of material on technique practice. Maybe this is something I'll give a shot before I'm ready.
If you have a 1” square hole on your treadle hammer, would it be bad to fake your flat die off your bottom, and put a square hole for tools like this? Obviously it won’t be a full hardy as it can only be a few inches long, but will it hurt the treadle hammer?
Couldn't you make some sort of cup for it to sit in at the anvil? I'm thinking of your hardy hole size reducing thing. If you had one of those you could make a bunch of moulds but only need one hardy?
Pineapple is not necessarily wrong. The pineapple is a very common architectural element, but not knowing when the original at Notre Dame was made, I don't know if it is too early. Otherwise, it could well be a pine cone. There's almost certainly some symbolism that needs to be considered, too.
Now imagine setting up from scratch, even for something simple. You make a device to incorporate into a workstation so that you can start making tools that will help you make tools to make new devices and other tools so that you can make more complex tools to make another tool to make another tool to make a product, making about a hundred slightly related tools along the way.
