Steve and Tom's Excellent Adventure: Quest for Fire, The Movie

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Steve and Tom's Excellent Adventure: Quest for Fire

Some time ago, my buddy Steve and I made a can forge from a large coffee can and some homemade refactory. We recently had occasion to try it out as Steve had a homemade blade for his Millers Falls 'Buck Rogers' 709 smoother that he wanted to heat-treat. So I went over to his place and we fabricated a bracket to hold two MAPP/propane torches and a base to hold the forge in a Workmate(TM).

Here's the can forge and attached torches on one of Steve's many Workmates. A quench (pickle) jar with some olive oil awaits the hot blade.

Steve is ready to go and has a, ah, enthusiastic (read that slightly deranged) look about him.

A crowd of spectators stands by in suspense. Being mainly happy well-adjusted American boys, I think they were hoping that Steve would set himself on fire and run around screaming. I was prepared for such an eventuality as I had a fire extinguisher at the ready.

Steve heats the blade.

The blade got to just about a bit beyond a dull cherry red. Steve just couldn't stand the suspense any more so he pulled the blade out of the forge...

...And stuck the blade in the quench 'tank'. When you do this, you are supposed to move the blade up and down to cool it off as rapidly and uniformly as possible. In this case, the quench tank was a pickle jar filled with olive oil. Ron Hock of Hock Tools recommends peanut oil because it has a nice smell. In retrospect the pickle jar was not the best choice and we will use a coffee can or some other unbreakable metal container on our next try.

Steve filed the blade and we decided it was too soft. So we tried again as shown in this short movie clip (Quicktime required). This video goes pretty quickly over broadband. It is about 6 megs so that will be a coffee-break for those of you still on dialup.

OK, so the second heat went better - we got to the desired temperature and the file skated off of the hardened blade like it's supposed to. Steve needs to remove the scale on the blade, polish it up some and temper it in his oven. The forge worked! Who knew? Now I've got a chisel or two that I always thought were too soft and need to be re-hardened and tempered...

So, I was loading the forge into Mobile Solar Kiln 3 (aka, Moby 3) and Steve mentioned that hauling that forge around for a while should impart some real manstink to the vehicle. Yep, that should do it.

FYI, here's how all this is s'pposed to be done.

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