Not a lot of progress on the cabinet build to re-post, however I have managed to obtain some wrought iron, and from this material I have hopes of making the cabinet hardware.
So far I have about 10' of 5/8" rod, cut into 1' lengths (on the left below), and a few pieces of 1.5" threaded rod, and a handful of nails:
The nuts are about 3" square and 1.5" thick:
The pieces of 1.5" threaded rod are about 5" or 6" long:
I'm thinking to turn the 1.5" rod down on a lathe and then machining some little shallow 'cups' of wrought iron. The can form the base of a door pull. The 5/8" rod will eventually become drawer pull handles, and the square nuts, well, I have various ideas about how I will make use of them. The nails were just thrown in there by the supplier and I have no immediate plans for them, however they will be handy for practice at the forge and maybe making small drawer pull handles.
I have more wrought iron here than I need for this project, so hopefully, even with the inevitable goof ups as I try to fabricate with an unfamiliar material, I should have plenty for the job and enough left over for another project down the line.
I've also made contact with a blacksmith in the area who has a second forge that he will allow me to use, and will help me out with the fabrication where I need it. So, at least I won't be going in totally blind.
All for today - thanks for coming by.
Hallo Chris
ReplyDeleteHave You really checked every nail to be sure it is wrought iron ? How to understand wrought or not ?
Regards
Priit
Priit,
Deletethanks for your comment. At this point I am going on the word from the supplier, who demolished the structure from which the wrought iron was obtained. It seems that all of the iron in the 1870 building was wrought iron. Of course, if I start cutting it up and find it is not wrought iron, I do have recourse to contact the supplier again. They do seem like very honest people though, and have sold the same material to various blacksmiths around the country and no one is screaming about being ripped off, so I'm fairly confident. And at the worst, if none of it is wrought iron and the supplier flees town, I haven't actually spent very much money on it, so I could accept that sort of loss if it came to it.
I may yet obtain some wrought sheet from a supplier in the UK. Now that stuff is going to be expensive! Hopefully I won't have to go that route.
As for how to tell whether the metal is wrought iron or not, here's the procedure:
Take a piece and cut half way through it. Stick it in a vise and bend it 90 degrees. If the break looks like cracked wood, with lots of fibers and striations, it is wrought iron. If it just cracks in a random pattern, it is just steel.
~C