Firsts and Futures

Time was, so I'm told, when a body could open up a shop with naught but brow sweat and boot strap exercises and still come out with enough change to pop down to the barber shop for a mustache trim. Times they are a changin', my friends. Yesterday was a day of many firsts, one of which was the forking over of my first thousand bucks of "skin in the game". I feel safe declaring myself officially "in the game".

Of course, $1k is small fish on the grander scale of business investments and I'm sure that those my senior are having many a knowing chuckle and head wag at my childlike innocence, but considering I'm both living off and investing from my savings, scant to begin with and rapidly becoming scanter-er, perhaps I may be forgiven.

However for all my hyperventilating in the Lowes plumbing isle over $2 pipe fittings, yesterday was a day of many auspicious firsts as well. BEHOLD!

 Wait, that's not the right one...

BEHOLD!

Tada! Tada! Tada! Tada forever!

The fruits of Nail Forge 1.0.2, a pair that only a mother could love. Nevertheless at least one of them is not so ugly that it didn't prevent me from canvasing the internet with my new business. The astute and/or slightly creepy of you may have noticed that since yesterday, you can now find me on Etsy, Facebook, for some reason Twitter, as well as, I'm sure your favorite, here. Which brings me to the part where you may have noticed that the forge proper has got a proper forge name now! If you're curious as to why Sweet Hollow Forge rather than a different combination of letters and sounds, it doesn't have a huge story. You may recall that it took a while to get the details in order and paperwork drawn up for the space, but I did get a "contract" eventually. In there, G&J (the owners) agreed to rent me space in "The Hollow". And I was like cool, the barn has a name I guess, but The Hollow is a little forbidding and dirge-like, and initially I was going to go with Fox Hollow (on account of my home turf in Georgia) but I'm not positive there are even foxes around here, and if there are they probably aren't very good blacksmiths. Anyway, Sweet Hollow has a nice kind of faintly southern ring to it, and so do I sometimes*, so there it is.

*I seem to have a southern accent in direct proportion to the southern accented-ness of the people I'm talking to.

But before I get too far ahead, let's get back to that first picture.

The worst meringue.

Pretty wild, huh? So I mixed up some of my freshly cooked water glass...

Almost the exact same consistency as those corn syrup hourglasses. Notice the deformation in the plastic - fun fact: peanut butter jars exhibit fascinating behaviors when you fill them with scalding hot liquids and then panic and dump them out again really fast.

...with ~100ml water and a quart of rough pumice to make a sort of cement. However, lacking aluminum oxide (which apparently nobody in Bend possesses or has heard of - there are a lot of fun "standing in a store being stared at blankly" stories behind that sentence), it thus lacked quite a lot in terms of refractory properties. But heat resistance be damned, I was going to whack flat some nails come hell or high water, so I crammed it in a tomato sauce can with a bit of pipe and a drill bit.

The drill bit was the only 1/2" thing I could find that I could put in the oven. I'm not crazy.

Now water glass cures by simple gas exchange so at that point I had three options to set it up: let it sit and dry for a week, inject it with compressed CO2 or heat the everlovin' jessy out of it. Lacking patience or a Soda Stream, I opted for the oven.

Nail Forge 1.0.1 was a real beauty. I wish I had pictures to show you, but in my enthusiasm to make progress, I forwent documentation. Suffice to say that after an hour of as-close-to-broil-as-possible treatment, the cement cemented. It cemented hard. Too hard. It fused to the center form and burner tube form like something out of The African Queen, and no amount of hammering, cajoling, sweating, or desperate scrabbling was going to persuade it out. At one point I literally tied a rope to the center form, tied the other end of the rope to Big Bgog's trailer hitch, and spent ten minutes yanking on it stubborn-loose-tooth-when-you-were-a-kid-style. Eventually though, I did get it free at the expense of cutting a hole in the bottom of the can and hammering it back and forth until it pulverized 50% of the rock and came out. There was about a 1/4" of cement stuck to the form that I could only get off by flattening the pipe with a hammer. C'est la vie, but at least it wasn't much work to whip up another batch and try again.

Unfortunately, being the disenfranchised, Recession Era, twenty-somethings that we are, Bucket and I only have one tomato sauce can to our names, so I had to repack the same can for Nail Forge 1.0.2 (as I said previously, taking the precaution of greasing up the forms this time around). The unforeseen complication introduced was, to quote Dear Henry, there was a hole in it. A quite alarming amount of that hard-earned water glass percolated out the bottom, oozing and boiling into that fantastic goo you saw earlier.

Undeterred, I cleared Nail Forge 1.0.2 for duty and got to forging.

During operation, the propane torch is lovingly crammed into the side of the forge. 

Soaring new heights for the non-literal use of the phrase "baby steps".

It took a lot longer than I expected to preheat the little sucker (close to 15 minutes), but once it was up to temp, I had fun experimenting with the duplex nails, seeing what kind of swords I could turn them into. I opted to start with the traditional Flat Duplex Nail style, and then moved on to a more conventional Sword An Extra Might Be Given to Hold in a Period Piece style. After that my mind started simmering with ideas of how to do this better (a simmer which, lucky me, boiled over at around 3am today with dreams of katanas, sabers, and epees), but before I could play around too much, I started to get worried about how much the forge was melting and smoking. Though ventilation was good and every measure to make this safe was observed, the forge started degassing some sort of tomato/pumice miasma after about an hour of duty, so I decided to shut things down until the snow clears enough for me to move into... The Hollow†.

† sotto Batman voce

Speaking of which, here's a quick peep tour of the space. I went over on Monday and did a little work clearing it of petrifying horse poop and forklift pallets, and doing my best to level out the ground a bit.

It's hard to tell how much like standing on a 1:1000 scale model of the Himalayas this is, but I promise it was Not Good before I shoveled my little heart out on it.

An arial view of my brilliant dirt layout of the space. Labeling to follow. 

I'm colonizing the right side to start, but theoretically I'm allowed to expand anywhere under the eave... 

...Or, as I said under my breath when I thought G couldn't hear me, "Everything the eave touches...is our kingdom."

Tentative layout labeled for your convenience.

That's it that's all for now. Bucket and I are off to St. Louis for Thanksgiving today, so enjoy your weeklong reprieve from my prolixity.

BLB

I Digress

So I have been tinkering around with the geopolymers, without great success so far. I'm attempting to make a couple videos of the process, so I won't talk too much about it except to say if anyone knows any free video editing software, that would be helpful.

I have a couple of ideas of why it hasn't been working out, but I'm having a hard time justifying spending more money on it until I know I've got a place to put the eventual forge. The good news on that front is that Bucket met a nice lady at a get-together who might have some property she'd like to see used for something interesting. We're going out on Wednesday to meet her and her husband and see if we can work something out, I expect I'll write about that and how it went soon enough.

In the mean time, I thought some of you might be interested to see how my other side-project has been coming along! During the summer I taught a class on photography, and one of the projects I did with the kids was Cyanotypes, (sometimes called "Sun Prints"). They're a really basic, entry-level, relatively safe developing style that was used to make architectural blueprints, as they're cheap to prepare, quick to develop, and give you extremely high contrast contact prints. 

Anyway, I had a lot of the chemicals and resources I needed leftover after the summer, so I've been messing around with it and seeing how far I can take it. Most of these are just little 4"x5" watercolor paper prints, but I did get some bigger ones in.

This is the only 8"x10" print that turned out in the first batch. I plan on doing most of the rest in this size eventually.

All of the first batch were supersaturated with the chemicals because I had accidentally mixed about 50x more sensitizer than I had paper for. As a result, they all turned out a little weird except the two that I left what I thought was a "normal" amount of sensitizer.

You can see along the right edge where the sensitizer was laid on so thick that when I fixed it, the sun hadn't penetrated deep enough to expose anything attached to the paper, leaving a big white strip.

 I've also been experimenting with toning them so they aren't all that eye-watering cerulean. The lovely folks down at Lone Pine Coffee generously donated some used grounds to my cause, but unfortunately I came away with extremely mixed results. The process involves bleaching the photos with sodium carbonate, and then re-toning the remaining gel layer with a natural tannin. You can use tea, wine, coffee, etc.

This was the only one worth sharing of the lot. This was a direct contact print of a handful of grass.

 As you can see, it didn't go super hot. I toyed around with varying levels of bleaching (from none at all to ultra-mega-super-bleached) and coffee strength/soaking time. Strangely, every single one turned out completely differently, and in ways I wouldn't have expected. In any case, I plan on trying again with some new prints using espresso instead (my guess is that the tannins will be more concentrated and the oils better released this way). I talked to a lady down in the Maker District who paints with coffee and beer, and she suggested letting it dry out/boil down a bit so there's a closer ratio of oil:water. We'll see how it goes!

 You can really see the difference between the supersaturated prints and the ones that just had a light brushing of sensitizer (the oval ones). I got some really strange dark splotches on a few of them that look like finger prints, but whether they were made during the initial sensitizing, the exposure, or the fixing, I have no idea.

I used Photoshop to make black and white negatives of a bunch of my photos, and then printed them onto transparency paper. From there it was just a simple 30 to 90 second exposure in direct sunlight to print them out.

This one got a lovely finger print right in the middle. :/

My favorite one by far. I've done a few prints of this one, but none have turned out as nice as this one. Thanks to Bucket for brushing the sensitizer on this one - I think it made all the difference.

So there it is! We'll see what comes of it. Hopefully I can combine the two projects and make some nice frames for the prints out of wrought metal.

BLB

The Story So Far...

Now I know many of you will be wondering, "Ben, is the title of this blog meant to imply that you yourself are extremely loud and incredibly hot, or is it blacksmithing that is that?" The short answer is yes.

If your follow up question is, "Are you meaning to say, in an unfortunate dad-humor sort of way that you are hot in a Hugh Jackman sense, or do you mean that you, as a highly exothermic chemical reaction going about his day, are generally uncomfortably warm?" To this I must admit it's a bit of both, but mostly the latter, and here's a thing: both my bod and blacksmithing would, from a sort of...sad...4th grader grasp on chemistry, seem to be exothermic - that is, producing heat as a byproduct of reaction - but while smithing, I am also absorbing a great deal of the forge's heat, which would make me some sort of exo-endo-therm chimera, which seems impossible to my barest of understandings of chemistry, but there it is.

Which is a great example of the kind of fast-and-loose approach to understanding chemistry that I promise to employ throughout this entire project. And so you, dear reader, find me today; struggling mightily to stretch my mind around a subject wildly beyond my ken: Geopolymers. What are geopolymers? For two days now I've been wrestling with this, and here's my best answer: Geopolymers are a mixture of organic or inorganic compounds. An answer as unsatisfying as it is vague and useless, mostly because it seems that a huge variety of materials and compounds fall under this umbrella, and they can be made from all sorts of stuff (which, etymologically, makes sense since the word itself is basically Greek for "a bunch of rocks or whatever"). But let me chop it down to what geopolymer is gonna mean for the practical purpose of my project. Henceforth, I'll call "GP" anything that acts like concrete (aka, liquid stone), but is made up of highly silicate (and possibly aluminate) material.

Why is this important to my project? Moreover, what is my project? Right, I'm building a forge. I could take the easy way out and buy some firestone bricks, or forego the insulation altogether and go with a simple brake-drum style open forge, but I've been there and done that, and I think it would be really fun and useful to know how to make GP, not just for refractory purposes, but as a building material in general (given its emerging popularity as a low-cost, industrial byproduct-eating, earth-friendly alternative to concrete). "But, Ben," I hear you saying, "firebricks are like...$9 each and I can tell already that this is going to be a stupidly deep rabbit hole of a project." Yes. Yes, you're right. However, based on how my previous four jobs have valued my time, $9 is practically a week's worth of 9-5 work, which means I can chase this rabbit pretty far before I'm losing money on time investment.

Here is some light reading on GP's. These are a few of the sources I've been reading through trying to get the gist of it all, sans misc youtube and wiki's, some of which I'll toss in as I go:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/some-notes-on-geopolymer-cement-clay-bricks-unfired-and-diy/

http://www.arpnjournals.com/jeas/research_papers/rp_2012/jeas_1112_810.pdf

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

http://www.geopolymer.org/science/introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIRTcmR6sSk&list=UUR4jAT1mvEwRRNo5qv8IewQ

The distilled version of this is, I think, "Pick a glassy mineral, dissolve it in an alkali, add it to some clay or some such, cure it with fire (or not, maybe), voila, GP."

My current understanding is there are two/three components, but I could be wrong here - the mixing phase is still a little mysterious to me at this point.

1. An Alkali of at least pH 10, e.g.
• Lye (Sodium Hydroxide [NaOH]) 
• Lime (Calcuim Oxide [CaO])
• Hydrated Lime Calcium Hydroxide [Ca(OH)2])
• Natron (which, seems to be functionally near enough to washing soda, aka Sodium Carbonate [Na2CO3]
2. A Silicate/Aluminosilicate, e.g.
• Silica Gel
• Diatomaceous Earth
• Class F Fly Ash
• Bentonite Clay
• Kaolin Clay
3. A Strata? (Like perlite, or one of them clays from #2, or kitty litter)

So in that last link in my "sources" - the youtube video - this guy is making waterglass by dissolving silica gel beads in lye. This, I think, is just reversing the chemical process which produces silica gel to begin with. Once he's got the "glue", he adds perlite to it as a strata, and *sha-bam*, GP.

Now that we have a list of ingredients, let me butcher for you the chemical processes that form a GP. To roughly translate from here a bit, I would describe it thusly:

1. Initial Mixing - An alkaline solution is used to dissolve Si and Al ions from the amorphous phases of the feedstock. I take this to mean that anything non-crystalline in structure (aka, your silicate ingredient) gets dissolved by the alkali.
2. Condensation - In the resulting solution, the Si and Al hydroxide molecules condense with adjacent hydroxyl ions, forming oxygen bonds (and water). I think that at this stage you have a monomer solution of silica and aluminum in water, just waiting to polymerize.
3. Poly-condensation (aka Polymerization) - an application of heat (apparently anywhere from ambient temperature to no more than 90ºC) causes the monomers and any leftover Si and Al hydroxide to polymerize into rigid chains/nets of oxygen bonded tetrahedra. I believe this is a science-y way of saying, "Then you dry it out and it gets hard."

Now here's where my ignorance of both chemistry and cement mixing really begin shine. I'm left with the following questions:

1. Is waterglass essentially a solution of "monomer-ized" Si/Al hydroxide waiting to be catalyzed into GP? I'm guessing that waterglass has no Al in it, and that for this purpose you would ideally want as pure a solution of dissolved SiO2 as you could get before adding it to an amorphous aluminosilicate strata for to make it into bricks and whatnot. I really have a very bad grasp on what I'm talking about here...
2. In terms of choosing a silicate material to dissolve in your alkali, the best example I've seen is in that youtube clip, where he used silica gel and added it to perlite, and perlite is essentially corn-puffed obsidian by composition at least. Well I live in Bend, OR and there are literally big-ol' heaps o' obsidian lying about. Could I dissolve obsidian in an alkali to make waterglass, or would the magnesium and iron in it mess it up? It would be awesome to have obsidian waterglass.
3. I have learned that Portland cement is basically a calcium silicate, Al/Fe blend that sets when mixed with water by way of "a complex series of chemical reactions still only partly understood." I can remember partaking of cement mixing in the past and I feel like I remember it involving mixing the cement powder with equal parts sand and gravel/stone, and then adding water to a desirable consistency. With GP's it seems waterglass is kind of an equivalent Portland cement, which you would then add to whatever you want bound. I wonder how far off base this understanding of the process is?
4. Given that GP's are practically entirely glass and aluminum, I'd assume they are by default pretty damn fireproof, but I don't trust my grasp of the situation enough to rule out that there may need to be modifications/additions to the recipe to make this material useful for me as a forge liner. If so, I wonder what they are?

I suspect that the answer to most of these, if I asked them to any self-respecting chemist (or mason), would be a really solid, "MU." Therefore, let me reiterate my objectives in case it will make the questions behind my poorly conceived questions more obvious. My primary goals are to make a healthy number of refractory bricks that I can use to free-form a heat-shield around my fire-pot/forge mouth to cut down on coal/gas waste, and make a safe refractory liner for a gas forge and gas foundry. 

So there it is. I've got a long way to go, but I feel like I'm on the right track. All this geopolymer nonsense aside though, I don't have a really satisfactory big-picture plan for how this operation will come together. Since I'm renting a duplex in a pretty cramped little cul-de-sac, I have neither an indoor nor an outdoor work space that I can call my own. I've been drawing up some crude plans for a blacksmithing trailer, and have been keeping an eye on the trailer market on Craigslist for a few weeks now, but so far nothing is leaping out at me. M'lady, Bucket, and I have been eyeballing the house market too, which is the long-game, low-fun solution to this problem, but I'm ready to smith NOW. I'm keen on the trailer idea owing to both my nomadic tendencies as well as a desire to make it possible to bring smithing to the community in the form of Blacksmithing Camp. Since Bucket is big-lady-on-campus with a camp organization here in Bend, she's designing all sorts of programs for all times of year, and I feel like I'd be a shoe-in for some of those. So yeah, Blacksmithing Trailer (aka OPERATION "ROLLING THUNDER") is a subject for another time. 

Thanks for your interest! If you know anything about this stuff or, through reading have discovered that I've totally got it all backwards and upside-down, please, PLEASE let me know in the comments or jot me an email or something. You guys are the best.

Big Love, Ben