Screwdriver
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- 10,146
Well I don't know, I get these idea and then just have to go ahead and do it. I watch the Essential Craftsman on YouTube and he's so enthusiastic about these beasts, he convinced me. The he did a video on how to make one and compounded it by giving it to another favourite YouTuber, Andrew Camarata.
So here it is:
I put the feelers out for some leaf springs and like waiting for a bus, several turned up all at once. Many thanks to @123hotchef for some dead handy lengths and for waiting as I got lost on the M4 (only lived here for a quarter of a century) but Cheb turned up with some bigger ones (!) so I went for these:
Boy do I wish I hadn't! Those lorry springs are half an inch thick and tough as anything. Even the pacman was struggling to get through it.
Got there eventually....
It's over a foot long, three and a half inches wide and half an inch thick. Takes ages to get warm let alone hot but with some perseverance I got the bevel roughed in.
Well worth forging in the bevel to save on grinding. Turned out ok.
and a LOT of grinding and linishing later....
Then all I have to do is warm it up and bend it. Easy.
Clamp it in the vice and hit it with oxyacetylene. Err. Nope. Bottles would run out before that got hot enough. I may have miss-set the bottles which are still stuck at "welding" settings. Oxy is new to me so I bunged it in the forge then hit it with the oxy.
Nope. Cracked and dented the face of my biggest hammer, hardly touched the leaf spring other than to ruin the carefully ground edge!
So there it is. I need to make a flypress too, bump up the burner on my forge because this hunk of iron needs a TON of energy and I have yet to get it up to heat treat temperatures.
But hey, if you look really carefully you can see where an hour of beating it with a sledge hammer has moved it. A bit....
So here it is:
I put the feelers out for some leaf springs and like waiting for a bus, several turned up all at once. Many thanks to @123hotchef for some dead handy lengths and for waiting as I got lost on the M4 (only lived here for a quarter of a century) but Cheb turned up with some bigger ones (!) so I went for these:
Boy do I wish I hadn't! Those lorry springs are half an inch thick and tough as anything. Even the pacman was struggling to get through it.
Got there eventually....
It's over a foot long, three and a half inches wide and half an inch thick. Takes ages to get warm let alone hot but with some perseverance I got the bevel roughed in.
Well worth forging in the bevel to save on grinding. Turned out ok.
and a LOT of grinding and linishing later....
Then all I have to do is warm it up and bend it. Easy.
Clamp it in the vice and hit it with oxyacetylene. Err. Nope. Bottles would run out before that got hot enough. I may have miss-set the bottles which are still stuck at "welding" settings. Oxy is new to me so I bunged it in the forge then hit it with the oxy.
Nope. Cracked and dented the face of my biggest hammer, hardly touched the leaf spring other than to ruin the carefully ground edge!
So there it is. I need to make a flypress too, bump up the burner on my forge because this hunk of iron needs a TON of energy and I have yet to get it up to heat treat temperatures.
But hey, if you look really carefully you can see where an hour of beating it with a sledge hammer has moved it. A bit....