Made myself a little spirally mail holder to go with my candle holder. Mainly it's just a cool shape. Man, it's a mess trying to curl a tiny little piece of metal around the horn of an anvil with a hammer. Lots of fun :-)
Grant, the blacksmithing teacher, was making his wife a bookcase for Valentines and had these big neat twisty metal staves about six feet long sitting around. They're apparently gonna be frontispieces but they look like steel walking sticks or wizard's staves. They curl over the top into a little tail of steel kind of like the top of a Dairy Queen dipped cone. Nifty.
We made chisels today, too. They're tool steel so we're learning to temper it. It's going to be hard enough to cut straight through the mild steel we've been using even stone-cold. Cold cutting is one of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time. You just take a wedge made of hardened tool steel and hammer the hell out of the poor piece of softer steel you're cutting. It slices through -- maybe not like butter, but definitely without scratching the cutting wedge. Watching steel get sliced cleanly by something muscle-powered is pretty damn impressive.
And now I know how to make stuff that ridiculously strong. How cool is that?
