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Have you ever wondered how to make the best use of your time when you're practicing your forging skills? If you're like me, you'll spend a week making clips, then move on to some forge welding. After you've made the rounds of all the possible shoe modifications and forging skills used to make shoes, you go back to doing clips again and find that you might have gotten rusty while you were working on the other stuff. Well, here is the perfect exercise for practicing most of the forging skills that you'll need to make and modify shoes. |
| First, start out with 14" of steel. It can be longer if you want, but don't make it any shorter, because you'll have problems down the road if you do. We're going to bend this bar into a circle and forge weld it together, so if you want to "scarf" the ends for welding, now is a good time to do that. Make sure the bevel on each end is on the opposite sides of the bar. |
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When you get the stock bent around into a circle, overlap the ends about 3/4 inch. You don't have to have a perfect circle yet. In order to get a good weld, you'll have to have a tight fit between the ends that are going to be welded. The best way to get the joint tight is to hold the overlap with your tongs and flatten the rest of the circle. Don't ask me about the physics of that exercise, but it really works well. |
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After the joint is tight and you've brought it up to a cherry red heat, clean the metal really good with your brush and cover the joint, top and bottom, inside and out, with flux. I use Sure-Weld, but Borax will work, too. Set the forge to 10 pounds of gas pressure for the welding process. Experts say that anything over that will introduce too much oxygen into the process and will actually work against you when you forge weld. |
| Good forge people will tell you all kinds of descriptive ways to determine when the steel is hot enough to weld. I just watch for bubbles in the flux to kind of dance around in there. At least with gas, you're less likely to burn anything up. When you take the steel out of the forge, don't smash the crap out of it - just give it a firm hit on both sides of the weld. Then, I start blending in the edges where it's overlapped. |  |
| I know you'll have to be able to forge weld everything on the first heat for competition, but I will brush and reflux the weld at least 3 times while I start working the joint back into the bar stock's original dimension. Incidentally, one of the guys on the American Farriers Team said he does the same thing. I've had only one shoe pop apart on me after it's been welded. |
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Now, let's forge a perfect circle. It's much easier to make a good circle if your anvil horn is round. All you have to do is keep a small gap between the steel and the anvil and keep turning it until it slides farther down the horn. I think it's easier done than explained. Anyway, keep working on it until you get as perfect a circle as you can. |
| That's a pretty good circle, if I do say so myself! Now, we can do all kinds of stuff to it as we practice different forging skills. We're going to practice fullering (creasing) and making punched nail holes. |  |
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First the fullering. Since the metal that was inside the crease has to go somewhere, I like to "hem" the steel before I start the crease. As you can see, the steel is perpendicular to the anvil surface and the hammer is driving down at an angle. I'm actually narrowing the top side of the shoe where the crease is going to be made. When I flatten the steel to its original dimension, the the circle will get larger. Steel is moving. |
| Here's a picture of the bevel that I just made. As I make the crease the displaced steel will push that bevel back out to where it was before. If you hem the shoe first, you'll be able to run the creaser exactly in the center of the web and the crease will come out right. If you don't hem it first, you'll have to start the crease closer to the inside of the web. For this exercise, we'll just fuller half of the circle. |  |
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It's interesting and beneficial to know where the steel is moving when you forge the steel. Not only is the bar gettng wider as you fuller the branch, the inside of the branch is getting thicker, as well. If you don't fix that change, you'll have a hard time getting a flat shoe. |
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You'll have to keep working the steel on the anvil face and horn to maintain its original dimensions. The steel has to go someplace, so a fullered shoe will end up being longer than one that isn't. Our circle will have to be reshaped as the steel stretches out on one side only. |
| Now, you can make the nail holes for the crease. Two will be enough. You'll be making a clip between them later, so give yourself enough space between them. A proper nail will have a pitch to it that is the same angle as the hoof wall. Make the pitch by angling the drift punch when you start the nail hole. |  |
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The pitch of the nail will be affected by both the drift and the pritchel when you actually punch the holes. Note the angle that I use when I'm making the holes. Again - the pitch of the nails matches the angle of the hoof, so typically the toe nails will have more pitch than the heel nails. |
| Now, make two punched nail holes on the other side of the shoe opposite of the crease. I'm using an "E" head punch, because I find that the size and shape of the hole are more easily managed than with a "City" head. If you tilt the head of the punch in the direction of the pitch you want and hit straight down on the inside edge of the head, you can pitch the hole without making it too coarse in the process. |  |
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This shows how the nail would look in the hole when your'e finished. This particular nail would probably be nearer the toe where the angle of the hoof wall is greater. Make sure you read up on how the nail head should sit in both the crease or the punched hole. |
| You have room on the circle to do other modifications as well. You could a leave enough space at the top and bottom of the circle to make a rolled toe on one side and a rocker toe on the other. I decided to draw two clips - one between the nail holes in the crease and one between the punched nail holes on the other side. I thought of going over the steps of making the clips, but there are so many ideas about how to make a clip that I'm leaving the details up to you. The best way to learn how to make clips is to watch and learn from as many people as you can who have different methods and tools for making them. I used a cross-peen hammer and drew the clips out side-ways with the edge of my rounding hammer. |
