Morning at the Hospital and a new project

 

Morning at the hospital:

We spent most of this morning at the hospital getting all the paperwork done so Patti can be admitted for her surgery next Monday. Fortunately her surgery isn’t scheduled until 1:00 pm so we don’t have to get up at some unholy hour in the morning to get her to the hospital.

A new blacksmithing project:

It has been several years since I have done any blacksmithing but my nephew, Dave, has been making some real nice furniture and other stuff out of wine barrels. His latest project is to build a large cooler out of a 50 gallon oak barrel. As you can imagine a 50 gallon wine barrel is quite heavy so it will need some heavy duty handles on it to move it around.

I told Dave that I would like to try and make some nice hand forged handles for the barrel. 
After giving the project some thought I figured that some nice steel basket twist handles would look good and would be easy on the hands when carrying the heavy barrel.

Here is one that I made for an adjustable grill to use around a campfire.

Getting ready to blacksmith:

It is taking me a while to get the shop ready for a blacksmithing project. I finally got the welding table clear and set up the propane forge that I made for building knives.

 

I have been digging around in my metal piles and came up with some long steel rods. I was hoping to find some 1/4’ rods but only had these that look to be around 5/16”
I spent a little time getting the rods ready by wiring them together but then I decided that they were just too thick for what I wanted to do so I will have to go buy some 1/4” rod.

You can see how the rods are prepared below;

Wire management:

Oh, you may notice the tie wire sitting on the welding table. It looks a little strange but it is an experiment of sorts. When starting a new role of tie wire I usually pull the wire from the center of the role. Eventually the outside wire can get all mixed up and can become a real birds nest. This time, before I started pulling wire off the role I whapped Gorilla tape around the outside of the role. Eventually we will find out if this is a good fix or not. I probably should put the wire in a box with a hole in the top that would surly work. Maybe that will be another project.

Okay that’s all for today.