This is what is referred to as the horn and bumper.
It fits on the back axle of the wagons and helps
steer and stop the wagon that's following.
It's made out of 3/4 inch thick, three and
a half inch wide steel.
These are forged welded together in the center, and on the lower portion,
this is what's called the bumper.
And this is what we're going to show first of how we made this.
The first part is to prepare the ends of the iron for forge welding.
So we bring them up to not quite a welding heat.
We want to scrape off all the excess oxidation.
And here is where we will actually use borax
and use it as a flux. So we're putting on a generous amount of flux here and this is what will
prevent the oxidation when we put these pieces of iron back into the forge. Actually bring them up to
when we put these pieces of iron back into the forge. Actually bring them up to a welding heat.
We're going to do these to both sides.
Scrape them off and coat them with borax to prevent the oxidation.
Even though I'm wearing welding gloves here, this steel is up to you know
a couple thousand degrees and it's awful hot on the hands.
So I'm going to take a couple of clamps.
We're going to position these so that they're parallel, right on top of each other.
We're going to clamp these in place,
so that they don't move, and then put them back into the Forge and we'll
go ahead and bring them up to a welding heat.
Now, a welding heat is about 2,350 2,400 degrees.
Once these are up to a welding heat, the first weld is actually going to be kind of the tack weld.
We're not going to get too aggressive. We're just going to tack it. make sure that the two stick together initially.
This is kind of a gentle weld,
just to make this sure the two are adhered together.
I'm going to scrape off the edges where the joint is,
and add some more borax for a flux.
Do this to both sides,
and then we're going to go back into the forge
and bring it back up again to a welding heat.
And then the second time will become a little more aggressive and actually form the weld itself.
I like to start on one end and move toward the other, so if there was any impurities in
the center, that it would get worked out.
This weld we really don't want to be lengthened,
but we would like the iron to be wider.
So we're going to turn it sideways here and actually draw this iron,
as it's being welded, to a wider width.
This heel is three and a half inch wide.
By the time we could get done it will be three and three quarters, almost four inches wide.
So we're going to scrape the side one more time, add a little more flux
add a little more flux to the joint,
and go ahead and make the third, final weld. Oftentimes forge
welds are in sets of three.
So we'll stick it back into the forge
and bring it up one more time to a welding heat and go ahead and finish our weld.
Again, we'll look for width more than we look for length on this lower bumper weld.
So this third time through pretty much finishes the weld,
but these two pieces of iron have to be separated.
and so we're going to put them in a vice
and we're going to bend
this three quarter by three and a half iron to a 90 degree
angle to the weld itself.
Even though we have a good heat on the iron,
it is 3/4 inch thick and we'll actually have to add a little
more heat to it in the process of the weld.
But initially we want to separate them.
It will bend just right at the well this which is going to be about an inch above the jaws of the vice.
Kind of get them started a little bit here,
and I'm going to go ahead and use the rosebud torch
so I can actually keep applying more heat
right at the spot above the weld where it needs to bend.
It's a pretty good piece of iron to bend at a 90 degrees, so it has
so it has to be pretty hot
right at this spot where it bends.
So we've got it kind of roughed in. It's a pretty wide bend.
And we'll have to go through a couple steps
to actually start to tighten up that bend a little bit,
and this is where it's a good test on whether you have a good weld or not
I changed the camera and the light so we can see a little better. It was kind of dark there
You can see we're going to force this joint together.
Now to get this a little tighter, we're going to stick this back into the forge
again and this time with the bumper sticking directly up
so that the heat goes directly on the joint
Here you can see it's sticking up out of the coal we're putting the heat right on the bend.
And we're going to take an upset this iron again
right in the bend and kind of tighten up that bend.
We're going to have to up set it to different directions. We'll do it once length wise.
and then we'll bring it back on the anvil and do it right on the end of the bumper.
Here again we're just upsetting, bringing that joint together at that 90-degree bend.
Going to change tongs, so I have a little better grip.
A little better control of this piece of the piece of iron.
Now here's where we're going to drive this bumper down into the anvil and tighten up the bend.
and in then at the same time we're going to try to make sure that it's straight and 90 degrees.
Make sure we're flat.
I'm going to bring the camera in here.
focus in a little closer so you can see
how we've tightened up the bend
at the top of that bumper. And this is what the lower joint, where
the bumper is, what that forge weld looks like.
The top piece of the bumper is a long piece
and the end of these pieces have a taper to them, so before we four G's together we're going to take this the
so before we forge these together, we're going to take this, the
top part of this horn,
and bring the end down to a taper, put a taper it onto it.
And this tapered end is what actually will be forge welded together.
We actually do it to the bottom part of the horn
and bumper. A piece of iron that has the bumper to it. I don't show it on this video but we do
the same thing on the ends of it. Both ends have a taper to them before they're welded together.
This tapers from the three and a half down to
just under three inches, two and three quarters, if my memory is correct.
Here we'll take the time to take some of the trip hammer marks off the edge.
Clean up the hammer marks. Clean up the scaling.
and then as the last step here, we'll put it back in the trip hammer. We'll take the
flatter and...
You can see we use it there to take out the trip hammer marks and make sure we
have a flat surface when we go back to close above these together.
So we'll let this cool.
Kind of set it off to the side. when it's cool we're actually going to do some shaping to it
When it's cool we're actually going to do some shaping to it
before we forge weld it together also.
Now we pattern out the shape that we want on a piece
of plywood, how it wants to be finished,
and we put these in the press and we bend them
to make them fit the correct rise
when they are attached to the reach
And this is the position they'll be in when they're actually forge welded together.
So I made a little wood block that's going to be the same size as the reach
that it is attached to
and we'll insert the block between the two.
Right now we're going to prepare the horn weld
just the same way we did the bumper weld.
We're going to clean off the scaling. We're going to apply the borax for the flux.
so when these two surfaces are put together there won't be any oxidation that builds up.
I use a quite a liberal amount of borax on there. We want to make sure it's got a good coating on it.
When you put the borax on it, just kind of melts right to the steel.
It makes make sure it gets
protected from the air.
This is just one of the uses of the product
borax that was hauled on these wagons was for flux in forge welding.
Now we're going to go ahead and we have our bolts,
bolt holes drilled. We're going to put this block of wood in that's the same size as the reach,
and go ahead and position both of these top and bottom pieces of iron that's going to forge
together on the tip. This is what's going to form the horn with the bumper.
Now, like we put clamps when we did the bumper, we're also going to clamp this together.
We'll adjust the tips
to make sure they're in the proper position.
Make sure they're lined up.
This is when we want these just right
when we actually do the forge weld.
So we'll put good tension on these clamps
and go ahead and
stick this back into the forge and bring it up to a welding heat.
Now this piece of iron as it
is here adds up to about 80 pounds.
So Calvin is being on the back end of this. He's actually the
one that helps roll and control this as we put it in.
This is the initial tack weld.
Kind of a gentle weld again.
Because of the size and bulk of it I just did it on one side. I'm going to go ahead and
clean the edges, reflux the joint.
We'll do this on both sides.
Make sure this is a good sealed up joint.
Stick it back in the forge. bring it back
up to heat and then we'll actually do the
second weld of the pattern of three welds
So this will be the second time to the hammer and we'll actually
get into rotating this, and this is the full strength weld.
A little more aggressive blows with the hammer, which actually is bringing the two pieces to one piece.
We just did a little bit of alignment before we go back into the forge.
This time we'll actually do a little bit more,
but this will be the final on the third weld on this one.
Now is when we'll pay a little more attention to our joints. We'll do a little
bit more tapering to it.
The two pieces are now one and they can actually move together as one.
This is more of a dressing up heat.
Kind of pointing out some of the spots that we need
to work on, to draw out.
This is more shaping. You notice as we didn't put any flux on this time.
We just put it back, brought it back up into heat.
We're doing our shaping.
The final kind of touches as much as going to be done in the in the trip hammer.
We'll bring it back up into heat, and not really quite as hot a heat, but again we'll take it to the anvil and
but again we'll take it to the anvil and
do a little more finish work with the hammer.
Work out some of the trip hammer marks.
Kind of clean up our edges, but you can see the taper to the horn
and how the two are now one piece.
So this is kind of what it looks like when it's finished.
We'll let this cool down a little bit and then Calvin is going to take the grinder and we'll do
a little touch-up little finishing on the edges some of the edges have round corners to them.
This was the second horn and bumper that's already been done.
This is what they look like when they're finished.
And this is where it goes on the back of the back axle.
Thanks for watching!