Make that look smooth and post
hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop in the past when using our backyard forge
We've been using these stainless steel tongs to pull things out and they are stainless steel
Which means that they don't melt in the furnace?
But they do get red-hot and very soft to the point that trying to pick up the crucible just makes them Bend
And I'm pretty sure these things were originally designed to be used on
Salad so you can see we haven't been using these for quite what they were designed for so today
We're gonna see if we can build ourselves some more industrial tongs that can really take the heat of our Forge
We've got some mild steel bars that we picked up at Home Depot along with some steel hardware
And we're gonna try and form two pairs of tongs one pair
That's designed to reach down inside the top of the forge and lift our crucible out and a second pair
That's designed to grab our crucible from the side, so we can easily pour it out to be building these tongs
We'll use a drill a hacksaw. We'll probably end up using the bench vise and a pair of channellocks as well first
let's just sort of get a measurement idea for how long we want these tongs to be I'm not trying to make tongs that I
Can operate up here just something about that long?
For the most part these will work, just like a pair of scissors
We'll have a hinge point in the middle and then somewhere around here
We'll try and get them to twist 90 degrees so that we have the flat face pointing at the crucible
We'll then take another piece of steel and bolt that on to the end
In sort of a claw shape so we can really grab onto the crucible
We just take some more of the steel bar beyond where my hand is and double that over. That'll give a nice handle
That's easy to hold on to I will still be using the furnace gloves while I'm using these tongs, so I do want something
That's easy to operate and doesn't require a ton of manual dexterity because they're pretty thick this is all very much an eye balled
sort of experiment if you want longer tongs you just use maybe the whole bar if you want shorter tongs then you're gonna burn your
Hands, but just use less
You go for right about there
Let's see how long it takes me to cut through this 1/8 inch thickness
3/4 inch wide mild steel bar using a standard hacksaw I
Wasn't too bad I actually got through that in like 30 seconds pretty good try the next one
We've now got the two shorter bars that will be the main body of the first set of tongs and we have the two pieces
That we cut off of those and we're going to be using these for something as well
We can cut two shorter pieces out of one side of this bar and those will become the two curved claws that will actually hold
on to our crucible
It looks like to get a good curved claw shape we aren't gonna have to cut this whole bar right in half
That would be a little bit too big, but just something I don't know 5 or 6 inches long should be pretty good
claw
I think
We actually want to make sure that our claws don't wrap all the way around our crucible because then the two halves would just hit
each other And they wouldn't actually grab the crucible at all so we want them shorter than that so it just grabs onto the sides again
I'm just kind of eyeballing it here
Now let's cut these two pieces off of our short bar
Got a magnet attached to our bench vise here, and it's really picking up quite a bit of steel filings from this I
Think we want to put our scissor hinge
Pretty much in the middle here
There are advantages to having it higher or lower if it's lower down
Nearer to the crucible then it's easier to hold pressure on it that lets us lift the crucible up out of the Forge but
If it's higher up
then we have more space to fit around a crucible and maybe even a
Larger crucible than this one, so I think just putting it right in the middle will be a good middle ground
It should be fairly easy enough to hold pressure to lift our crucible up and out
But we should also have enough space that we can fit around the mouth of even our taller and bigger crucibles
The hardware we have is one-quarter inch bolts so I have a 1/4 inch drill bit
But I don't have a punch to get my hole started
So I'm gonna be switching out using a smaller drill bit just to put a little bit of a divot into the steel and then
I'll switch back to my 1/4 inch bit
That should work I
Don't have any sort of special drill bit
This is a normal drill bit that I'm gonna be using to get through this mild steel
And if you use it correctly it should work pretty well
There's a couple of things that you want to remember when you're drilling into metal though
One is you don't want to use a high speed?
That will create a lot of friction
Which will heat up the tip of the drill bit and that can make it get soft?
If you keep a low speed you should be able to get through the metal no problem
The other thing to remember is that it's always good to use some kind of oil when you're cutting through metal
I don't have any machine oil around but I do have this cooking oil, which while not perfect should still do the job
Doesn't need a lot
Steel hardware fits beautifully through that little hole with just a tiny tiny effects err space almost none
But it fits through nice and easily
Just what we want
Just got a little bit of a burr on the bottom of our steel
So let's take some sandpaper and just get rid of that you know
It's a quick test if we fit our bolts through both of those
We've got ourselves with a hinges pair of tongs or scissors are really they're neither of those yet
It's just two pieces of metal on a hinge, but
making good progress
let's see if we can't bend the ends of our steel 90 degrees so that the flat portion will be facing the crucible I
Like that that's pretty good alignment, it looks like right there, so now we need to add
Little claws on to both ends first of course we need to add a little bit of curves into this parts
Straight right now, which is not going to be good for grabbing a crucible
You're just putting it in the vise bending it in one spot
Gonna have to move on to using tools after this because my hands are not going to be stronger
I
Think that will work great now we need to attach one of the curve pieces to each of these
handles and
Of course that means more drilling holes
As a final step before we assemble everything using our hardware
Let's take our extra bits of Steel and fold those over to create our handles
Alright, that's looking like it should work. Let's start assembling with hardware
It's pretty good not too shaky these pieces are going to be assembled largely the same way
But they don't need to have any play to them these aren't supposed to move so we're just going to tighten them down a lot
It seems to be working
But I think we could make it a little bit easier to use if the claw pieces were a little bit more in line with
The shape of the crucible in this case that actually means bending the bars a little bit more inward
That way they should be
Lined up with the direction the crucible sits there we go that is
Perfect look at that. It just goes nicely down
Our little claws are perpendicular to the walls of the crucible
Easy to grab these things are working pretty well so far of course
It's going to be a little bit more of a long-term test than that when we start using them in the furnace
We'll see if the hardware holds up nicely
Or if the change from getting hot to cooling down over and over ends up weakening them somehow
It's possible that we'll have to come back later and weld some of these pieces in place
We have tongs that are really good for picking up our crucible from the top
But if we want to go and pour it these aren't gonna do too much for us
so what we need to do now is build a second set of tongs that has these claws facing the other direction so that we
Can come in at it from the side all
Of our pieces are cut our holes are drilled. Let's just bend some handles into this and then do our final assembly wait
That's not right
There we go
Now these ones will attach mostly the same way, but instead of attaching them with the claws perpendicular to the posts
We're going to go parallel
Let's give that a test so with our sideways Tong we should be able to just come in grab it
Tip you can even hold it upside down and pour out all of the dust that's down in there that works pretty great
Ha yeah, and now I can be farther away from the metal as it's pouring and
Our tongs aren't going to get destroyed like our salad tongs kept doing
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