Hammer and top swage

I finalized all my power hammer tooling for making hand hammers, so I made my first hand hammer under a power hammer this evening. It's a will be a little less than 2 pounds once it is totally finished.....I still have to polish, harden, temper, and handle.


The starting piece!

The hole punched!

Currently!

The tooling needs a bit of tweeking but it worked pretty good.




I made a tool called a top swage the other day. It turned out ok, especially considering I've never made one before and never seen one made either!

And in a shocking turn of events.......


Back in the winter of 2010 I built a properly scaled down model of the wooden boat I eventually hope to build. The model was 1/8-scale, and was quite detailed, with seats, pins for holding the sail ropes, and basically a 100% working model. It would sail great all around our pond. Here are some pictures of the boat and building process.

Back in the spring or summer of 2010, I was sailing the boat in the pond, when it suddenly sank without warning. I still have no idea what happened. It was fine one moment, and then it went straight down. I knew where it sunk, but the water there is 20 feet deep, extremely dark, and extremely cold, even on bright, sunny, warm, days.

Today, we were out fishing. The line on one of the poles I was using, suddenly went taunt, and the pole started jerking. I grabbed the pole and attempted to set the hook. The fish had let go by this time, but there was an immense amount of dead weight on the line. I started pulling, and felt that whatever the weight was, it was being pulled along. I gently continued pulling, wowzers.......up came my boat. Here are some pictures of a model boat that's been sitting 20 foot under water, in all weather, and in the mud for a year and a half.

 

So now I suppose I'll get some experience in boat restoration!