I Tried Making Chain For The First Time In 15 Years!
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- Опубликовано: 5 ноя 2023
- As a professional blacksmith making chain isn't something I do very often (factories are much quicker at it!), but I realised that it's a great way to show off a lot of a blacksmith's traditional skills, so I thought I'd bite the bullet and show you my (rather rusty) attempts at making some chain. The last time I did was when I was in college, and they didn't end up looking as good as these.
You'll see most parts of my anvil being utilised and hopefully me getting quicker and more effective as the links are added (keep an eye out for a bit later on when I get bored of doing everything the traditional way in my desperate quest to make processes quicker and more efficient). You'll also see quite a lot of forge welding, albeit a slight variation to the more widely used scarf welds.
A shout out to Mark Aspery (@MarkAspery ) who's method I use here. He's the master and you should all go and watch his videos immediately (after this one). 
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Your fire welds are always on point!Excellent work! I’d be curious to see how hand fire welded chain holds up to contemporary manufactured chain of the same link lengths and thickness.
Thanks for saying so! Me too. My suspicion would be that modern manufactured stuff would be better (certainly cheaper!) because there will always be inherent weakness due to human error in the fire welded stuff. I guess, in theory, if you could ensure each fire weld was complete and fused throughout the join, then they should be as strong as each other, but I'd rather not x-ray the ones I've done!
Your chain making video came up on my RUclips feed. Nice job, especially after 15 years. I'm leading a tong forging workshop on Sunday. I guess we'll have to forge chain making tongs. You just need some reps on bending your workpiece in the middle (grin, cause I've been there). Thanks for the video. I was having withdrawls from no more Joey Van der Steeg videos. I'll be watching yours.
Thanks for this, I switched to the fly press eventually as that's what I would normally use. Especially if I was trying to be as quick as possible. High praise to be compared to Joey, thank you. I would love to emulate his close ups!
That is just so labour intensive, must be for a special project.
Would that bar not bend cold in the fly press?
Have read that traditionally, a lot of chainmakers were women, they must have been tough in those days.
Yeah, it felt labour intensive. In making it I realised so many ways I could speed up the process. I think you could certainly put that first bend in cold, and using a gas forge to do everything other than the last fire weld would definitely help. I have been thinking about making a follow up video with all these in mind, maybe to see how many I could make in a couple of hours, perhaps. Although I'm not surprised it's all left to machines nowadays. I'd also be interested in meeting some of those women.
You can add some flux so that it can easily joined
You should watch my forge welding video which talks about why I don't use flux.
@@TomFellBlacksmith surely I will watch I am just sharing my knowledge with you about the flux on forge welding chain because it saves your time buddy 🤝🤝
Can you make a video on how to make a coke forge? I’ve see a few but no one shows the details
Hmmm. It's a good idea, certainly if there aren't many out there. I can't say I've ever built one myself, although I certainly know how they are put together. It's also not a small project. Maybe one for the future, or potentially I could do an explainer the next time I have to dig out my own coke forge. Propane forges, on the other hand, are relatively cheap and easy to build.
@@TomFellBlacksmith I may have to look into building a propane forge, I appreciate the response
Flux, Tom?
No. Don't need it for mild to mild. Just good fire control.