When we remodeled our home, I installed a 4-foot French door in the dining room with dreams of opening it to step out on to a narrow balcony and look into the back yard, coffee in hand, on fine warm mornings. I fantasized about marveling at my green grass and watching the kids/puppies play in the yard.

Well, it only took me like 4 years to make it happen. I bought some salvaged iron fence sections, cut them up, over-built a frame for them, welded it all up, painted it, and then let it sit in my shop for 7-8 months waiting on the house to get painted and on a semi-sunny spring day to get it bolted up to the house.

That day has come! I installed it recently and I think that my wife loves it more than I ever could have. It is a Juliet balcony for my very own Juliet!

I have a manual forge, mostly because I live on a tiny lot in the middle of a city and there is only 10′ of space between houses. I would LOVE a power hammer or a hydraulic press, but I would have some very unhappy neighbors.

I chose to recently equip my forge with a 4-ton British fly press that will be used for punching and forming tasks. the beast weighs almost 400 pounds and I have to build a stand for it that will both hold the weight and resist the lateral forces exerted during normal operation. I am already planning to WAY over build it!

I decided to spoil myself and order a set of new nail bags. I had a nicely broken in set of Occidental Leather Pro Framer bags that were stolen about 10 years ago. I didn’t have a bunch of spare cash then, so I replaced them with a decent set of Craftsmen leather bags. They were meant as a stop-gap and I tweaked them a little here and there to fit my needs. I was planning on buying a new set of Occidentals, but I used someone else’s rig that had a diagonal hammer and cat’s paw sheath and was blown away by how much I preferred that set up! I have been eye-balling a set of custom modular Akribis nail bags with that and some other cool features for about a year and finally was able to hit their once a month online store opening.

They came via USPS about 2 weeks after I ordered them and THAT DAY I was swapping out my tools from my old bags (they will go to my son who will get years of use out of them). I used them for the first time 3 days later to build a scaffold/brace for a project at the house. They fit PERFECTLY.

I am really happy with this purchase and the product/communication/customer service at Akribis leather. They are not cheap and the Occidentals are just as solid AND US Made. It was a hard choice, but it was the diagonal hammer sheath that finally sold me.

The buying experience for this tool was not the greatest: LONG lead, missed dates, poor communication, etc… but the tool is fantastic and now has a forever home in my forge.

This Celtic cross was commissioned as a gift for one of the faithful. I spent a couple hours in the shop and forge cutting, slitting, drilling, adding texture, and riveting. A bunch of tools were used today!

Between heats on the cross project, I made three specialty tongs: bent scrolling tongs, pipe tongs, and duck bill tongs for 1/4×1” flat bar.

My Harbor Freight 20-ton press was just taking up too much needed space in the shop and I decided to make it into an effective tool that would earn the real estate that it held. Over the course of two months or so I did the following:

• Welded a base frame on
• Installed Castors
• Made a plywood bottom
• Welded together a SWAG finger press break kit.
• Made some pin extenders and a mount for them
• Altered the beam support pins for safety
• Swapped out the manual 20t jack for a20t air/hydraulic one
• Primed and painted everything

I am most proud of the press shaft extension pins and the pin holder. I did some initial concept sketches and then opened AutoCAD for some part design. Next step was to have SendCutSend cuts my parts out. The parts arrived in 4 days and a week or so later and I welded/bolted everything together on a Saturday. I don’t show it in the video, but the bottoms of the pins are drilled and tapped 1/2”-13 so that I can bolt in shaped dies and also smaller diameter pin extensions for pressing out u-joints, freeze plugs, and such.

Total cost was $610 for all the parts, material, paint, castors, hardware, hoses, and foot pedal. Not the cheapest option, but this thing is MINE and will last me the rest of my working life. I also feel that in the month since I finished it, that the press has finally earned THAT real estate in the shop – seeing action a couple times a week.

Here is my dinosaur 25′ Stanly tape measure. I glue a small piece of white Formica to my tapes to act as a note pad. Works great and wipe clean with water/sweat/spit/Gatorade. Saves time and material waste!

Holy Bejesus, a local builder, horse owner, and friend (whose wife happens to be a farrier) hooked me up with about 200 pounds of used horseshoes and a few worn farriers rasps! It has saved me a bundle and I gave them 12 forged hooks for them to hang tack on. It was nowhere near an even trade so I will work something special for a future gift.

I had a couple projects for family that I needed a few shoes (and a dull rasp) for and this will set me up! There are plans for yard wine glass holders, a sign, hooks for a horse obsessed niece, and a throwing tomahawk from one of the rasps. But I now suffer from an abundance of raw material.

I drove home the night after I picked them up thinking of other horseshoe forge and welding projects that are now possible/going to happen, though I will stay away from the hooky Pinterest-highlighted wine racks and yard art.  We are not into the “western aesthetic” décor at home – I grew up with that – so I am looking at projects that use them in more subtle ways: feet, brackets, trim, etc. In truth, I have enough horseshoes for a decade worth of projects. 

I now need to clean to pasture residue off, remove the nails, and sort them: size, material, condition. I’ll make some sort of rack to hold them in the forge so they are on hand as inspiration strikes. 

I have had a couple of messages about the bottle opener I made in the “New Propane Forge Video.” That one was sort of a one-off as it was made from a scrap section of 1/2” piece of square bar I had laying around. I thought I would take a minute or two and show you my favorite type of forged opener to actually use day to day. I have 3 stashed in various places: kitchen, grill, and by the fireplace in the living room.

These are made from a section of 1/8”X1” flat bar, the opener just feels good to hold and use, slips in a pocket, and doesn’t roll off a table. I coat them while still hot with beeswax collected from my hives.

My HF compact bender is now mobile – sort of. I welded a 14” section of 2” square tube to the trunk, added leveling feet, and a 2” hitch bolted to the bench leg. This way I can apply lots of leverage with out having to bolt it to the concrete floor. I pull the hitch pin and can move/store the bender. Same height as hitch on the Jeep, so it can be REAL mobile if need be.