Forging bolt jaw tongs, traditional approach

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] over the weekend I hosted the Rocky Mountain Smith's monthly get together and we did a demonstration on Tong making we looked at various styles of tongs but we didn't get around to making a traditional pair of Bolt jaw tanks Welcome Back to Black Bear Forge bolt jaw tongs are something people have asked for here and there are lots of different ways to make these the paws tongs we've looked at in the past are essentially bolt jaw tongs but they aren't made as traditionally as what I want to talk about today these really are very similar to Flat jaw tongs except for the way you shape those flat Jaws when you're all done plus you got to make them a lot bigger for today's project I'm going to start with a piece of three quarter inch square bar and three quarter squares the same as 20 millimeter square bar and this piece just happens to be 14 inches long foreign or about 360 millimeters long that's not real critical there's a few different ways we can approach this I think what I'm going to do though is make a jaw on each end of this bar and then draw the reins out in the middle cut it in half finish the tongs up and really that's the way I generally approach something like this these days Forge welding the reins to the Jaws which we've looked at before and I'll link to that in a video up here is really a good way to go if you don't have a power hammer but if you don't want to forge weld you need to draw out the reins and while it can be done entirely by hand I think I'll go ahead and use the power hammer for drawing out the reins just to expedite so we're not here for two hours but we will go ahead and do the Jaws at the Anvil so you can see how that's done forging them at the Anvil so you want to start with half face blows at the near edge of the Anvil and I want to draw this first jaw out a lot longer than you would for flat jaw talks I shouldn't say the first jaw both Jaws and what about four inches of jaw length when I'm all done here you want to take it down to about half the original thickness of your material so it'd be 3 8 of an inch foreign just keeping it cleaned up in this Dimension here I'm not trying to make keep it at three quarters it could spread out it looks like I probably could have taken a little bit bigger bite here it's not quite as long as I would like it to be so I may come back here and take a little bit more the problem is I might create a cold shut so I'm going to have to forge that to an angle first I'm just going to work that corner down a little bit so I don't create a cold shut cold shut in the Tong Jaws would be a really bad thing and I'll advance that a little bit and this should give me my four inches it would have been smart to measure this first you know how much I'm now taking but I wasn't that smart that's about four inches my Anvil is five inches wide so I can use it as a pretty reasonable guide now the next step is to rotate this and kick it off 45 degrees to forge the boss and you rotate it towards your tongue hand I hold tongs in my left hand so I rotate that to the left if I held tongue to my right hand I would rotate it to the right so we're going to rotate that up towards my tongue hand and again half face blows we're going to offset the jaw as well as thin the boss and then work back into the parts that'll be the range a little bit because you'll need to thin that ultimately you want to go to about half the thickness of your material just going to thin this a little bit more ultimately that boss has to be parallel so now our next step again we rotate towards our tongue hand and we're going to offset that again this direction and this part will then become the range so we've rotated from here to here and now we go to here and we want to offset about as much as the boss is wide kind of like a round boss when I'm all done but some people like rectangular some people like to taper into the Rings so it's just up to personal preference at that point you may have to come back and repeat all these steps as you go just to keep everything in line and for now that's all I'm going to do because I'm going to draw these rains out under the power hammer and turn this around do all these same steps to the other end we'll clean that boss up and round it up some after we draw the reins out foreign s now pretty much the same I'm going to draw out in the middle and just see how long our reins will be out of this and as I mentioned earlier I'm going to go ahead and do this under the power hammer I know a lot of you don't have power hammers you could do all of this at the Anvil just plan to spend a lot more time so doing this under the power hammer it might take me 10 minutes of actual forging doing it by hand maybe a half hour 45 minutes part of the problem with doing it by hand at the Anvil especially if you're not used to it is you get tired and when you get tired you start to think yeah that's good enough and doing it under the power hammer I'm likely to do a little bit better job that shouldn't be the case you should just spend the time at the Anvil so if you have to spend two hours at the Anvil to get the range just right by all means go ahead and do that I'm just not going to do that on today's video because I don't want to make it that long foreign foreign foreign [Music] okay thank you foreign foreign [Music] foreign thank you [Music] that gives us our two Tong halves both with the same length reins and the reins look nice and finished I probably don't need to do anything else to those except maybe grind or file the ends to make sure there's no Burrs on the very end and that is way faster than doing it by hand but again if you don't have a power hammer you can do it all at the Anvil or better yet if you don't have a power hammer learn to do Forge welded rains and again we link to that video up here so you should be able to find that video in any case I'm going to let these rains cool off then I'm going to turn them around and I'm going to clean up the jaws and finish doing the Jaws but it's much easier now that I've got the reins to hold on to this then is just all the same steps we've already done let's try to get it all cleaned up if you want to work on that boss a little bit and drop your hand low at the Anvil like this well the shape of the boss does not affect the functionality of the tongs it does affect the aesthetic of the tongs a little bit in my view so I try to round that boss up some [Applause] you don't have to if you don't want to try and make the other half match as closely as I can foreign [Applause] foreign boss too thin it'll uh Factor the strength of the tongs if you do at this point we should hopefully have two nearly identical pieces the next thing I want to do is bend over the end where it'll be the v-bit part of the bolt tongs all right I'm going to put that part up out of the vise and bend it away from the the boss and the reins at about 90 degrees looks like that I'm going to do that with both of them if you're concerned about getting an accurate okay offset here go ahead and put a center punch Mark in there so you get them both the same we'll see if I got lucky or not and I say I got pretty lucky I don't want to start by offsetting this portion and we'll go into this bending jig made out of a piece of pipe this one might be a little bit big let me go to a smaller pipe [Music] foreign didn't fit so we'll just have to do some extra fussing and fiddling here that we have the technology to fuss and Fiddle all we want tongs always seem to have a a fussy and a fiddly phase to them no matter how you make them let's see if we can just sink that down this way this may be the better way to go in the first place try not to just create a Groove switch the top folder that fits perfectly would be absolutely wonderful but any case you can see what I'm going for there foreign thing is that both halves match at this point are very close we'll get a another chance to fiddle with them a little bit they say there's always going to be some fiddling in here pretty much want this in the same plane or parallel plane of the reins but it has to be down from the rains just a little bit otherwise they'll bump into each other when you put them together it's getting pretty close the same kind of stuff with this one and I think that's looking pretty good the next thing we're going to do is put the v in the very ends of these the easiest way to do that is with a V Swedge and a v Fuller [Music] and if you have a striker you don't need a treadle Hammer but if you don't have a striker or treadle hammers all too nice foreign to form a notch and you can do a round Notch and or you can do a round profile in these as well a round profile only holds round bar well but doing a v or a square profile will hold square bar or round bar so that's what I prefer foreign to get these a little twisted so we'll have to fix that in the final assembly thank you I just want to do any last fiddling and adjusting as far as pre-assembly goes guarantee you there'll be more once they're assembled and I think I will go put my touch Mark in there foreign make sure this one's straight and not Twisted any more than it has to be my last name and of course the Bearpaw [Music] a little countersink on these makes it less likely to Shear your rivet in use now if the holes drilled I can put a rivet in here and not set it yet just to look at these see how the joint is going to work and like most tongs at this stage they need a lot of work Jaws don't quite line up right things don't fit as well as they should but the joint Works quite nicely which is too bad because now I don't really need to show you how to fix that but I'll talk about it just a little bit anyways pretty much if the joint doesn't fit at this point it's just a matter of finding out what's holding it up and taking a file and filing the high spots off and it doesn't hurt to file it a little bit smoother anyways this might make it run better in the long run get rid of any sharp spots and of course work on both of them if they need it and then of course depending on how much it matters to you you might want to look at the boss and see if it needs some sort of attention to make both sides match functionality is the first concern but if you take time to be just a little bit prouder of it you might as well file the lumps and the bumps off now I think we're ready to go set our rivet and I'm going to deal with all this misalignment after they're assembled I'm just going to heat the rivet up of the torch that makes this go much easier make sure you hold all this down tight together so that it doesn't get a gap in between the reins and at the boss there foreign together and as you might expect or you should expect they won't budge at all they are completely locked up tight and if you've been paying attention to the previous videos on Tong making you should know all you really have to do is just heat that up and work it gently I'm also going to let that shape my jaws a little bit because this needs to come together some try not to bend the reins though it isn't the purpose here but those are still really misshapen so you need to do something here and trying to decide if one is good and the other is bad what you need to do in this case they're both off about the same amount so I just need to work on both of them and now they're pretty much in line and I decided I was going to make these fit 5 8 square bar doesn't matter this would fit probably half to three quarter using these same directions just fine I'm just going to get that started and then I'm going to heat this all up again I'm going to cooled the rains off right to the boss so that they are less likely to be a problem now you can squeeze the reins together a little bit and that's adjusting the Jaws and by working all four portions of the Jaws we should be able to get a very nice custom fit two or three quarter inch or excuse me our 5 8 inch Square bar that's a pretty comfortable squeeze back here now sometimes it seems like all this fiddling to make tongs fit just right takes longer than making the tongs themselves make sure everything is straightened in line makes it much easier to use in the long run make sure they don't Tighten Up On You if you're going to grab this bar grab it by the cold end it doesn't hurt to mark that with a soapstone so you know which engines to fold in the last thing I'm going to do I'm going to run to the grinder real quick and just level up those ends because they aren't quite even that makes that a lot better [Music] my rivet's loosened up just a little so I'm gonna give it a little tap there snug it up a bit and just one last check of the fit the good news is you can always come back and Fiddle with these again later if you decide they don't fit exactly like you want or if you wanted to fit a different size bar so that's a fairly traditional way to make a pair of Bolt tongs and bolt tongs are really just v-bit tongs that have this hoop in there so there's room for a bolt head or an angle if you've got a an L-shaped bolt or some other forging and they're really a very handy pair of tongs these fit 5 8 square bar very nicely could easily have made this size pair of tongs to fit half to three quarter bar if you're going to go up to one inch bar you might want to start with a bigger piece of material maybe start with one inch or 25 millimeter square bar now there are lots of other ways to make bolt tongs we've looked at making some from a pre-cut blank in the past we have looked at making the pause tongs which are essentially bolt tongs but I think we'll take another look at making some of these out of flat bar that aren't exactly like the paws tongs or the ones that are pre-cut lots of ways to approach anything there is no one right way no one correct way again if you don't have a power hammer and can forge weld you just make the jaw and Forge well to rain onto it that's a fast easy way to do this if you don't have a power hammer and you don't know how to forge weld or your Forge won't get to welding heat then you need to draw these out by hand and that's a lot of work so these may not be the style of tongs you want to make if that's your situation but we'll look at some of the others in upcoming videos and we'll hopefully then be able to present something that works for people that don't have a power hammer and can't forge weld the reins on this pair of tongs ended up being 14 inches long so that's not bad and that's from the edge of the boss to the tip of the reins pretty comfortable length for me if you're working really hot stuff or have a gas forge that has even worse dragon's breath than my chili Forge does maybe you want longer rains but this works just fine anyway that's all I've got for today I hope you enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up if you did if you haven't done so already I would love it if you hit that subscribe button down there feel free to stick around watch a few of the other videos share the videos with your friends if you'd like to support black bear forged on YouTube financially there are links down in the video description for both PayPal and patreon those are simply donations the content is free and will remain free in the meantime I hope you have time in your day to get out to your shop make something but stay safe wear your safety glasses we'll see you for the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 92,812

Keywords: Blacksmith, blacksmithing for beginners, black bear forge, john switzer, forging bolt jaw tongs, making bolt jaw tongs, bolt jaw tongs, v bit tongs, bolt tongs, blacksmith tongs, blacksmithing tongs, forging tongs, making tongs, forge, hammer, anvil, smithing, smith, power hammer, saymak power hammer, how to forge tongs, making blacksmith tongs, tong making, how to make tongs, bolt head tongs, forge tongs, how to make blacksmith tongs, blacksmith shop

Id: cvsXrpYTsNU

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019