3rd gear

[macmac]

Geeze i wasn't expecting that, to be as close or that you were in winter....

Sure ask away, but i warn you I have never once split a case on a Nomad.. I have in Triumph 650, and a few assorted other things a long time ago, and man they got gizzmos in there..

i use egg cartons with lables, pre digital anything back them

All the egg cartons were IDed as sub assemblies and many parts were the only part in one pocket of the egg carton. I made hand drawn sketches too in a note book, because i forget no sooner than something is done.

I compared bolts in a given assembly taking them out to the first bolt i took out when there were many nearly alike. The right length bolts gotta go back in the right holes..

I tend to be a little gifted in figuring things out, like guys bring me gun they took apart and all the parts are heeped in a box, and sometimes these boxes have parts of other guns..

Once there was a Winchester modle 100 I think it was a 30-06 in semi auto, all part for blue and the blueing guy blew town instead.

You are going to need a factory book no matter what any one else says. a real paper book..

I have 2... 2000 Nomad 1500 and 06 Nomad 1600. Once i had a 1500 01 Nomad and it was stolen.

There is no stupid questions, just stupid answers..

Your weather and mine are about the same probably, mine might be a lot colder in winter, I really don't know, but we get -40 and no mater what system we use that temp is the same.

Soon winter will be here.. Sugar maple trees are turning bright red in the low swamps as i type this.

[mattbren]

will source a book first, the take lots of photos and draw diagrams.
Doesnt get nowhere as cold as where you are, but it can get as hot as bagdag - without the car bombs
cant wait for it to warm up a bit, cold weather and banged up bones dont mix
if there are any questions about upholstery, furniture or leather dont hesitate to ask
thanks Matt

[macmac]

Yup you will need a book... You will need to read it about 10 times too, as the lingo is very odd if you ask me. I don't really like the way it is written.

So far I have no Clymers, but you can get that in addition and I would. I have Clymers for other bikes and for after market books I like them best.

All books contain errors and in all my years so far, I have never found any book and I don't care who made it for what all exactly correct. BEWARE the errors..

What Clymers does to the un-suspecting is take you right down to bare bones and then put it all back together.

If you don't know when to stop you will go too far for no reason.

The way Clymers breaks down for a clutch, if you go to far you will split the case, and end up rebuilding everything whether you wanted to or not.

Clymers assumes you know nothing, while Ma Kawii assumes you know everything..

Comparing one to the other is like night and day.

Ma Kawii uses drawings, and bad pictures, and Clymers just uses bad pictures.

Clymers has it all right in wiring with in color diagrams, and Ma Kawii diagrams suck. To read them you need a big looking glass, and then loose what you were thinking about trying to ID the colors, and or floow a wire to the next page over the bloomin book spine! :(" title="" border="0"/>

You might like Haines, but I can't stand them... I won't buy a Chiltons because any time I want to know something it says "Refer to Expert" I am the bloomin expert, I just want the damnned info!

If you can find a Mitchells they are the best of both worlds, but I don't think they make them for bikes and they cost a million bucks...

I appreciate the offers of trade too, but doubt I will take you up. It's fine by me, but I am what is known as a Buck Skinner, dealing in woodland skills from 1700-1840.

I am one of the dyed in the wool ones, doing woodland skills well, making fire by bow drill, making most any articals a Mountain Man might have myself, by hand.

I am not saying I know it ll, but I know enough with which to make most anything I would ever want, and over the years have collected most any tools I would ever need even if the power went out for the rest of my life.

Back then people did specialty work just like today, but i do most any and all of these trades myself because no one else really does.

Lock Stock and Barrel was a lock maker making gun locks, the Stock maker making gun stocks, and the barrel maker making gun barrels.

I do all of these and more myself.

I make Trade Silver, stone pipe bowls, stone pijts and other related tools, made a cantten of all natrual items in the woods with no glue or metals. Commonly make mocs and moc boots for my wife and me. Shirts, leather leggin, portmantous (luggage) Forge knives, fire irons, fry pans, kitchen tools, on my forge.

I have a 70 pound anvil in the bed room and a 70 pound swivel vise, also in the bed room, plus 2 more bigger anvils around in differet shop locations.

A full set of tech tools from Snap On from when I was a foreign car tech going back to 1970...

Not trying to brag, I am trying to explain.. I am well rounded in a lot of fields.

And you are going to try and pull off something I would say is very difficult for me to do myself.

If I haven't set you off this time I am still around and will do what I can.. You will be going deeper into a Nomad than i ever have and wouldn't ever want too... it can be done, but you will have frustrations and really bad days.


Don't try to cheat, as this is way too deep for that to work. Only work when you want too, and avoid getting caught up and being beaten by a machine.

When things get complicated and you can take that to the bank, get every detail recorded, put back on what you just took off less new gaskets so it sticks in your head.

There is a lot of springs, cams and levers... Every single working machine is just made of springs, cams and levers..

The thing is these are all different looking and do different things different ways. Getting any of these installed wrong is not an option.

I got lots of battered bits too, so I hear that loud and clear.

A nice dry cold ain't too bad Hot and muggy isn't much fun..

as of late my spine feels like rocks in a heavy tidal change..
Oh well....... huh? mac...

[mattbren]

sound like you are living the life I want to live, cant do that much stuck in suburbia. I do make alot of my own stuff from hans and salamis to furniture and sheds. my motto is why pay someone to stuff it up when I can stuff it up quite fine myself. my mech friend will help me out a bit, but I hate relying on other people.
Will try and source the best manual I can get and put the new glasses into action
Im looking at making a big meat cleaver that will fit in my hand good and would not chip when I chop up a pig, do youtemper your knife blade a few times or fold the metal

[macmac]

For cutting edges I use tool steels. These are files, rasps, and car springs. With the firge i heat and beat to basic shapes i want, and then grind to get close, refine with a file by hand, and if i want polished I will sand and sand to what ever finish there will be.

This depends on the effect I want for what ever it is i am making.

Most of the time I will aneal anything tool steel before i do anything else. That is just toss it in a wood stove, get it bright red orange hot, and smother it in the ashes still in the heat stove and get the metal out the next morning some what cooled, and lay it in more ashes in a bucket till what ever it is can be handeld by hand.

Then heat and beat take place to shape, and if that piece acts work hardened any, back in the wood stove it goes and it gets anealed again.

Heat is nearly white hot, beat is pound the begessus out of it, and evenly, doing what you do one one side to the other with 4 pound sledges because i am not big enough to pound with 6..

Moving white hot steel isn't easy. It ain't play dough ya know?

Smaller things get smaller hammers, forexample if i want a knife with a shepards hook in the grip, as a neck knife (not very big fixed blade)

After anealing the first thing I do is move the file tang over to one side of the file.

You don't heat the tang much but you do heat the area of the file near it. When the file is hot (white heat) you lay the tang on the anvil and hit the file down, which moves the tang right up quick.

Then you heat the tang and beat it out longer than it was, for so long as you want and figure it will need to be by eye.

When it is, another heat has usually come and gone and a 3rd heat gets it ready to hammer a scroll eye ( The little eye on a fancy pot hook)

That is made with the tip of the tang white hot, and you have tapered the tang well to a near point, and bent the tip over the side off the anvil.

The next heat You drive the tang bend into the anvil and the eye just rolls up tight.

Another heat and you hammer off the side of the horn end of the anvil and the shepards hook begins to form.

Last heat there finishes up the hook and eye a few taps to get things straight does that.

Then the next part is the area grip scales will be and I usually turn a dent into a figer guard on the sharp side, or where that will eventually be. After the dent is formed buy light tapping in white heat, a curl forms like tapping a coin for a long time with a spoon.

At that point I start on what will be the blade, and try to get the blade thinned from it's pine to the cutting edge, and make the blade longer than the file was. When the last heat come i wack the piece with a sword weilding horseman stamp, my mark.

Again this usually brings on work hardening, an so the whole thing gets anealed, and if i am tight on time it get 'noramalized' so I can get back on it.. This isn't as good as Anealed but it works.

it will not work at all with "A" steel which is air hardening though..

Once the blade is about where I want I will do some grinding and then filing, and anneal it again for fancy file decorations, doing hour glass patterns, vines, rope and other idea that pop in my aledged head.

At this time I make the grips and fit them, testing the fit and the hand made wire nail rivets or copper and brass I use for rivets..

When everything is ready the the blade part and just the blade pat goet orange heat in day light, so a magnet is no longer attracted, and then the blade is dip quenched in oils horizontal.

Just in and right back out, and I look it over fast to see if any bends occured.. If they did I have the vise preset close and fix any bends. You have seconds of time to do it.

Now if you drop that blade on a hard suface it will break like glass, much to hard to use. With a powered wire wheel the blade and all gets cleaned off from the black cabon layer of oil burnt on.

Then with about 6 to 12 other blades they all go in the oven with a turkey or roast beef to cook for so long as that meal cooks. This is tempering.

i usually have a independant thermomiter in there and when the food is done, I turn the heat up iof i want depending on what the objects will be.

If I need to temper more than the kitchen oven can do deep, and need a spine on a big knife softer I can heat up a hunk of steel I have like a 2x4 to do that, or paint the spine with torches and watch the parade of colors. I can mud and leather rap the edge too keeping it hard, while allowing the spine to get softer and more flexible.

The steel will be a color here cold in plain day light, and sometimes I just leave them this way, as I like the tones of straw yellow (pretty hard and brittle) plum (some what more flexible, and peacock blue (about spring good for lances)

At this point the grips are final fit oiled, and the rivets are driven and peened.. The blade is done and it is off to the leather bench for the sheath.

These are some
http://s290.photobucket.com/albums/l...ac_Muz/Knives/

[mattbren]

absolutley brilliant work, you must have alot of satisfaction in your life

[ringadingh]

Thats certainly some nice work on those knives. There is a lot of skills required to do a job like that. I have an old 24ga. double, with hammers that Ive been restoring for a few years in my spare time. I made a new stock from a peice of walnut, and it turned out very nice. I made a couple of the other parts and they turn out ok , its the heat treating that I cant seem to figure out properly. One day I'll get back to the project and get it finished.

[macmac]

Originally Posted by mattbren

absolutley brilliant work, you must have alot of satisfaction in your life

Well I am always broke... :'( Broken and broke I guess, but it goes hand in hand with why I can make so much. I sure can't go buy it, and at this point I can't buy it because no one sells it...

Heat treating gun parts is the same thing I said above, but more delicate.

In camp (primitive doins') I fix guns with broken V main springs when the shooter finds me.. I can take an axe and slam it in a stump for the anvil. I need some cooking oil in a pot for a quench, after re-firging the spring longer.

These springs tend to fail riding the sear and you just need to make them longer.

It is wiser to leave the v of the spring as it is, but that is tuff to do, since the distance is so short.

So I will wrap the spring in mud and leather and bind the 'v' in wire. This is a poor attempt to keep the temper as it is in pne place on the spring anf still work the sear rider longer.

Once I have hammered and drawn the broken part out long, maybe formed a hook shape to it, and have filed it as smooth as i can with what ever is on hand, I will harden that end.

I use a brass blowing tube made of 3 brass sections to be about 3 feet long extended. This is common hobby shop brass tubing at the biggest tube about 3/8" / 11 mm's.

Mine is tipped with a little sperm whale tooth I had as a child. Any big wooden bead will do. A common hard wood camp fire with coals does the rest.. Some pliers or tongs do the lifting... I have little tongs to light a pipe with, and use those.

The end I fix needs to be glass hard, but the v in spring needs to be a spring still..

I can 'face' a frizzen in camp fires too, and leave the rest of that part soft. You want the face and only the face glass hard, and since it is hit with a flint in the cock jaws the rest must be hard...

A flinter burns steel and not rocks...

I really hope I wasn't over the top as I have no needs to be provin squat.. I just do what I need to get done..

If in this thread it is ok to talk shop for dealing with other metals besides bikes it is fine by me.

With most guns I have some idea on what parts need what temper.. Temper is always making a glass hard hunk of steel softer for a reason.

Annealing is a step to get tool steels dead soft.

Normalize is another way to get tool steels softer than they were

Hardening is to make tool steel glass hard

Tempering is another step to get glass hard steel softer than it was, but still very hard, depending on the chore the steel part will do.

Two glass hard steel parts working agains each other become a bearing of sorts. You can't strike them hard, but they can slide over one another.

There is a 1,001 ways to temper things... There is a lot of hocus pokus about triple tempering the same part.

There is ways to get a knife blade almost glass hard and leave the back spine dead soft.. It all depends on why you what it that way and the uses..

Anything can be inbetween, like a 16 inch lance blade can hold an edge and be spring steel at the same time, so you could bust open a nailed crate with it, bend the blade 2 inches out of line and it will spring back straight.

A time when I needed to know, and I came to know.

Same thing for mocs.. i couldn't buy historicaly accurate mocs so I learned how to make them, and shirts, trousers, knee britches, weskits, and more just because i wanted them to be historically correct..

The deeper the USA goes into the modern worlds ways, the deeper, I go backwards into the old ways because one day I see a disaster coming.

That much is very reassuring... I will always have fire because I can and do do it with 2 sticks, and in 120 seconds by Captian Clock. Most folks laff at me and my antics, but then I can share some of the things like bikes they have, and still get by in a world where I am broken, that makes money the reason to live.

If the power goes off for a year i sure will be popular then...

[ringadingh]

You seem to have a lot of talents Mac, working with metal is a real art once you get into heat treating and stuff, I would like to case harden that old dbl barrell of mine but I still need to do some more reading about it someday. Its something I work on in the winter here when its too cold outside, one day it will be finished. I tried making a V spring a few years ago, but it was to brittle and broke. I got real lucky one day and found one at a gun shop after rooting through a pile of old used parts. The seers should be replaced but thats a job for another day.

[mattbren]

to me you seem to be one of the richest people I know, you have to have a bit of money to survive but it aint everything

[macmac]

Ring, I think you have a term mixed up... Barrels on shot guns are usually soft, and must be, so casing one isn't anything you might want.... I doubt it..

I think you mean flame colored.. a finish of dull colors, some blues, tans reds and gold tones on the metal from oxidation, and kind of rust, that stops other rusts.

Once this was common on older real Colt Six shooters. Some of these like the black powder pistols and the early .45 cased ammo guns were commonly finish on the frame this way.

I don't know of any shot gun barrels finished like that but you sure can.

The thing there is, is I won't tell you how yet..

I need to know for sure if this gun is damascus or not. If it isn't you can flame color it, and if it is you can't.

Flame coloring damacus on a black powder only shot gun won't work either, and not many shot guns made of that type of folded steel can even fire a modern round.

There is other barrel finishes for damacus, so if it is you can do one of those instead with no meaningful heat, or no heat at all.

The hardened parts would be in the lock(s) and any spring catchs if this gun is a break top gun..

Just what is this gun anyway? Fox, LC Smith, Parker?

Could be a lot more too, Iver Johnson, Baker, Some old market gun? All the above are top breaks and I could create a hell of longer list..

Yup I am loved by one woman, who puts up with me and my messes. Some messes are dirt and chems from doin' stuff, while others were legal battles from a nasty divorce. I didn't want the nasty, just the divorce..

With what I know, I am free. Well so long as I can still stand, and use my hands...

A little whit and lots of humor pass my time most days..

[ringadingh]

The gun doesn't have Damascus barrells, its about a 1900 era Nuemann Bros. with double hammers. I'll blue the barrels when it time, but flame coloring the breach would be what Im after. I still have to get a bit of engraving done on the barrells and sideplates since I sanded off the original lettering during refinishing. The gun was broken, rusty and in poor condition when I received it, restoring it is more of a challenge than anything. I have most of it back in shape but it still needs some finnesing with the triggers, one is still to sensitive for my liking. I may even try to do some checkering on the stock if I have the patience.

[macmac]

That makes more sence... Blueing can be done cold and clean and is much better done right in a salts bath hot.. That work is for a guy who has the set up, set up. You want a new change of salts if you can get the timing right.

Any flaws will show, so don't have any flaws..

Flame coloring isn't an art it is a smallish job.. Looks great too, but anyone with oxy/actelene can do it. All you doo is polish what ever for the last time, and paint it with a hot welding tip. The smaller the tip the better the colors.

To try the idea out assuming you have acces to cutting torches is to brighten any common hot or cold rolled steel bright..

Just grind and sand it to a pretty clean uniform finish a near polish will do for learning..

Add heat waving the tip in a pattern.. circles and triangles will do.

Soon you will see the first colors in the 'parade of Colors start.

These will be tones of gold.. Straw by the old books. Dark straw comes next, then bronze, reds come after that turniung to different shades of blue... just like out pipes on the bikes do.

The art is stopping before you see the color you want, and letting it happen.

At no time should the metal glow from heat you apply, never dull red in dim light, or worse a bright glow from the metal.

Another way to play, but not on a gun is to use a common propane torch and a common stainless steel butter knife for the table.

The best way i know to see the 'parade of color' is to simply hold the knife the way you just do, and heat the tip only. Just heat the tip and don't move the torch at all..

Soon the colors with roll right down the blade; yellows will be chased by every other color there is and the last is a dull gray.

When that is cooled off you can polish the same knife over again and play more. To stop the colors dip in water with a table knife..

To stop color on a gun reciever you dab fast with a dampend rag, made of 100% pure cotton/ linen and or anything not wool and not man made synthetics because these melt and make a wicked mess of things..

Checkering is as good as the hand that holds the cutters. That one takes skills I don't have, but I have dabbled around with it some. The first practice run was on brass vise jaw plates, then in maple. Walnut is harder because it isn't a really hard wood.. Walnut is sort of medium hard and can splinter out easy.

I use large amounts of masking tape to help not slip and cut a place I didn't want cut, like right next to where I do want cut....

I will cheat and bend jewelers files to be cutting burrs getting into tight places. I will cheat more and use exacto knives..

I will cheat well past that and steal my wife's finger nail boards to sand out flaws, and pass that with sanding sticks made to polish point set on old cars.

I have been known to grind, bend and polish cutters from old files.. If I want to keep the temper in the file as it is, I will wear NO gloves so i get burned before the temper can go, and dip the file in water while grinding a lot.

You probably know that too...

I have a good many barrel scrapers made this same way to inlet barrels into the stocks. These cut wood not metal.

I use a small alcohol lamp fueled with keroscene, like a candle. it makes soot on the barrel, and that will rub off on high wood spots in the barrel channels. Then it is a matter to remove a sliver of wood at a time.

In 1989 I made most all the parts to this gun by hand. The barrel was solid brass round stock in a junk pile and the stock was a 16 foot long plank of walnut. It shoots the pitance ball of 0.60..

Thats right, a 60 cal pistol! No one would want to play target in my ft door in the middle of night if I had that in my hand

This rig took me 90 days of all my spare time. A nice winter project..



more here
http://s290.photobucket.com/albums/l..._Muz/Firearms/

[ringadingh]

Thanks for the info Mac, I do have torches here so I can try coloring it one day, Ive blued a few rifles in my time and I did get a lot better after a couple, Id prefer the hot salts method but I don't do it near enough to invest in the stuff required. The cold blue comes out pretty nice but sometimes it fades over time.
Thats a nice job you did on the pistol.

[macmac]

Copied 6 different guns from 1740 to 1745 taking an idea from each. A sort of if I was there sort of thing, but not really right since if i was there I would just be one of these lock stock and barrel guys... In my case i was all of them. The pistol would be a Naval officers Pistol with a brass sea going barrel.

The use would be off hand with a sword in the right hand, and more in line with getting sailors to fight and not run than for defence.

The world was as harsh a place then too.