Bar Shoes

Yeah pretty much. It's not that it's any harder than any other weld but you definitely want to get your seems closed up, where you scarf, before you move onto forging the bar.

Il give one a go tomorrow, I need to improve my shoe making, i can make a fairly nice standard concave shoe my fullering and bar shoes are shockingly bad so im going to make and post at least one bar shoe a week to try improve.

Had a go at it this eve, ive a lot of practice to do!

You're really not that far off. What generally throws you off with this shoe is the corners which are there after you weld the shoe. You need to forge those corner in and forge the bar to the desired width.

If you throw you shoe back in the fire and forge the corners off and rework the width of the heel you will have the basic shoe there. You won't be able to get the width back from where you thinned it in front of the bar but the rest should look good.

And it takes a lot to flatten them.

David i hope to make and nail on a pair next week or the week after
i'm told the dept in the bar is the key in this shoe

Il give one another go this week, I should have brought the computer up to the forge so i could look at one of yours while im making it.

I thought the same thing while I made mine. At the end of the day, once you figure out how to make the shoe it doesn't matter what anybody else's shoe looks like or what their theory is behind it. There is enough metal for you to decide what you want to do with it.

What is the purpose of a bar shoe, Smitty? what kind of a problem are you looking to solve when you use one of these?

Had another go today just looks like a badly made bar shoe though, thinned the branch again and the weld was a disaster fullering is rubbish all round a poor attempt 20 more and I hope to have a nice one

well done david

Thanks John but we both know most of your second year apprentices if not first are maikng better. I hope in 6 weeks time to be up to the standard I should be givin the house I trained in. All its taken to get me motivated is living in a tea total country

Playing in the forge

Beautiful shoe! Do you and should I for a specimen shoe be fullering up the center of the stock? Also is there such a thing as shit steel? The steel I have here seems to get a scummy scale on it like nothing ive seen before!

Bought a large drum of gas yesterday 34 sar that's 9 euro!

David its your own preference
making one for a foot can be different
alot of the lads doing 3/4 fullered run it up the centre

Are your shoes off the hammer?

yes i think you dont benifit on this type of bar shoe by rasping
they could be cleaner worked better

Todays one isn't much better but was made in about half the amount of heats as the other so I think that's at least a bit of progress, but my fullering is still terrible and forging of the bar and frog plate is awful

Just got my coke pot and air blower in today. I needed a mini-shoe for the air gate handle so this is it. It's ugly and won't ever go to the top of a table, but when I rasp it, weld it on the handle, and paint it, it will suffice for the job. I made it out of about 5 inches of 3/8" round stock...didn't measure exactly...forged it out till' it looked about right, then cut it off.

Pair I made today, set myself an hour time limit but went fifteen mins over....

Mr Scruggs,I can read in the hand lines and I can see that in your hands;

-The line of the life says thay you will work very much,and you don'y become rich with the work of your hands or the sweat of your front.Besides, I can see you will unlucky with the woman if you don't use glooves in your hands.