I was wondering if there are hot rolling mills for a small hot shop. Devin Thomas has one that he says came out of an old mine, but are small ones still made commercially? If so, by whom?
Here is a small one in the shop of MS Hank Knickmeyer. Check Dee Hedges use it at 1:51
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7fPp8PcN6o
I would love to do a group build on something like it.
Karl B. Andersen
Journeyman Smith
You can get the plans on CD-Rom for a Small Rolling Mill by Hugh McDonald, this is the rolling mill that Dee Hedges is using in that Video.
You can order the Plans from - Anvilfire.com - go to the Anvilfire store, click on browse catalog.
Anthony
Beyond plans being available, or paying someone to build you one, I don't know of any that are commercially available.
I've owned/used a rolling mill for several years now. While it's very nice to have, I find that I don't use it as much as I thought I would. For drawing out straight steel it's fast and efficient, but I find it less useful for anything other then a random pattern when it comes to damascus...... when it comes to damascus, a rolling mill will generally give any patterned steel a "chevron".....simply because of the manner in which it works the steel. This can be somewhat mitigated by turning a billet end to end between each pass through the rolling mill, but it doesn't totally eliminate the "chevron effect".
One thing I immediately discovered is that in order to work it's best, the rollers must be "dead on" parallel. Not long after getting mine, I realized that everything I would put through it tended to come out curved to the left....the more times through, the more curve I'd get. It took me a while to figure out what was going on..... when I'd run the rollers together to check parallel, there was never a gap of any type..... I finally found that with the pressure of running a billet through the rollers, they would go out of parallel about .030".....doesn't sound like much, but it made a huge impact. After trying a few things that were only "band aids", I finally got serious and rebored/shimmed one end of the unpowered roller support, and it solved the issue....at least for now. <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//smile.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />
Ed Caffrey, ABS MS
"The Montana Bladesmith"
www.CaffreyKnives.net
