Dropstone Farms

So the other day the girls laid only a single egg. It was bizarre. Then, the day after, we got five eggs. We normally get between three and six eggs per day, so having an egg-free day out of the blue was kind of bizarre. Everything seems to be back to normal. I guess they needed a break.

In a perfectly reasonable segue, I built a new anvil stand today. My old stand was built of a mess of 2×12s glued and bolted together (see figure 11 on this page). It was unstable on uneven ground and I never felt really good about it. Also, even with a mess of silicone caulk on top my anvil, being an old Peter Wright, rang loud enough to require earplugs. So I built a new stand out of 2×12 by screwing together four lengths and making a box with either end open. Then I filled it full of dirt.

The silver-grey stuff is scale that forms on iron when it's being worked. It then flakes off and makes a mess. I don't know if the resolution is high enough to see the earwig that ran out when I moved the anvil, but it's there.

I call it my Rammed Earth Anvil Stand on account of I compacted each layer of dirt with a chunk of 2×4 and a sledge. It came out rather well, I think. It’s much more stable than the old one because the dirt inside conforms to the grass and soil it’s resting on. Also, the much greater mass means that my hammer blows move more metal and the anvil doesn’t hop around when I’m working. Best of all, the column of dirt damps the anvil and it’s not so freaking loud all the time. As a further upside, I can tell the relative temperature of the iron by the changing sounds as the metal cools. Nifty, eh? Also, very cheap.

This is my anvil. You can see the dirt it's resting on. It's like a raised bed for metalworking.

My only concern it that the weight and the hammering will cause the screws holding the whole shebang together to pull out. If this happens, I’ll just run some bands around the outside for strength and hope it holds.

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Inspired by Throwback at Trapper Creek’s straw bale root cellar, we’re going to take a crack at building our own to store potatoes and all the apples that blew down in last night’s windstorm.

We went to the feed store and picked up “as many straw bales as will fit in this truck”* and I asked Lauren if I was allowed to buy a hay hook because, well, I am no longer twenty and bucking bales does not come as easily as to once did. She said yes but, due to lack of hay hook at the store, I was foiled.

And then I remembered I have a forge! And a pile of iron! So after I got home I cranked out the following local-heritage-artisanal hay hook (Appellation My Backyard).

I am reasonably pleased with it. I hammered and twisted it, aligned everything perfectly, and quenched it in water to test if it was the right shape. I was pleased with it and decided to anneal the tool. The process of annealing is used to soften a piece of metal. When I quenched the hook in water to check the fit (*ppsssshhhhh*) I set the molecules and it became brittle. To cure this, I needed to heat the metal up and let it cool down slowly.

So I returned the perfectly aligned tool to the forge to let it heat up. Unfortunately, I left it in the heat to long and it got all saggy and crooked. Oops. Oh well, at some point I’ll heat it up and straighten it out again. In the meantime, I can report that I’ve got a perfectly functional tool, if somewhat lopsided.

* Six bales in a Toyota pickup with a topper. Topper, for the record, is what Wisconsinites call a canopy. Also, we eat frozen custard.

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