More Tooling up

Just a quick post about some more of my new tools, while ive been making some great head way with tennons i wanted to started drifting out the holes to put them in so i could get that down to a method.

So on Friday i made up a new 25mm by 3mm slot punch and a 12mm by 20mm drift.

These are the two, i made the punch up from an old chisel i started in the first year and never got round to finishing so with a little forging down i re shaped it to the new purpose. The drift is just a piece of 10 by 25mm section, regular mild steel that i forged down to size on the power hammer.

I did a few pratice holes and as i did them i changed the tools to match, my first change was i took some advice to leave the cutting edge on the end of the punch, this was just slicing though not giving great edge quality so i took that off which made it better but not great yet. So i had a talk with one of the third years, Sam and he suggested i take the sharp corners off the tools so it wants to push rather than cut as it goes in. After that it started going through quite nice, i still think there is room for improvement so i will have to talk it over with Adrian tommorow see his thoughts.