Smokehouse Prep: Making Log Dogs - Townsends Wilderness Homestead

Well, hello. Welcome back to the Townsend's Wilderness Homestead. I'm Brandon Oswald, the blacksmith, and it is fall. The leaves are changing. It's starting to look beautiful. We have those crisp mornings, which means it's time for some of our bigger projects, and we've got some really cool ones coming up. We're gonna start work on our smokehouse, and we were originally going to do, you know, more of a rustic frontier sort of structure. We decided to go for a post and beam structure, so that'll be really fun. One of my jobs, though, in this whole project is to make some tools. We need some extra things for it, some extra iron pieces, and one of the things that really come in handy, especially when working on these long timbers, is log dogs. These can keep it firmly in place while you make all your cuts, and you can get them accurate without the piece moving. They came in handy on the cabin. Really nice to hold the pieces in place and firm. These log dogs are the ones that we used on the cabin. They're a little bit long for our upcoming project, so that's one of the tools that I need to be working on here because we're gonna start it real soon. So, we have our fire heated up. Time to stick some metal in it, get it hot enough to work, and then we can start forging our log dogs. To make our log dogs, we are using some half-inch square solid rod. In previous videos, we did a process called upsetting, where we heat the end of it, and then we hammer it down on the anvil to get extra material on the very end of it. We want extra material back a little bit farther, so we're gonna do the same process. It's still called upsetting, only when we heat this up, we're gonna quench the first part of it before we upset. That way, we'll get our extra material right here, and we need that extra material on our bend to give a nice, strong, solid 90 degrees. If we just bent it without upsetting, we would have a little weak spot in the corner on the inside. We don't want that. Now, we don't have to upset it a great deal, just a little bit. So, we don't need a great big bulge there. We just need just a little bit. So, we have our piece in here heating up. Once we get it up to temperature, we're gonna quench just that end of it before we upset it. All right, we have our upsetting process done. Now, if you remember back in the chisel video, it was a long process. There's a lot of heating and straightening, heating and straightening. I was trying to get that perfect shelf on there. With this, I don't have to have a whole lot of extra meat, just a little bit. And we have it a little closer to the end because we want the teeth of our staples to be a little bit shorter than the other ones. So, we have both ends upset, just a little bit of extra material there. Next step is to hammer each end out into a flat point, and then we can do our 90 degree turn. So, back in the fire. So, we've got our piece here, and we have both ends hammered to a point. We have the upset right where we want our angle to be. Next step is to heat it up and hammer this over to a 90 degree angle. If it goes just a little bit acute, so a little bit more than 90 degrees over, that's fine too. It'll help it bite just a little bit better. We have our finished log dog. It's shorter than our other one, so that'll work really well for the smaller timbers that we're gonna be using on our smokehouse. Another thing that we need is a scribe, nice pointy sharp instrument, because we're gonna be doing a lot of marking and a lot of measuring. So, I'm gonna make that one really quick. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you next time.