Good news about my roof

I'm finally gong to get my workshop roof fixed this weekend and its only going to cost me half of what I was quoted. After coming to an agreement with my landlord its all go now and I'm very happy now as we can move forward to setting up the rest of the workshop !..!,

Guitar Hooks done!!

I've finally cut brushed and lacquered them and now they are fully finished and now sat in a Heron music store. They have agreed to have a poster of my other work and details so that others can contact me and have their own personalized gear. I'm very pleased with the final outcome and they look amazing with a guitar on them, I think they speak for themselves !..!,

An anvil at last!!!

Today is the day My anvil arrived at my workshop, now that I have one I feel more like a blacksmith. As you can see from the photos its a big one too. I'm going to be working even harder over the weekend to try and get as much up and running as possible. I'm now one step closer to being fully set up !..!,

Well it's been a productive day

It's been a long and productive day for me and I've ticked a lot off my list. After spending the whole morning on the phone to a lot of different people trying to get myself in better position to set up my workshop quicker. After lunch I visited my local reclamation yard to see if they had a materials I could use to make a work bench but instead I found one of the most important pieces of equipment that I was missing an Anvil!!! So now I'm having the anvil delivered to my workshop Friday morning, I'm very happy because its been very rare to come across an anvil in Bristol almost as rare as Blacksmiths in Bristol hahaha!!!

I had asked help from Fred Brodnax A blacksmith who had helped me before when my Microphone stand to give me a hand tweaking my guitar hooks with his gas torch. It only took around half an hour to fully tweak both the hooks so that they both sit nice and flat and now they look a lot better.

The only thing left to do now is clean them up with a cut brush, apply the lacquer finish and heat shrink the rubber on to the hooks which I will start tomorrow. I hope to deliver them to their new owner in the next couple of day and see a beautiful guitar framed on it !..!,   

  

Problems and solutions

Now that I have most of my equipment in my workshop I've been looking in to having new electrics sorted so I can have news lights installed and power all around the workshop. However I noticed a huge damp at the back of workshop coming from the roof, after speaking with my landlord he said he knew of the problem and said I could have ago at fixing it so I had a roofer over to have a look and the problem is much worse then I could have imagined! I have a swimming pool on my roof with no drainage so the weight of it is slowly taking the roof with it and will need a whole new roof costing £1.500!!!!! So today I'm going to confront my Landlord with this problem and hope we can come to a fair solution that doesn't involve me paying for the whole new roof.

I also have the chance of earning some money straight away on a couple of jobs one of which is a forging related job the other is mainly fabrication but could bring in £3.000 which would pay rent for over two year alone. I've got to start somewhere and doing some fabrication work every now and again will bring in some money and keep my workshop up and running. Fingers crossed I get the job !..!,     

Move in day and catch up

I know I've not updated my Blog for about a week and I apologize for that but I've had what would be called a bad week to most people but we'll move away from that and focus on the good stuff that's happened this week. First of all the third and final day I was in mid Wales went very well, me and nick managed to complete two and a half out of the three hooks that I had planned, which I was very pleased with. the two which I completed do need some extra tweaking with a gas torch. So when I got back to Bristol I got back in contact with Fred Brodnax a blacksmith who had helped me before when my microphone stand needed an extra rivet and some TLC. I took my portfolio with me to show him as well as one of the hooks I made, Fred really liked my portfolio and thought my forging skills were very good and was willing to offer his help with finishing the last of the two guitar hooks. So I look forward to hopefully getting these hooks ready to be cleaned and have the heat shrink rubber applied to them so they can go to their new owners.     

Now today was my move in day to my new workshop and we had a field day picking up all my equipment  from different locations in to a van which I hired to my workshop. As you can see from the photos it may not look like much at the moment but give me a month and I hope to have a workshop fit for any blacksmith. There's a lot of work to do to get this all up and running and its not going to be easy but I've come this far so lets finish this !..!,