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The math on drawing out tapers finally clicked for me
I was trying to make a bunch of bottle openers last weekend and kept ending up with tapers way too short. Looked up some old blacksmithing forum post from like 2011 about volume staying the same when you draw out steel. Worked out that if I want a 6 inch taper from 1/2 inch square stock, I need to start with almost 18 inches of material because of the volume math. Nobody ever told me that in 5 years of smithing, always just eyeballed it and wasted a ton of stock. Has anyone else found a basic math rule that totally changed how they plan a project?
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nancy27523d agoTop Commenter
That whole "volume stays the same" thing is huge, but there's another side nobody mentions. Like, that math only works if you're not burning off scale or losing material to fire. I checked my tapers once with a caliper after doing the math and still came up short because of scale loss. You gotta add a little extra, like 5 or 10 percent, just to be safe. That's the kind of thing that really changes your planning once you figure it out.
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