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Ctongs12.jpg
Ctongs13.jpg

DESCRIPTION:

These are pictures of shop built crucible tongs. Posted by Paul Dickman 
<PKDickman@aol.com>. Paul provided the following description:

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An Easy Pair of Crucible Tongs
Paul K. Dickman


I recently (last weekend) built a mud bucket and Ron Reil burner melt furnace 
and figured I'd need some tongs to lift the crucible out of there.  New ones 
cost a fortune so I endeavored to make my own.

I had made blacksmithing tongs in college but it was a long process involving 
drawing out heavy stock or drop tong welds. I felt this was too much like work 
so I worked out a simpler process for these.

The drawings are sized for a #2 clay graphite crucible and all the angles are 
pretty loose approximations. All the drawings of the forge work on the jaws are 
with the sawn edge down. The handle sketch, however, is sawn edge up.

It should be simple enough to size them to whatever crucible you have.

I started with one three foot piece of 1/4" x 1" hot rolled flat stock. Instead 
of drawing out the handles I laid out the bar for the one jaw on each end and, 
using my $200 Chinese bandsaw in the vertical mode, ripsawed the bar down the 
middle of the one inch face in a lazy "S" from just behind the hinge bulge from 
each jaw (about 6 3/4" from the ends). 

This left me with two pieces with a one inch wide bar on the end and a tapered 
handle section roughly 1/2" x 1/4".

Then I ripped down the end of the two jaws for 2 1/2" so I could split them to 
reach around the crucible.

Now for the blacksmithing

I was too lazy to drag my forge and anvil out of the shed so I used the melt 
furnace as a forge and used a big hunk of steel, I keep around for upsetting bar 
ends, for an anvil.

I used a spring fuller I made from 5/16" cold rolled round stock (see drawings) 
to fuller the spot where I was going to twist the jaws. The angle bend on the 
end of the fuller is to keep it from falling over. It still wanted to wiggle 
around so I duct taped it to the anvil.

I fullered the jaws and then split the ends over the edge of the anvil. 

Next I twisted it 90 deg at the fuller and bent the handle by placing the sawn 
edge to the anvil and hammering it down til the radiused cut was driven 
straight.

Remember, if you've never done tongs before, both halves are identical. It is 
very hard to overcome the idea that they should be mirror images

The rest of it is pretty self-explanatory from the drawings. 

It took me a little over an hour of moderately inept blacksmithing to put these 
together (including sawing, layout and setup). I was quite pleased with how 
easily and how well these went together. Heck, it took me longer to do the 
drawings. 

They are a nice sturdy pair of tongs. I'm going to try to adapt these bandsaw, 
fuller and twist tongs to other types of blacksmithing tongs. 



Paul K. Dickman