I am not really certain when this article actually ran in the UMBA Journal, but the information is good so I felt I should include it here as part of the archive.

Franklyn 

             At the November 4th membership meeting, Frank Garland and I presented a brief demonstration of team striking, based upon the  "Sledge" articles we co-authored, which have been running (unendingly?) in JUMBA (This acronym sounds a little pachydermish, but I like it!).  This article serves as a footnote to the "Sledge" article regarding tools driven by the longhandles.  This revision is largely due to the fact that the article series was penned over a year ago, and since that time, new challenges have arisen and solutions found.  Central to the development of the tools used for the demo' was a deep conviction to cheap and easy production and an abiding belief that an ugly tool is beautiful if it does the job.

            At the time the article series was originally written, the tools driven by hammer when the two of us got together were usually of my manufacture and usually made from scrap steels--primarily heavy truck leaf spring.  These tools ended up relatively red-hard and within limitations water quenchable between hammer attacks(If more than an inch of a cutting edge up the tool is cherry red or hotter do not water quench.).  The primary difficulty with such tools was that while the cutting edges are relatively red-hard, after you've lowered them into a yellow hot piece of   2 1/4" hammer stock, relatively doesn't cut it.  After a short while the edge will round, erode, or evaporate, how ever you want to put it, making the work much slower and leading to more contact and more edge deterioration.  There is a point where this erosion seems to plateau, but it is well beyond the place where the tool no longer does the job efficiently.  This quandary, while hardly unknown in blacksmithdom, was one we limped along with, in the absence of anything better.  Those who attended the ABANA conference '94 and caught Paul Zimmer's demo', witnessed the old world solution--sharpening chisels between every heat.

            Enter one "Hillbilly John" to Frank's and my circle of blacksmith pals.  John, by happy coincidence, had access to an inexpensive source for H series and other hot work steels with which to bring our tools into the 20th century (To maintain the sanctity of this source I have sworn to emasculate myself with a  rusty cross pein rather than divulge its identity).  Since I am powerhammer challenged (ain't got one) Frank became the father of our new generation of tools.  Believe me, you don't even want to think about hand forging steels intended to maintain a cutting edge at a yellow heat!  Frank quickly ran up a number of chisels and punches, mostly from H11 a ferrous, tungsten-cobalt alloy which is air hardening, holds an edge at mind numbing temperatures, and behaves like a fragmentation grenade if water quenched.  In keeping with the applicable physics ("Just Tooling Around" from the "Sledge" series) Frank kept the eye slitting chisel very lightweight, so that most of the hammer's force would be used to part the iron, rather than to overcome the inertia of the tool.  Theoretically, we had a real tail kicking, eye slitting chisel.