finished 1 piece bit

I finished the 1 piece bit yesterday.

I learned a lot on this one, and glad I built it. It gives me a lot of ideas for using larger diameter steel and will probably build one out of damascus in the near future.
 Starting out simple saves a lot of time in the long run, I now know some things not to do, and some things I should have done. When I need to do a fancy one, I've got a little less chance of adding to my scrap pile.

1 piece bit

I have been wanting to try one of these for quite a while. It hasn't taken me as long as I thought it would. This is my first one piece bit, I know no one that has made one, but have a neighbor thats father made one when he was a kid, and he says I'm going about it like he did.

The start. I bent the low port mouth piece into a 2ft. long 1/2in. rod. Then split the bar down the middle until it will make a 5 1/4 in. wide mouth piece.

I then split the 4 ends to make my rings, and hammered them to a 90 degree angle. The hardest part of this is keeping things anywhere close to square. there is lots of things pointed in lots of different directions, and they are all hot.

Hammering the rings in. I wished I could have gotten some hot and hammering photos, but I only have 2 hands.
I like this old time looking stuff, and spend a lot of time looking for it on the rare times I venture away from the ranch. Building one of these makes me appreciate what the old timers went through before "lectricty".