Plate forging fuller

[Philip Davies]

If I can obtain an old spade or shovel, I like to make it into a plate. Some have sold. (We are hoping to break into the market in Japan, since this seems to the sort of thing they like for tea time) Some we have kept. I particularly like this one, which looks as though it had been buried a while.

My youngest is building a business as a food photographer and wants antique utensils, so I made him a couple of spoons, from steel forged from springs. They were old springs. But I think he would rather have nice cutlery.

The bar the fuller is made from is a shaft and was very difficult to bend, I put it in the vice and used a scaffolding tube. Then it was normalised. I welded a shank for the hardy hole. The angle wasn’t quite right and I had to cut it half through, heat it with oxy-acetylene and tap the arm round clockwise, the re-weld. Then two lugs were welded on, for each side of the bick. Again, a bit tricky to place correctly.