Projects For Metal working class
Hello Everyone, first post here.
I need your help. Last march I became a university teacher of metallurgy on an engineering faculty on Spain. One of the classes I wil be teaching will be an open Blacksmithing course as I am the most dirty handed professor on the rooster.
The class will have around 18 students that I plan on dividing in groups of 6. They will have one weekly class of 6 hours on mondays for the two semesters, which equals to around 200 hours of work. The students are usaually well motivated to work with their hands but the harsh truth is they usally never seen anything more complex than a handrill in their previous years.
My workshop is a foundry, we are able to melt aluminum, bronzes and other low temperature alloys. We also have a small power hammer with a weight of around one kilo, not very powerful but saves some energy. We have also a couple of forges and anvils, a lathe, heat treat furnaces and general tooling.
I plan on starting the first three weeks, around 20 hours of work, with some first-contact sessions, one group will be casting some rings, other one forging and another one welding. And they rotate trough every method for the following weeks.
After that I will asign some group projects for them. My intention was to make them build machines that we could use in the upcoming years.
What Kind of machine or piece of equipment would you propose for projects like this?
I was think a belt grinder for one group, a natural gas powered small casting furnace and a rapier sword for the last one. The rapier will be a reproduction of the Industrial Engineer sword. A cool piece of spanish traditions, now lost in time, but i think I would be cool to make one by casting and forgin to flex on the management departments.
I also will let them make their own personal porjects such as knives, bracelets or belt buckles on top of making them build smaller tools for the workshop, such as anvil dies, tongs or hammers.
Thank you for your ideas, all of them are more than welcome!