So I finished my first horseshoe "art" . . .

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Down a few threads, I talked about the neighbor lady whose life is about horses and who suggested I could get all the jobs I might want both doing horse trailer repairs and horseshoe "art." Experienced and wiser heads here offered numerous reasons I might want to avoid horse trailers, but said that the horseshoe art might work out and have a lot fewer downsides.So I just finished and delivered the utterly simple first artsy project, for which she provided the shoes. She is supposed to send me some photos; meanwhile, here is something very similar I found to show you (Google Images), though mine has no stars, just shoes. The ends of the shoes are pointed up rather than down so you can hang decorations, cards, whatever. I made mine with a bigger, more stable base out of four horseshoes welded as sort of a 4-leaf clover.http://www.westernshop.com/store/pro...hristmas-Tree/Oh my goodness was she ever pleased with it!! She already had picked up another Christmas tree made by some other welder, and we agreed that mine was WAAYYY better than his, ha ha!!  Of course, this has gone to my head, and I'm now referring to myself as "The Artist formerly known as," etc., etc.. If I make her another one of these things, who knows how she might respond (and she's a hottie)  .  .  .Anyway, I wanted to ask a couple of questions of you fellas who previously advised me on this horseshoe art stuff.  Do you buy new shoes (which I understand are only a couple bucks each) or clean up old shoes for this work?  The gal is able to supply me with any number of old shoes, but unless there are better methods than I used for cleaning them up, I can't see how anyone could make a dime doing this. The first problem is getting all the nails out. Some just fall out, but several in each shoe do not.  With a shoe turned over and a cutoff blade in my 4 1/2" side-grinder, I sawed off the exposed nails flush with the shoe. With a hammer and a small pin-punch (that I kept bending and straightening) I could drive out a few more nails, maybe all of them.  But I ended up with a small stack of shoes with nail-heads that would not drive out. I spread these out on the ground and got them good and hot with my pre-heater (actually weed-burner) propane torch, then quenched them. After that I was able to drive out the remaining nails. But the whole process took about an hour to de-nail two dozen shoes .  .  .  which still needed cleaning.I took the pail of shoes to my auto machine shop and borrowed the use of their glass-bead-blaster. Parts of the shoes lean easily, but they have a groove with holes for the nails, and that is full of impacted old grass and rust and poop that can be quite slow to blast clean.  So add another hour into the shoes.All glass-beaded, the shoes look good. With this very simple design I could lay the shoes out, upside down so I could hide the beads in back, on my small welding table. To avoid distortion, I laid a heavy bar, clamped down to the table at both ends, across the shoes one row at a time for welding. This adds more time expended, but I thought it might be quicker than trying to hammer-straighten any bends in an unwieldy finished part.  So it came out fine.  But a typical selling price for something about like this item seems to be about $60-65. I just did this as a no-charge favor to a neighbor, but done the way I did it, it would have been about $12/hour work, i.e. a hobby, and I don't need more hobbies (and my personal opinion of most of the horseshoe art I've seen including my Christmas tree is that it looks like the kind of stuff that will be found in yard sales for two bucks in a few years).Comments, anybody?Last edited by old jupiter; 05-12-2016 at 12:31 PM.
Reply:Some people won't care if the shoe is new or used.  Others will gravitate towards the 'repurposed,' 'recycled,' or 'fancy patina' that a used shoe will offer.  I don't say this with alot of experience, I'm just someone who has started messing with horseshoes and noticed this.
Reply:old Jupiter,Nothing wrong with mining the horsey set for their cash by selling them horse related crafty stuff.  In fact that's probably a better business model than concentrating on fixing their neglected stock trailers for them.   A lot less hassle (and liability) involved for one thing.   When it comes to cleaning up old shoes for repurposing.....glass beads just aren't aggressive enough to do that in any kind of efficient manner.   A small blasting cabinet of your own running "Black Magic" grit would be the hot ticket for that.A buddy of mine cobbled together a poor man's tumbler out of an old dryer and an old rubber ATV tire that would probably work good for cleaning up old shoes for you.   He uses it for cleaning up old rusted metal parts to make artsy stuff out of.  He put's hand fulls of old fencing staples, nails and screws in it for a medium.   I've had him tumble a few things for me and it does a pretty nice job.  It's pretty good at removing mill scale and slag from flame and plasma cut parts also.   Load it up, turn it on and walk away (because it's noisy as all hell when it's running).
Reply:If you have a pressure washer, that would work great for cleaning in the groove you mentioned as well as the rest of the shoe. Washing before the heating will make it easier too, as the heat dries out and bakes/hardens the material in there. Sometimes the nail heads left in there may add a certain "personality" to the piece being made, maybe tack it in place from the backside to make sure it stays there.
Reply:If you have access to a forge, that is the best way I found to clean up used shoes. Once heated the old  nails fall out or can easily pulled out. Also get a butcher block brush sold at Anvil Brand or any farrier supply shop and brush the dirt out of the crease. Since they are hot its a good time to level them also. Im sure there are other ways also but this works good for meMM252 30AMaxstar 150STrailblazer 301gDialarc 2509100XX Hypertherm PM 30                      Milwaukee4 BaldorsKohlswa shop anvilScott truck anvilStonewell farrier rig
Reply:Just as a reminder, there is a HORSESHOE ART STICKY , http://weldingweb.com/vbb/showthread.php...hoe-art-StickyI have done and do horseshoe art. As for new or recycled shoes, it depends what I'm making. The wine holder guys that I do are NEW shoes and the snowman are recycled. Sometimes it saves grief by using new when you want all the same shape and style. My recycled ones are a variety of sizes and shapes and can make a project difficult to meet my expectations.   As for cleaning , I soak in white vinegar and use a Dremel tool to clean the groove and nail openings. A center punch works well to knock out from the backside. Look through the horseshoe sticky for some hints and ideas.
Reply:Jupiter, I second BD1's suggestion...browse over to the thread on HORSESHOE ART STICKY.  About 8 pages of stuff there.I do a lot of horseshoe art.  My method is a lot like BD1's.  With old shoes, I first soak them a few hours in water to soften the mud and horse sh!t in the grooves.  Then I cut the nails off with a diagonal plier, punch them back through the hole and then scrape out the mud and stuff with a rectangular punch and brush them with a block brush to remove most of the krud and then soak a day or two in white vinegar.  Rinse with some baking soda solution, then water, then dry.  Finally, I give them a good going over with a bench grinder wire wheel.I may have posted some pictures of the before and after somewhere here, but just in case here are some using that method.  No blasting, no heating, nothing but vinegar and punches to clean and de-rust.
Reply:I cut my nails off and punch them out as well. Clean up is with a wire brush wheel. They come out clean enough for me.Some thing else to think about with used shoes is to sort them by type, size and front and back feet. Front feet work better for most things but some tings work better for back shoes. In the photo above of the cleaned shoes, the left shoe is a front shoe and the right is a back shoe. Mixing them up just makes a project look bad to me.
Reply:I don't like to mix them either.  I sort my cleaned shoes by front and back and also cleated or not.  I try to sort by size if I have enough as well.  I hate to have to forge and hammer the cleats down flat, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do....  I don't like to grind off cleats and then smooth out the grind marks; messes up the natural worn shape...never comes out natural.To punch out nails I forge an actual prichel from spring steel, like what is used to form the holes in making a shoe from scratch.  I heat treat to about blue so it's harder than the nails and shoe, but soft enough it doesn't chip.  That way when punching out the nails from the backside, it fits the rectangular hole making punching easier.  I have an old workbench I use to clean shoes, so I drilled a 1/2" hole in one corner and place the shoe and nail I am punching out over the hole.  That way the shoe lays flat and punching is easier, nail falls into a coffee can.  Goes fast as a hot knife thru butter.Last edited by shortfuse; 05-12-2016 at 10:52 PM.
Reply:Wow! As the old tent-preachers used to say, "ASK-uh, and ye shall re-CIEVE-uh!!"  Lots of good ideas to try; maybe I can do a little business yet. I do like that big old tire used as a tumbler, and might rig one up for miscellaneous clean-up, but I have some doubts as to whether it could clean out the gooves in the shoes, which is the hard part. So far it appears that on a lot of these old shoes, the edges of the grooves have gotten rolled over, further trapping the crud. I don't think I could stand hearing that tumbler clanking a load of horseshoes hour after hour. But after a pre-soak as advised to soften up the crud, possibly the tumbler could take it from there. I'm not keen on the idea of manually digging out the grooves, but again, it might go a lot faster after a pre-soak.  I knew going in that glass-bead was not a particularly good media for this job; it made a nice finish, but was slow. Pre-soak would've helped there too. A more aggressive media like aluminum oxide or copper slag might be better. But even a cheap Harbor Freight blast cabinet of my own would run easily $350-400, charged with 50lbs of whatever media.  Might take a long time to pay for it with horseshoe art. The neighbor gal is taking my masterpiece to be auctioned off for some good cause, tonight, so maybe I'll shortly have some clue as to how much real interest there is in this stuff, how much cash they'll part with. I noticed that the local big-box store sells a tie-rack (I think) made of horseshoes for about $33;  when I picked it up to look, it turned out to be plastic!!Thanks for all the good ideas.  Did you tell me before about the horseshoe art sticky?  I completely missed that, but now I'll go check it out.Thanks again!
Reply:As I wrote that, I have been sitting in the local McDonalds, mooching off their WiFi, and one of the morning regulars came past and asked what was going on. I gave him a brief account of my horseshoe art project, and said I was asking other welders how I might prep the horseshoes faster."Simple," he said. "Get shoes from faster horses."
Reply:Back momentarily from seeing the sticky  .  .  .  you guys blow me away with your imagination  .  .  .  and that's just the first page!!!!!!
Reply:Just make stuff that you like. Make as much as you want. Pretty soon you end up with your own style and methods. The cleaning will become a lot easier for you as you get into a groove and routine. Book a spot at a flea market and sell what you can. Then tune your art toward the stuff that sells. Incorporate wood like tables and benches. Make a few lamps and bookends and watch that stuff go.
Reply:I always had used shoes available (brother is a farrier) but he lives far away now. I have a few projects and my have to actually buy some shoes.I was going to comment that I never used to clean them, just the edges where I welded them together, then cleaned the object just before painting.