Carpentry or joinery is, of course, good. Wood processing is traditional for Russia. But we want to talk about metal. More precisely, about the forging of metal. What do you need to do forging? The first is the forge.
You might be surprised, but the forge is the easiest to set up a forge..
The task of the forge is to heat a piece of metal to a temperature that will allow it to be crumpled without destruction.
The horn is, of course, fire. You can burn gas, liquid fuel, fuel oil or crude oil, coal and firewood. Only now the firewood does not give much heat until it turns into coal. Firewood can only be considered as a raw material for charcoal production, but charcoal is an excellent fuel for a furnace. Perhaps the best, but also the most expensive, although the most affordable. Charcoal for barbecues and barbecues is sold in any supermarket. So let’s stop at the coal option.
When it comes to a coal-fired furnace, there are two options: side blowing and bottom blowing. Side blowing is the best suited for charcoal, and it is also the easiest to implement. The simplest option is a hole in the ground, where air is supplied through a pipe. You can also lay out a forge made of bricks and heap it with earth..
With the help of such a forge, novice blacksmiths try their hand. A hose is inserted into the pipe, connected to the blowout hole of the vacuum cleaner.
The downside of this bugle is that you have to work while squatting, which is not very convenient. However, you can put together a box of the required height, fill it with earth and make a forge in it. But if we go this way, then it is worth doing something more fundamental. There is one more thing. The side-blowing hearth is not very suitable for coal, while the bottom-blowing hearth through the grate is more versatile in this regard. That is, a bottom-blowing furnace can operate on both charcoal and stone. But the design will be more complicated..
We need:
- steel sheet with a thickness of five millimeters about 100×100 cm;
- sheet steel 2 mm thick;
- corner 30×30;
- six fireclay bricks ШБ-8;
- LBM, popularly called “Bulgarian”;
- cleaning wheel;
- cutting wheels for cutting steel and stone;
- welding machine and electrodes;
- two wing screws (eye nut).
The horn consists of a table with a horn socket. Below, under the forge nest, there is an ash chamber where air is supplied. The table is made of steel sheet five millimeters thick. The size of the table is arbitrary, but it is more convenient when you can freely place working pincers, a poker and a scoop on it so that they are at hand. We cut off a strip 125 mm wide from a five-millimeter sheet, it will still come in handy for us, and from the remaining piece we make a table.
Diagram of a forge with a forge nest
In the middle, cut a square hole for the future forge nest. It is necessary to determine the size of the nest. A large nest will require a lot of coal. Small will not allow heating large workpieces. The depth of the nest to the grate is also important. Without going into details, let’s say that a depth of ten centimeters will be optimal, regardless of the size of the nest in terms of.
To prevent the metal from burning out, it must be lined (overlaid) with fireclay bricks. We use brick ШБ-8. Its dimensions are 250x124x65 mm. These dimensions will determine the size of the hearth nest – 12.5 cm at the grate, 25 at the top, 10 cm deep. Given the thickness of the brick, the size of the hole in the table will be 38×38 cm.
From the cut out piece we cut out a square with a side of 25 cm.In the center of the square we cut out a square hole with a side of 12 cm.We also need four plates in the shape of an isosceles trapezoid with base lengths 38 and 25 cm, a height of 12.5 cm. So the previously cut strip came in handy … Now you need to cook it all.
From two millimeter steel we roll up a square pipe with a side of 12 and a length of 20-25 cm. This will be an ash collector. In the middle of one of the walls we make a hole for the air duct. We weld a branch pipe into the hole. We use a piece of ordinary water pipe for 40.
The ash pan is closed from below with a lid. We make it with thumbscrews.
The table is ready. It remains to place it on the base or weld the legs from the corner to it. You can make a base from foam concrete blocks.
Pay attention to the opening. An air duct will pass through it.
Using a grinder with a cutting disc, cut a lining out of a brick over the stone. Be sure to use a respirator and safety goggles. And observe safety precautions when working with angle grinders.
You can connect a vacuum cleaner and try to light the forge.
First, we put wood chips and finely chopped wood. We set them on fire with a weak blow, and when the wood fires up well, we fill in the coal. Now you can increase the blow.
The vacuum cleaner can be connected not directly to the air duct of the furnace, but through a homemade air regulator. This device allows you to adjust the amount of air supplied to the furnace, that is, to reduce or increase the blowing.
Typically, a damper is installed to regulate the air supply to the duct. But blocking the flow increases the load on the vacuum cleaner motor. The vacuum cleaner is usually used an old one, and in order not to overload it, an air supply regulator is built. The air flow is not blocked, but is diverted to another duct. For this, a box with three nozzles was made. Two opposite each other – inlet from the pump and outlet to the forge. The third branch pipe, on the upper wall, is the discharge of excess air. The third branch pipe is shifted relative to the first two by the size of the hole diameter.
Inside, a plate curved at a right angle, half the length of the box. The plate can be moved from one extreme position to another using a wire rod. As far as the air supply hole in the furnace is closed, the discharge hole will open as much.
The box is closed by a lid with a pull hole.
We now have a working forge suitable for outdoor use. For protection from rain, a canopy is needed, which must be non-flammable. And the forge needs an umbrella and a pipe for collecting and removing smoke.
The umbrella is made of sheet iron two millimeters thick. Firstly, such an umbrella will last longer, and secondly, it is more difficult to cook thinner iron by manual arc welding.
For the umbrella to be as effective as possible, the slope of its walls must be at least sixty degrees to the horizon. The umbrella should be located above the hearth so that an imaginary ray directed from the point of the hearth closest to the edge, inclined outward at an angle of sixty degrees to the plane of the table, falls into the umbrella. This means that the higher the umbrella above the hearth, the larger it should be. On the other hand, the lower the umbrella is above the table, the more inconvenient it is to work. Here you must proceed from the available material and your anthropometric data.
The umbrella is supported by corner steel posts. We put a pipe on top of the umbrella, which we also weld from a steel sheet of two. The pipe must be covered with a spark arrester, which is made from a metal mesh.
If you direct the air discharged from the throttle through the air duct (the water pipe will go 1 inch) to the beginning of the chimney, you get an ejector that increases the efficiency of flue gas removal.
That’s all. Your forge is ready. Forge to health, forge like us, forge better than us!
Can anyone recommend a good DIY forge for beginner blacksmithing projects? I’m interested in getting started but I’m not sure where to begin. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!