Mini Forge Tool Kit

The first thing for a mini-forge is to choose a room. For obvious reasons, it will not work to equip such a “hot” workshop in an apartment. You need a separate room, a barn, it is possible to use a corner in the garage.

Important! Don’t forget about fire safety rules! You will have to work with fire, so the forge, of course, should be located away from gas equipment, a boiler room, flammable buildings, a firebox.

The heart of the mini-forge will be the forge, we described in detail how to make it with our own hands, so we will not dwell on this moment. Often, home craftsmen use mobile, portable braziers, you just need to take care of the availability of fuel, charcoal will be the best option, as well as good traction. To maintain the heat, you can use traditional furs or a building hair dryer (heat gun).

The second indispensable attribute of every forge is the anvil. Of course, you can buy a ready-made version. However, a small anvil weighing five kilograms will cost at least three thousand rubles, and for a new instrument weighing 20 kg will have to pay about 10 thousand rubles. So the pleasure is not cheap.

We offer two options for saving on the anvil:

1. Visit the nearest secondary metal and purchase a used anvil, which is sold by the weight of the metal. It will turn out significantly cheaper.
2. Do it yourself from a piece of rail. Of course, you have to tinker with the rail to make it a really comfortable anvil. But on the other hand, material costs will be sharply reduced.

Important! The anvil must be securely fixed on a stand, it can become an ordinary, fairly large wooden block.

Hammers are in third place in the mini-forge. We wrote that there are many types of hammers; a forge will require a heavy hammer to flatten the molten metal, and small tools for more delicate work..

The handbrake will become the main working tool. This is a hammer weighing from 500 g to 2 kg. A heavier sledgehammer is also needed, which often has to work with both hands, securing a future workpiece to the anvil or using someone’s help.

Among the other tools for the mini-forge, we separately highlight such a necessary item as pliers. You won’t hold the hot metal with your bare hands, will you? Pliers are required to provide a strong clamping of the future product during forging. Pliers can have semicircular, flat and tubular sponges, they are used depending on the type of product you are working with.

The smithy also uses crimps, which help to give the product the shape of an ellipse, cylinder, and make edges. The lower part of the crimps is fixed in a special hole in the anvil, the upper part has a wooden handle for work. The ironer smoothes the surface of the product, therefore its lower working part is sanded.

You will also need liners to create various depressions, grooves, and so on. They can have the most different shapes and sizes, the assortment is large. To create holes, a punch is used, which is also available in a variety of formats. Often blacksmiths make these tools themselves, knowing what they will have to work with in the future..

What else is indispensable in a mini-smithy – without a welding machine, a grinder, that is, an angle grinder, and a chisel. We admit that this is not a complete list of tools that will be required in a forge. In the process of work, mastering the skill of hot forging, blacksmiths constantly replenish their arsenal, often making their own tools to create artistic forged masterpieces.