$100 Charcoal Forge...Why didn't I do this sooner?

welcome today we're going to talk about my porch talk about how I build it and how you can do this is the forge that I use some human forging pet projects I am NOT blacksmith I am NOT an expert on Forge design but I like a lot of people have you know gone online looked around found some plans modified them and sort of make them my own you can build a forge similar to this one for probably under a hundred dollars so what I use as kind of the basis for my Forge as you probably already figured out is a cheap grill this is something that I bought for twenty twenty-two dollars something like that at a store of which shall remain nameless this thing does not have real strong legs on it the design that I used use a very very light refractory material make sure that the forge you're building is built in such a way that is not going to collapse so this type allows air in that's one of the keys to making it affected forage you have to get a lot of airflow going through there and this is what I use for a blower this is obviously a hairdryer this is something that I bought really really cheap I forget maybe eleven twelve bucks something like that you can find them a little cheaper or a little bit more this has two speeds a low and a high I found that that was not enough and so I made a little this is pretty pretty pretty rough but I made a little pipe air using aluminum to connect my blow dryer I make sure you can see that okay so to connect the blow dryer to the forge and you can see from me listing this thing up that it obviously isn't very City okay I'm going to take this wool dryer out of the way I'm going to show you more or less how this works so I got a whole bunch of holes in here and that's so that as air flows in I can control the amount of air that actually gets through into the forge itself so if I back this thing way out here I got a couple holes cut the top of the pipe here and a whole bunch of holes in my in my connector and so a lot of air is escape and before it even gets in to the forge but if I want that thing to get real hot real fast and I can slide this a little further down and now you know with the blow dryer in at this end you know maybe you only have a few of these holes that are open letting air out so then a lot of air is getting down into the into the forge area itself we kind of see what this looks like inside to built up all around here on the edges it comes down to this pipe steel pipe never use galvanized for any part of this but a non galvanized steel pipe you start heating this thing up of the galvanized pipe and you're going to be having all kinds of poisonous fumes coming off of it anyway so this is my steel pipe knocked a bunch of holes in there with the with the drill and this is just to maximize the amount of airflow that's going to be coming out into this area so this material is what's called refractory there are a lot of different recipes online for how to use refractory cement plus perlite and I do have bag of perlite over here that I'll grab it's a crazy material it has all kinds of different applications but one of them is in building refractory materials so and actually they're recipes online for making your own fire bricks and a lot of them call for pearlite and refractory cement I'll link a couple of those below so you can go and check them out I used a five-gallon pail to mix it up and I can tell you that you want to mix it thick enough that you can actually you know you kind of mold it almost like a like a clay between this and see so I cut a hole in the sort of in the bottom of the grill just at one end and then I ran this pipe through to there and I tape this up really good to make sure that as I was adding the refractory cement that I didn't wind up with you know cement dripping out of there or whatever so I taped that up real good so I ran that in man and I made sure that it was exposed exposed well announced that I'd be able to get out and drill holes and and so on you know be aware that on rare occasions if something happened that didn't go quite right in there'll be a pocket of moisture in there someplace and I build up pressure and you know it can blow out the side so you start with really really low heat you know maybe put some coals in there and light up the coals and just leave it alone you know walk away and let those coals burn and let them burn out you know and then a few hours later you pile up more coals and you get those going you let them burn out and maybe the next day you throw some coals in there and you fire up the blow-dryer you get the thing running get it get it started heating up it keep your distance you some use goggles use safety gear big thick leather gloves and everything else I use regular charcoal briquettes I've also used hardwood put charcoal works fine for the projects I've been doing and then I will show you one last piece of this that some of you have if you've been watching my other videos you've seen me use this from time to time this is welded together from just scraps of metal but I had scraps of Steel turn this see the way that fits on there that just really contains the heat a little bit and also makes it a little bit more vertical and you get a little taller like that you'll get you get a little bit more heat up in here then you might have a little lower down in a in a shallower shallower coal bed and if I really want to get something hot I'll use these fire bricks okay and I'll build something like that sometimes I'll put like a little chimney in the back so so he can escape this way just add flames pouring out the front or whatever so that that's another way to trap the heat even further so there is the forge that's my design there are probably literally a thousand different designs on the web some of them people have videos they walk you through the steps some of them people have blogged it or whatever anyway there are many many many different designs but if you're like me just build one it works and start there I knew for I wanted to build a forge for probably 3 or 4 weeks before I really got down to business and did and if anything I wish I had gone sooner and gone they hadn't built it to that first experience of being able to bring metal up to temperature that you can bored something and bang the way out with the hammer and actually creating something with it this is one of the very first projects I did I made some tongs out of rebar it's not as hard as you might think to get started so then sort of the other main part of the operation is of course my splendid anvil I got this for $15 at Harbor Freight and it has worked fine it jumps around a lot because it's not very heavy and I don't really have a good very good base for but if I built a better base for it this would actually be really good animal it's a little small of course but and I have bought a replacement now that I'm going to get set up here at some point but all the projects I've done so far I've done on this anvil and I've made a lot of cool stuff so there's no reason you can't just start out small and see if you like it and see if to you it's worth making a bigger investment and if you decide it is then you know you go up from there so if you have any interest yourself in this I'd say absolutely give it a try build your own Forge and you know let me know how it goes alright thanks for joining me when you'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: FargoFX

Views: 435,845

Keywords: How to, Creative, DIY, Forging, blacksmithing, homemade, makers

Id: jDnbScHmxZQ

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017