Blacksmith Basics - Learn the Tools and Techniques to get started in Blacksmithing!

[Music] here we are again at the jail Porter blacksmith shop in Hawkes town Pennsylvania on location and we're going to discuss basic blacksmithing and what you would actually need to get started very simply into blacksmithing I've lined up on this table a number of tools that I use all the time if I would go out to an event somewhere this is what I would normally take I know it's not a lot of tools but we'll explain the uses of each one and we'll actually do the five or six processes that a blacksmith would do in doing their hot metal work so one of the most important things let's start with the what I think is the most important thing is the cross peen hammer it's about two two-and-a-half pounds in weight it has a wooden handle it has a cross peen this way sometimes they're straight this one's crossed and then face this one has some grooves cut around it came that way to me this was second hand tooled and I've obtained at one of the meets that hammer with the anvil is basically what we're going to do most of the hot metal work will get to the anvil in a minute but I wanted to go over these these specific hand tools that a blacksmith would normally have the second hammer I have I've got three here today is a rounding hammer it's round on one face it's flat on the other and it's a not a very big one about a pound and a half and it's a fair's hammer for doing horseshoes a horseshoe is to be turned on the inside of the leg that's why this is rounded on the inside you actually have a piece of bar stock like so and you would hit on the inside of the bar stock to make it curve and then it's shaped a little bit more on the anvil but that's a rounding hammer it has a wooden handle this handles been repaired because you can see the black on it it was broken at one time or cracked and I didn't really give up on the hammer handle that easily because of the handles are really kind of nice when they're worn something else about a handle if you get a brand new one and they're coated with a paint or a varnish you would like to take that off because it'll make a blister in your hand it's better to have a handle that's just basically they've got beeswax on it or bare because it won't create sweat and on the palm of your hand and give yourself a blister the third one is a ball-peen hammer not a very big one shaped on both ends once the ball one's a flat wouldn't handle the same way and that's the one that you could do leaves with and different things well you've got that the other two tools that are in the bag are these you've got a punch and a chisel and they're both made out of a fairly good steel either s 1 or s 7 or H 13 or 5160 some type of better than hot rolled steel and they're about 9 to 10 inches long and the chisel is about 3/4 of an inch wide if you make them much wider than that that you tend to take a lot more force to to cut a slot and with a handheld hammer you're limited to how much you can actually slit you know in a small period of time so this is more dedicated to the person that's going do Ren fairs or something like that the craft shows and obviously you can't take your whole shop with you to to do that kind of work another thing is to have a ruler if you get one that's like this and that'll roar with the etched lettering you won't wind up with burning all the numbers off when it gets hot calipers are very very helpful also to set your cutting size or whatever but a ruler like this it's not terribly big folding ruler with the numbers that are deeply etched into the into the metal and and darkened and then we have the proverbial monkey wrench without the handle there and then with a handle here and the reason why we've added a handle and so we can apply the a twisting force similar on both ends if you try to twist with just one hand usually your twist will go off in on one side so you can get these at the swap meet old this is a very nice one it's got a wooden handle and I just weld it on another handle and it pierced a hole so you can hang it up this is very very important to have if you're going to do a lot of twisting and a lot of people like to see twists and then you're going to get tongs tongs are unless your elements that you're heating are long enough that you can hold them like two feet sooner or later you're going to need tongs and these tongs have a a square cut in both directions so that you could hold something up right this way or on the end like so very simply these are what they call a twisted jaw Tong I made these out of Missouri with Tom Clark and URI Hoffy a number of years ago and I still have them and they work really well there they're made out of 5/16 by three-quarter material not very big but they serve the purpose for the for what we're doing light light blacksmithing or hot metal work okay now we'll move around to the anvil so you can understand a little bit more about the anvil move some of these hammers out of the way so you can you can film and actually see that a little bit better this is a London London pattern anvil and it has a pretty hole here and a hardy hole here and the two tools that you really need for an anvil is a cut off like so and a bending fork and the those two tools you notice these are crooked it's because the anvil when it was made it was drifted crooked so there's very very hard for you to find appropriate tooling to fit in your anvil when they're like this and they're marked you know I get motifs there's a cut line here actually we made these tools and they fit real well into the hardy hole they don't move around a whole lot and they only use it go in one way there's a cut here and that goes to the tail and you can see how that locks in there and that would allow you to actually bend pieces in that by locking them in and then tapping it around the rest of the anvil has a flat top and has a shelf or a bench and a horn and this one is looks like a hay button made in New York very good anvil and if you're looking at animals to buy animals there's two that you would three or four styles you can have a style this is called a London pattern anvil the square tail and a point if you if you buy a European anvil they usually are tapered in a tail and they usually don't have a step and usually the hardy holes up at this end so it's a little bit different and then you have the older animals the mouseholes the once made in England prior to the manufacturers in the United States making angles they're usually made out of wrought iron they usually are swaybacked what I mean by the by that is that the top plate is usually warped and the reason for that is that the wrought iron that supports the top plate has given way over time broad iron is fairly soft and they're made in pieces they're made usually the horn the base about here and then the the rest of this piece here and then the top plate some of them do not have a pretty whole phenom was really really old it won't have a pitcher hole but this particular amble was made in New York so you know it's probably 1920s in that area and made out of steel not wrought iron there also is one other animal that you may want to stay away from and that is the cast iron anvil they were made by Fisher and some of the other companies they're usually you can tell Fisher animal right away because it has an eagle on it and they're usually chipped up really bad on the sides and you can't repair them most ambles you can repair by welding but you can't really repair the cast iron ones that well because cast is very hard to to uh to weld so that's that's the animals and then you'll have to have a heating source to actually heat your work we have a really really nice Forge here at the jail port a blacksmith shop and the Pittsburgh area artisan blacksmith Association has given us a lot of equipment to make this shop workable we actually built this in about 2000 and the plot has come from Slippery Rock University gave us the apartment where Roy Price gave us the blower or the fan and we built the chimney and it works really really well what I like to do at this point is to show you what the tools are actually made for what process is that we would normally do as a blacksmith to do our traditional work that is really the difference between fabrication fabricating something today by cutting and grinding and welding electric welding versus forging it to shape like a piece of clay what I'm going to do first is what I think is a really a lot of fun is to do a couple of twists and the twists are very very good to see work being accomplished really quickly and it's something that you can't really do on a CNC machine or something like that and there's my dog Dixie how you doing Dix huh all right she comes down here with me periodically if I leave her at home she doesn't like that much so I try to bring her along what I want to do is a very simple twist to make a handle for something it's a piece of 3/4 by 1/8 steel and what we're going to do is we're going to heat up a section put it in a leg vise here and twist it until it falls back on itself and I'll have the material in the Forge right now hot you can see and we're going to put that in the in the anvil like this and we're going to start to twist it we're going to use our twisting fork monkey wrench we're gonna take it that far you can see that's pretty that's pretty dynamic but that's really not what we're looking for I'm gonna turn this all the way down until it closes up as a handle you'll see in a minute what that will look like come straighten this out just a tad bit and you can see what it looks like now much different than the bottom but what we want to do is turn this until it closes up so we'll heat this again you got the same thing over again it's hot and we're going to use our twisting monkey wrench and and just continue to twist and it's going to go together and create this wonderful handle which I really like it has a really nice feel this is just one section of it that you'll be able to see the difference between get our wire brush here clean this off a little bit now you can see how it is folded together and creates these little rounded dips and we can we'll go on down a little bit further and you could put a piece of handle material in that tapered if you'd like and make a really nice handle but I think it's a quite a dynamic difference between this down here and that up there just a simple twist as all it is very simple that's one of the five or six processes that a blacksmith would be able to do that can't be duplicated in today's world as far as cold metal worker fabrication they are not able to get those intricate shapes without it being hot it's something that happens to that flat material as it's being worked hot that can't be done in the other way that I know of twist can be done in solid stock square stock rectangular stock almost anything you can think of you'd be able to do and the leg vise is pretty important to have also does it allows you to do a lot of straightening and things that you can't do by holding it by in your own tongues or your hand now you can see how nice that would be for a handle you can grip that your fingers can go right into those valleys and ridges and then the end could be tapered and made a loop on we'll do that in this process will continue to do that so I didn't use a hammer on this much because I didn't have to not all work is done hammer will be on the next go-around I'm going to heat up that end and Forge that into a loop that's another advantage we have in blacksmithing is to really don't waste much material other than the scale that falls off the piece in this method we can do a push it out almost like Clank so if you don't know how to do something when you're actually doing it the first time you might want to take some clay and actually try it in clay first so you don't need to have a fire [Music] [Music] you can see that end the volume we had from the flat stock has now been tapered into into a point I'm going to do a little bit more now I'm going to turn a loop no way we could hang it up and the rest of it you could put a tapered piece up in here for the rest of your tool if you wanted to do that all I'm gonna do is is turn this it can be turned over there the edge of the anvil or it could be turned over and horn or it could be turned over the bending fork try to use all three of those so you can understand the importance of having a bending fork [Music] [Music] now we have a hook to hang it up on it needs to be moved over a little bit so tap that over that's a little more than line so if we wanted to hang that up onto something we could actually hang it up by the loop that's on the top to drift a hole in a piece of flat stock you're gonna need a punch if you make a punch about nine or ten inches long your hands high enough off the hot work it's not gonna burn your bottom of your hand so much this will get hot but is you can actually hold it and it should be tapered and this one's about a quarter inch on the end if you've got much smaller to deform because it can't withstand that kind of heat and tapers up to a but that's probably 7/8 of an inch to material we're gonna put a hole in a piece of square stock if if in fact you were a blacksmith and you needed a hole to put something in pass something through like this particular piece here a piece of round stock you'd either have to cool a piece down to drill it or you can punch a hole in it very simply which is a whole lot faster now it looks a whole much different - because the material is not discarded that you would drill out it's actually shaped out to the sides so it doesn't lose any strength and I'll do that process this is one of the disciplines that you wouldn't need to know yeah it's another discipline that would use a punch so I've got the piece of half-inch square in there and let me explain on the blackboard what we're gonna do so that you won't be too confused hopefully we've got a piece of square stock and I'm going to put a hole right here all the way through and we're going to drift that hole open so we can pass this rod we have through the square stock so I'm going to take that out of the fire and we're going to drift the hole in its really nice and hot and place it right here put the drift on top of it hopefully close to the middle now we have a hole through it and I'm going to open the hole slightly so that that piece will fit in there it's a little too small like so now having a tapered rift will allow you to have a whole lot of drill bits any size you can think of as in this tapered bit if you had a smaller piece or a bigger piece you could actually open that up even bigger and bigger and bigger to fit the piece it's going to pass through you can see how it's bulged on one side a little bit on this side not so much I didn't get a drift right in the middle it's close but whatever side was this was the weakest it moved out more we can straighten that also by putting a drift in there and pushing it back over but that's a punched hole so we have the so far we have done a twist look down a twist a taper a punched hole and we should do a few other processes and know as we go along if we're gonna use this element we should be able to know how to cut it off also so we're going to cut a piece off not with a hacksaw but with a hot cup that was the other tool that I mentioned that you need to have or should have you can either have when it goes in the anvil only goes in one way the cut goes retail or you can use a chisel we use a chisel in this case so that you can see how important that would be to have and will cut a piece of this off I've got another piece here it's almost hot so I'll use that piece to cut that off now obviously if we use a an anvil and you've got a nice nice chisel you would like not to damage the chisel on the face of the anvil or down in the anvil so I've got a block of aluminum here and that won't lay that on top of here and I cut on that I won't be damaging my chisel or the anvil so that's pretty helpful to have and you know we'll just place that up here on the top of this and and go ahead and cut a section of this off using a chisel I can rotate it and rotate it again and what that's doing for me is just creating a center to the piece so even though we're severing this off it's also refining the end of the element to be tapered later on you can see how quickly I cut that off it also has a little point in the middle so that will become the point to the taper if I wanted to taper this element out so you don't really lose a lot if you continue the process if you cut this off with a with a hot cut abrasive saw you'll have a square end on it's going to be a lot harder to form a nice taper on the end of it because you have these square shoulder that you have to deal with I'll do a little taper on this so you can see how quickly you can do a taper on half inch square stock if it's cut off properly I've got this really nice this is the right temperature right here just just about ready to give up we'll get rid of some of the deep carb off the surface I'll just elevate the back a little wee bit you see this step that little bulge here that's my target I'm gonna place that up towards me I'm gonna drive that down okay there's our point it's almost like an eel you could easily stick this right in this board I'll cool it down so don't burn the board and it's fairly sharp so that wasn't one heat I could have used the Horn of the anvil to draw that out but if I would have done that the horns so noisy much more noisy than the table we would have trouble filming but the proper weight is they actually use the horn somewhat or use the corner of the anvil I usually corner I'm going to cut that off that flat stock that we first twisted a little bit ago and then you'll maybe better understand what we can use that or if you do this what better you can do it with what you can make out of it later on I'm gonna use that the hardy to cut this off and you can see how quickly it cuts it's very very quick I don't think you can do that that quick with a hacksaw I'm going to twist down on up a little bit further and that will become let's taper that up maybe we can use that for a decorative part of this handle if I taper that out we can wrap that around whatever is going to go in that okay [Music] [Music] okay now we just tapered out that piece and if this was going to be a handle for a pair of tongs or something you would insert the tapered piece into here drive it down in when this coil case was hot and then wrapped this piece around as a as a element to decorate the end so you can see what you could use it for us many many things you could be doing pokers and broom handles and anything you want with this type of a twist which is fairly simple it's only 1/8 by 3/4 round or rectangular stock a slit hole is a little different than a punched hole a slit hole would be using a chisel and that would be utilized to pass two elements through each other that were exactly the same size more bigger can't do that in today's process either I like to do things that they can't do with the big heavy machinery today what I'm speaking of here is is if we take a piece of half-inch Square and tried to pass a piece of half-inch square through it and you drilled it or did some mechanism to to get that through there just so this piece here would be in two pieces I'm looking at this the end view this is a side view but if we slip this piece here looking at it from more of a three-dimensional viewpoint if we slip that in the middle with a that chisel I have and open this this could be open until this actually becomes rectangular the sides would come out like this and you can pass that piece through it so that's kind of unique today to have something like that and you can actually do something that you can't duplicate using a CNC machine or a milling machine or something like that I have a couple of different riffs for that I have a somewhere here in the shop I have a square drift it's nothing more than a piece of round that's been squared and tapered so that will give us the square shape after I do the slit first you do the slit or you can actually punch it and then slit it as different processes but I'm going to just basically do the simple slit in it and then I'll try to get it into the center it's really pretty important [Music] [Music] okay there's a slot through there I'm not in the senator it never happens then you get it right in the middle bit if I would plan a little bit more for this video I think you understand what we're doing and what we're going to do is is to take this piece of aluminum which I've cut a V in and slit that open a little bit more okay now you can see the slot little bit better notice how it's bolt on one side because it wasn't in the middle now if I heat the opposite side more than this side I might be able to get some of that back it's too far off center and I think the chisels a little misformed also sometimes you don't get the grind on the chisel exactly the same on both sides it it'll wander to one side and that's probably what this is more so than the other okay we've got now is performing a square hole we have as a square hole now and that square hole fits the square drift I'm going to drive it a little bit further so that it will be a little nicer it's a little it's off centered so it's very difficult to get it centered up after the after that's happened okay it's heated up again I'm gonna place it over the party hole because the preacher hole is too small for this I'm gonna try and center that so what I can do is actually put this over here and drive that down which will help Center that okay now you can see that the drifted hole is more in the center now and it can be cleaned up one more heat we'll clean that up a little bit and it's not perfect but I don't think there's too much in blacksmithing that's actually perfect but you can make some really really nice almost perfect fits using this very old process fitting one piece to the nether so pre-industrial eights thinking that's how they made everything before mass production and they made one person specific piece and then everything else matched the next piece that was made were made one at a time until the clock worked of the lock worked or whatever but they decided on one piece I'm not sure which how they did that and then after that piece was made they would make the next piece that fit to that piece and it was done one piece at a time very difficult to to mass-produce something like that but obviously the the simplicity of it is what we're trying to do theirs there's a pretty good fit square hole you know square piece almost the same in size half by half so we'll put that aside and there's one process that we really haven't done that most blacksmiths would know how to do and that is the Forge weld these rings that are hanging here arm were made in that process there there have been turned and have been lapped and forged welded together and some of them you can't hardly even tell where they were forged this lump is worried this one is you can see it's not done real well you can still see the gap each but we should know how to do that that's another process that a blacksmith would normally do we're going to do is we're going to make a link for chain and what I have is a piece of it looks like about 3/8 stock marked at about 6 inches I'm going to cut that off that's that one of those processes that we talked about a little bit ago and I'm going to grab that with my tongs to ass that off put this back in the fire and then we're going to take the hot cut out put the bending fork in and Bend a loop like so so now we have the link of the chain started got about six inches of material about three-eighths inch and we have to scarf both ends and the reason why I bent it in the loop first is because that allows me to heat both ends and scarf them at the same time and I'll show you that in the next heat we're also going to use a flux I think this is 20 you multi borax it was here so we're hoping that that's what it is it's white you can get it at the grocery store and that will allow you to reduce the scale that's on the piece so we'll weld you should have a much bigger fire to do this and it should be very clean which we have neither so we'll see how it goes we don't want to give an excuse but there are some difficulties and most of the difficulty comes in the cleanliness of the piece and the shape of the scarfs and I'll show you how to do the scarf next it's basically you put this on the corner of the table and drive it down creating this little hand and I'm going to flip it over I'm going to do the opposite side [Music] like so I don't know if you can see that but it should be a little bit offset to do that in the bending fork used to go that one's got to be I'm gonna heat that back up and I'm gonna bring these together we're gonna loop this down Bend this one over so they actually hold hands I've got the second one in here we'll cut that one off just in case that one's a little work I'm gonna two shots here Samara dicks something father and Dixie we got the second one get back to the first one and we'll continue to bring those together oops sorry about that [Music] never man Luke and we're gonna flux that loop with the borax like so that's kind of melt in the heat and create like a somewhat of a glass enclosure to the element or the link and when it does that keeps it very clean and secondly we'd like to be able to put them together so I better not close that up this is how a chain maker would do his work he would have three or four go at the same time you usually make one two one two one and then the third one is hooks the three together and then it would lay them off to the side making three three three three and three and then it would make a whole bunch of singer links and hook all those together I'm going to push this down a bit more and we're gonna put a little more flux on it because it's hot enough now that it'll really melt and we're gonna place that back in the hot spot of the fire and cover it up very important to have it covered because if it doesn't it's not covered you're getting too much oxygen to it and it won't weld because it's it oxidizes the surface and becomes dirty so cleanliness is very very important I can't stress that enough clean fire clean element and and do it fairly quick you can't really play around with it too long longer it's in there you can't bring it up fairly quickly it'll oxidize also especially if your fire is dirty which this one actually is you have to bring up to a welding heat and what I mean by welding heat is wait Heat very very hot over a couple thousand degrees and and let it soak just a second or two and then tap them together oops oops I got a dark spot there that means it's not welded if it's dark it's not welded it's weld it in the middle but it's not Wells on my ends I got a hammer I think we got lucky I think it did world I don't see a dark spots there's your welded link I'll do the second one it might even come out better this one looks okay though I think it's going to be fine we'll stick that back in there and heat that back up and then we'll shape that link so that it's looks like a link it's not oblong this is the second link and I've forged and shaped and I'm just getting the scarfs together prior to welding you should lay pretty close closer you can get them the better you are you can see what that looks like they're overlapped and then we're gonna put flux on it I'm gonna put it back in the fire okay we've got two links in the fire and one of them's already been welded one has not and I'm going to shape the first one I'm gonna heat the whole link to shape it like a link instead of it being somewhat right now it looks like this is served oblong and the weld is right here so I want to make that I want to make that link look uniform like that and we can do a lot of that with the bending fork that's why that tool is so important to have there's our oblong link I'm just gonna true that up like so if it wasn't welded at that point it would have come apart when we straightened that out it would have definitely separated so it was a good weld and that's that's basically how a chain maker would do that is if it didn't weld he would know right away that his process wasn't too good he'll throw that one up here and get the second one it should be up at welding heat almost that's needs to go a couple hundred degrees more you can see how I say that's heated okay there's a one link welded I'll clean it off a little bit a lot of guys will do it what they call an insurance weld he'll stop at that point once it's tapped together reflux and put it back in the fire and I know that this fire is really really dirty and it's not near big enough so we'll uh reheat and have the insurance weld which basically is letting it giving it time to to grow together those carbon elements carbon molecules if they're placed close enough together and heated to the right temperature will actually increase the bond in the fire without doing anything remember to if you've got a poor situation where a dirty element is to go ahead and try to have an insurance weld by doing it the second time and then go on the flat and square it up and then on the corner and if you've got a place on the inside you can't get to that's where this beggars hammer comes in really handy inside or you can use the horn you can see it's not quite formed yet but it's close got a few little divots here and there well reflux put it back in the fire and and continue to shape that welding is actually completed at that point after that first tap you notice the spray of sparks that's the surface D carb being moved out of the way by the hammer blow just sort of fluid on the surface but it's not it's not a a well that is the same as arc welding we're actually melting the metal this is called pressure welding it's just a little bit different the concept is different and processes is very very old I'm gonna use the horn this time to shape that inside loop and we'd like to make that loop shaped I [Music] always like the bending fortress it seems that cannot better for me use that gives the enzyme less you get a more uniform diameter because one size [Music] most people would not fool with it this much because they would not want it to come apart however I'm not sure I care whether does or doesn't I'd like it to stay together but I want to make sure that you understand that it is definitely welded because you would not be able to smash these around if it wasn't welded it will come apart and guaranteed and with the fire we have boy we were lucky I think that it didn't come apart but you can see there's two two links in a fairly short period of time and that one's still pretty warm and what we would do now is is it take two links put them together like that this would be turned in a loop these would be held back out of the way with a coat hanger like so and it would be welded this this one would be welded so you'd have three links together and they would be laid on the floor and it made three more and three more and three more and then they would also be connected together with downlink so it's a it's a I think most of them done three at a time but maybe they did more I don't know but that's that's an opinion I guess I would say from what I've seen so there's our welded forged welded links pressure welded links so the process that we have so far and that's most of the ones that you would need to know is first we have a twist a real nice flat twist we have a tapered shaped end and also have another tapered shaped end we had to cut these off so that was a hot cut we have another shaped round stock forged weld together two of those and a punched hole a punched hole here which has been deformed because I hit it and a square hole slip drifted so in a short period of time in this tape we hope you can understand a little bit about the disciplines what I normally do is try to use at least one or two disciplines in each one of my pieces and usually it winds up to be all of them to shape the piece and that really gives it a much different look than if it was fabricating I hope you had fun today I hope you enjoy this DVD or CD tape and and and learn something from it just whatever I've done I wanted to share with you that process the process that I like I like that I like to color the metal I like the way it looks I like the the process of doing the work that's why I wanted to be my name is Bob Rupert if you didn't get that to begin and this is from Hookes town Pennsylvania at the jail Porter blacksmith shop [Music] well here we are back in the general Porter blacksmith shop this morning with my dog Dixie and Jim mechanic and we're going to finish the film that we started in April the beginning of April we we did a a basic blacksmithing DVD that we didn't finish since you've viewed that DVD at this point we want to explain one portion of that that we did not cover and that portion is the fire and I know that having viewed that DVD from beginning to end that you're going to be curious about how do we get the metal hot and what method are we going to use today we're going to talk about a coal Forge and we're going to show you exactly what happens in the Forge we're also going to show you how to start to the coal and and how to heat the metal so I'm going to go to the black board here and explain what we're going to do in a minute basically in a coal Forge we have a fan which you see here it can be in form of a bellows it can be a form of electric or it can be hand operated it's going to force air through a tube and the tube is going to wind up in a Twitter it's a duck's nest at the bottom of your coal Forge and usually a clinker breaker there and a method of dumping the ash out of this area here once it's burnt called the ice dump above that you'll see call and coke piled up in the Twitter and then the top of the Forge in this diagram where we'd like to place our element to be heated would be right in here it's what they call the neutral zone it's an Sun where there's not a lot of oxygen because the oxygen as the air comes in it gets consumed by the carbon in the coal and actually starts the the heating process in this area here so if you stick your element in like so you're gonna get this area down in here which is going to scale your steel it could burn it off it's got a lot of cold air blast on it and it's not going to be heated properly so my suggestion is is to put it in this area here the neutral zone or slightly above which would be a little more carbon content but if you don't cover it with coal you're gonna wind up with a red hot element and it's going to be very hard to forge because in that area up here you're starting to get oxygen from the outside migrating into that area so here's where it needs to be this is where it needs to be placed and you also see some representations of heat that coal will obtain and I'm talking about bituminous coal not anthracite bituminous there's lignite first there's semi bituminous then there's bituminous and then anthracite and The Associated temperatures are anthracite would give you the most temperature but it doesn't cook and that's what really what you're looking for is a cooking coal without whoa ash low-sulfur below 1% and then the forging ranges you have 1450 which is about where it's starting to change colors 1800s in eighteen seventeen eighteen nineteen hundred is a forging range for most steals your 2300 is where you it's going to basically be able to forge wallet together and if you get the 2500 you're probably going to have a lot of sparks and you're gonna lose your piece especially if it's small in diameter or small in volume so there you have some heat ranges that you're going to be looking for and using bituminous coal and the and the method of actually heating it you know in a coal Forge so now we're going to move over to the Forge and we're going to extract what was left from the previous making of this video and we're gonna I'm gonna identify what you're going to find in a forge after it's been put out how you obtained these temperatures is basically where you're going to place the element and how much air you're going to give it so the more air you give it and the more coal is consumed in in your burn is where your temperature is going to come from if you place the the element right where I'm telling you in line with this it's going to be what we consider very very hot if you go out on the outer perimeters out in here or out in here where you may have wet calls stacked up being cooked as we make as we make our fire it won't be near as hot out here it's also controlled by the air blast the more we crank on this the more airs been given the more fuel it's going to consume and most blacksmiths are very careful about how they consume their coal because it's you know it's fairly expensive now you know over a hundred dollars a ton in some places a couple thousand dollars a ton depends on never than San Francisco or somewhere else where we're very fortunate because we're in Pennsylvania and West Virginia clothes and we have a pretty good supply of coal but in some areas that's not it that is really not the case coal is fairly expensive and so you have to be really careful about you know how and how big your fire is going to be and how much coal you're going to consume if you have an electric blower without a gate valve to shut off the air to the blast you can burn up buckets and buckets of cold very quickly but if you're very careful using a hand blower or using a gait belt every time you pull your element out you you cut your air then the fire dies down and you don't use near as much coal you can get by on a five gallon bucket and a half a day easily but you could burn it a bucket full up in a couple hours if you're not careful so that's something to be that's something to consider when you're you know using coal or any other product is like you say how hot do you want it and how do you get it there if you make a cave fire we'll explain some of those fires as we build our fire and you'll know a little bit more about that but basically it's how long you're going to leave it in the Forge how much air you got to give it and how big the fire is going to be to obtain those different temperatures and that that's an art in itself a heater for a blacksmith is very very important a guy that knows how to heat knows what temperature knows how much air you'll learn that over time but we will try to explain that and we'll show you how to build a fire and then maybe you'll have more questions that we'll try to answer so let's move over to the Forge and will escalate what was left and I'll identify what's in there now we're in front of forge the forge this is why we left it when we made the first part of this DVD so what I'm going to do is I'm going to escalate the stuff that's left over we put the fire out we've cleared out the forge out on the outer perimeters and we need to dig what's left down in here and discover what it is I've got this real nice screen it's actually shaker from a for my foundry for doing sand casting work but I use it for this and all we're going to do is we're going to sweep up what's here and place it in that that basket we're gonna identify shake out the fines we're gonna identify what's what's left out of here usually down the bottom I know that we're going to discover some clinkers and I'll just dig those out right now so that we don't lose those there's a couple of clinkers there and we'll place the rest of the coal and coke that was left over in the green basket and I'll try to explain the impurities that's left over in here okay I've kind of cleared this back on this particular Forge it has a ball Twitter and there's a control underneath here that I can rotate that ball and shake down into the ash dump which I showed you on the board and dump that out of the bottom I've cleared the Twitter which is this one's about that deep let's see if I can explain that it's about that deep okay a lot of the forged pots are only about half that deep if you're using a rivet Forge they're only usually at 2 or 3 inches so look for a deep pot you're going to buy a new one and it'll it'll make your work go a lot easier I've cleaned this out in here and I've found a number of pieces that I'm going to explain to you what they are first off I've got some pieces of coal in lump form this is a way it comes out of the earth okay there's there's some smaller pieces that have been broken up and then this this would lay like this you can see the lines going this way and there would be roof coal there would be this coal and then there would be bottom coal and this can be broke up and most of the coats you find will be broken up into bits like this or smaller you can buy it in eggs shapes smaller than that you can buy it in fines but I'd like to have something about that size like nuts sighs coal if you get much smaller than that it wants to filter through where the Twitter is and the grate and you'll lose a lot of that if you have a lot of colas fines just nothing but fines you can wet that coal and cook it that way which will reduce your loss in coal now we dug out a couple of what we are calling clinkers it's mesma italic sound you'll see on here you'll see these big round pieces it's its impurities that have solidified where the air blast comes in down at the bottom of the Twitter because that's where it's the coolest the air blast comes in this stuff has been heated up in the upper portions and sand it's dripped down to the bottom of Twitter and if left long enough it'll actually shut the air off coming into the coal Forge so and you can tell what it sounds like it's metallic and sound and it looks like this and you can see what that looks like it's it's got some really unique shapes and there's another there's a couple more pieces here but they all sound kind of clinky and they just don't look to be useful now what we're trying to produce is this product which is coke and coal once it's been heated for a short period of time the volatile materials the coal gases and the tars will burn out and it'll create this structure that's kind of like glued together and it'll burn very very clean and very very hot this is what you want especially if you're making knives or anything with tool steel you want to use coke coal that's been previously burned and quenched with water and and you have a good supply of that so that's what coke is it's very light and coal is analyzed what they call a button number there's button number says go from 1 to 10 and it's actually the size of a coal lump once it's heated how far will actually swell up and the ash and all the carbon contents and the heating volumes that it will produce is all developed around what they call a cold button number so if this was like like a number 10 this would swell up almost 10 times its size once it's heated and create this very light structure and very very clean and burning the fire won't be yellow it'll be like a almost like a blue-white color so that's what we're looking for is this product right here and we make the coke as we use our fire the cook is made on the outside edge areas of the forge and we like to start your Forge with some of this leftover that's why when we're done we'll try to put this out and when you come back to make your next fire you use that to start the next one that way you don't have a lot of smoke in your shop and and you won't you know create a lot of smoke outside and people won't be unhappy with you if you do it that way and a lot of shops don't have a lot of ventilation and you've always always seen a lot of the old blacksmith's pictures of the blacksmith's face is always black and it's very hard on yourself as long somewhat now you're breathing that in so the the best method is to actually pre-heat the chimney with a little bit of paper to eliminate that smoke in your shop now Jim says to ask the question about can you buy coke yes you can buy commercially made coke a lot of the mills lot of stumbles around here still use coke in the iron and steel industry to produce steel so it is commercially available and you want to get what they call met coke it's metallurgical grade coke and it would have be under 1% sulfur it would be very very high in BTUs and be low ash and usually you know it won't have a lot of smoke to it especially if you use coke however most of the commercially made cook for this deal is quite large it comes in blocks sometimes they're bigger than this in Coke form and it's almost impossible to break it up to what we need because it flies all over the place and it just guys bring me coke all the time from along the railroad tracks and but it's commercial grade first deal no and it doesn't work for what we're doing we're heating smaller elements they're trying to heat you know tons and tons and tons of of cast iron to be put into the steel process and it just doesn't work very well they do make smaller coke there's a place right not right down the road from here called whoreson industries that makes commercially great coke for the mills and they make smaller grades of it too so I don't know the actual conversion costs wise but if you're shipping very far you get a lot more coke weight-wise than you would in coal so it may be cheaper to do it the way if you have to ship it very far or if you're carrying a small pickup load you could carry a lot of coke that much coal would be very heavy so you're losing a lot of weight by getting ready to vol up multiple materials and if you're in town and whatnot and you and you want to burn coke and possibilities nobody's gonna question it because I'm not gonna see any smoke if you use coke but if you burn coal correctly you won't see a lot of smoke either and I'll show you how to do that to get started without making a lot of soft smoke so we've cleaned this out we've cleared that we're if you could see down if I had a mirror you can see this it's a round ball with with lines cut in and it rotates and that allows me to drop all the fines out of the out of the area and what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to take in to start the fire I'm going to take a few pieces of newspaper this is a good way to read the paper that you haven't had time to read is to take all right look so obituary sections just to see if them is not in there I make about three or four these little egg pieces and the more crumbly it is the better off you are so we're not looking to roll it up in a ball or or in a tube or inning we're just making as many folds as possible make about two or three of those and then take a few sheets of paper see there's the obit section Albert G jr. and Richard wooly anyway and this is Shane's in there today what I'm going to do is I'm going to lay that out like so and I'm going to place these couple of pieces in the center and I'm going to take a little bit of coal dust and sort of sprinkle that in here and then I'm going to take this and roll it in from the sides I'm gonna take a team or sheets and lay that out flat there's a top and a bottom of this that's the bottom place that in here you're gonna roll these in just punch this down okay you can see what that looks like there's the bottom there's the top you've got a little bit of coal dust in here we've got those three leg pieces and that should be enough to start your fire okay I'm also going to put a couple of sheets Rumpel them up and I'm going to preheat the chimney this particular forges works really really well we made this in 2000 we we designed this Lester six and myself and a few others and we actually built this it doesn't have a liner it has a much bigger opening in here than it does where it goes in so there's a what we call a thermal a thermal vacuum created right here before the fire is going to be bright burning right here and the reason why the fire is outside of the chimney is because if we're going to heat something long if you have an inside is you're going to be limited this way we can pass something through very very long and heat this way and it's what they call a side draft Forge I'm gonna take my my father's Zippo lighter i've fueled up this morning and i'm going to place a little bit of burning paper at the entrance of the forge and that's going to hopefully heat the chimney just a tad bit you'll see all of a sudden the smoke will start going then I'm going to take our are you see how it's drawn that in I'm gonna start this at the bottom get that going I'm going to set that down on top of the twitter-like so I'm going to crank the blower just a little bit I'm going to start to add the fuel you notice how the smoke is going right in we're going to do this over again and you may you may have this same difficulty in getting the fire started but I'm going to show you the same method over again but this time I'm going to use a little bit of wood and that's normally what I do I read about this this morning I thought you give that a shot let's go coal dust basically I'm going to do the same exact thing I've got the ball and place it down in here I'm going to put a few pieces of wood on top along with a couple of pine cones and then we're going to start to crank usually the wood will start after the paper and there would be it will be enough to get the coke started and you'll have a fire fairly quickly would you pay for sometimes that doesn't work out real well drill enough BTUs in the paper probably depends how much paper you would put also but usually that time is somewhat unsuccessful a lot of times you don't have enough heat to actually start the fire start the coke on fire [Music] see how it's starting to draft the chimney starting to warm and it won't take very long with that that would be drawing all that smoke up to up the chimney in a thermal vacuum setup [Music] [Music] sighing tear out the bigger pieces of coats are enough recover from the fire before place that on top and then we'll start with the green coal and and add that to the sides GZ put the hold on the center to direct the air up through [Music] this is a green coal and it's wet so what we're going to have is if I place this on top of the fire it's going to really smoke a lot I don't want that situation because our fire is still fairly small at this point you can see it's starting to read enough so what we're going to do is we're going to place this along the edges and create an area that is going to be heated from the center and that stuff that's on the outside perimeter will be heated and as it turns to Coke it won't be so smoky for us now you can see it's really starting to draft nice you can see the the flow of air the thermal vacuum being drift drifted into the to the chimney opening I'll show you what happens if you placed this on top you see how much smoke just out a little bit of green call produced I don't want to place all this green coal I want to build it up around the outside and as Jimmy explained when we first started how do you get the different temperatures from your coal this is how you get it you don't want something to be too hot you're gonna shove it through the fire into that wet zone which will keep that from overheating as it gets as it burns in this area here if we can push this together keep pushing it into the fire you see we're starting to smoke around the outside edges now that green call is actually making into going to be made into coke we have coke in the center from the last flowering of the forge and the green call around the outside edges and we can continue to build this fire up and what we can make what we consider a cave the cave is is basically a volume of coal that's been cooked up and it sort of gets real sticky and gummy it will actually sit together you can usually punch a hole in it and when you have that situation you have what they call a cave you can heat the element without having a little oxygen in you can see it's it's smoking out here only because those edges are being cooked if I would push this over top of that fire there wouldn't be enough heat to draw up the smoke into the chimney and it would become very very smoky in here sort of like what we have when we first started because it was a little slow and started so I'm going to let that cook for a few moments now I'm going to push it closer to the fire and I'll show you the results of that as we go you can see all yellow the fire is and how much smokes coming off the outer surfaces the crowd what they call crowding this into the fire but I'm not going to cover it up if you if you cover up a forge fire with green coal and stop cranking you'll create a lot of gas in that dome and about the time you make one turn of your Forge blower it's going to ignite and you're going to probably clear out all the coke into your audience so if you have a bellows and you let the gas that's being created out here back up into the bellows it can also blow the bellows apart so you're creating coke gas and that coke gas is very volatile you want to have an escape route and usually the escape route is this hole in the center until you get a lot of that gas burned off it's not very conducive to actually eating something you also notice see odd flames up it's almost at that igniting stage the yellows you see coming off in here is sulfur and that's really what you don't want this was found object cold one of the coal haulers had too much on their truck and they what they call tailgating along the road in Pennsylvania that's kind of happens quite often because the state has put up some weight scales along the route that they're traveling to see if they're overweight and a lot of the coal haulers usually are so when they find out that there's a weight station coming up one it's just been put up a temporary one they'll stop it a pull up along the road and open the tailgate to reduce their load weight so the one that goes through the skills are not overweight so when they do that we try to pick that stuff up and we bring it here because this is a non funded shop in any any commodities that we can acquire free is okay with us we'll see the you see how the gas is being ignited that if that was covered over and you let that gas buildup you know travel back through the piping back through the blast tube into the blower into the bellows and about the first time you crank it the gas is going to go in where it's hot enough to ignite and it's going to explode so you don't want that to happen so you when you when you start a green fire like this you don't want to stop pumping and cover it over if you want to do something like that you'd want to put a a piece of wood into the fire as an escape route and something you keep the fire going I'm gonna crowd this in a little bit more you can see if I scrape this off there's a section in here right now that's its coat it's you can see how it's swelled up and if you wanted to make a bunch of coke you would pull this out and actually sprinkle water on it to put it out and then you would save you keep continue to make coke until you have enough to do a certain process without having to fiddle with and see what happens if I cover it up if I punch a hole right down in the middle usually that will ignite the smoke in a moment as soon as that temperature comes up to where the gas would start to ignite but this Forge works exceptionally well if you can just see how it it draws in there's no fans or anything in the important in the chimney to draw that smoke out it's just basically the heat from the Forge trading that thermal vacuum that would be the situation if you piled all your green call up at the start if you'd have all that smoke but you wouldn't have any heat in a chimney to draw it off and you'd be it would just off the room with smoke basically so you want to add the call to the outside edges and burn it off slowly until you get it made in the coke I'm going to continue to pump here for a few moments and then we're going to break this up to see what our coke actually looks like now we've got enough coke you can see how it's burn it all on the outside now the whole outside of the mound is burning and it's going to become like a UH a gumball that's that's solidified we'll have to break it up if I had a piece of steel see if there's a piece of short piece laying back there in Iraq that I can actually heat we want to explain I'd like to explain the heating process oh that's perfect Jimmy's gonna give me a piece of this is a piece of half inch square stock and we've got that this is still quite dirty to fire right now you can see the yellowness to it but I'm going to place if you place a piece in this way not a good idea what you want to do is just lay your iron on a push down and slide it forward okay what you're trying to do is feed the Twitter with hole you want to feed the coal down to where the air is coming in and as that burns out you have to keep feeding that so it's it can become very open underneath this cave and if you don't feed it all the air is coming in from the blower it's going directly on the patient it's gonna get a lot of scale okay I'll place this piece in the fire right at this moment and we'll slid it in and push the coal down so the coal is actually feeding the twig and there's no cavity under there where the air is coming in and you can see how quickly it's heated that half inch square stock do you notice how it's red here dark here and dark here that's because I shoved it through and this end was in to the green call on this side if I want that end just to be hot I push it in that hole pushing a little bit more coke and pushing it about that far and we've got a brick here to kind of hold up this end I'll heat just the end I'll show you how you could heat different areas is that was a big question the gyms part here when he asked me how do you get those different temperatures well it's basically where it's placed in the forge and if you understood where the air is coming in and this ball you can direct the air source to the ball moves so I can direct it this way or this way we're straight up and down and you'll see that the end now is hot and it's it's cool back in here I want this end to be cooler so what I'm gonna do is push it through and I'm going to crank until I almost burned the center in half that end of still be black the piece should be covered if you don't cover your piece it will appear hot would be very hard to work so it's important to to cover up your work now a lot of people talk about overheating a piece of material not much as discussed about under heating it and usually that is what happens for the most part people are too afraid once I've put a lot of time in making something they don't want to burn it off so they they work the metal actually too cold so it's very hard to work and it's very labor-intensive and sometimes it'll actually split you know the metal is it becomes brittle work-hardened because it wasn't forged in the right range now you can see here look at the end see how red it is here but it's dark on this end because I pushed it through into the green coal and here the suction that's what's really really nice about a coal Forge is that you can heat small areas very very hot and it can be forged you can only Forge three or four inches at a time anyway with a handheld hammer so why heat an area it's two feet long unless you're just twisting pickets or something like that you basically only want to work three or four inches your animals are usually 3 to 4 or 5 inches wide and your handheld hammer is usually an inch inch and a half and the time period between a heat is fairly short especially the first part of this DVD the original concept of basic stuff it was very cold in here actually we had snow sitting up here wasn't even melting and to make nails and things like that in that condition with a small profile or small volume of Steel and it's it's like very very difficult you settle on the and once it's stone-cold so it just makes it harder to do our work a lot of people will take a in the wintertime they'll take a big block of steel and heat it up in the Forge and lay it on top the anvil and now we'll take the chill out of the anvil and make make that process go a lot smoother a lot easier now you can see how nice that is I'm going to I'm going to bring this all the way up to a real nice white heat just a little more air I've got a much cleaner fire now the yellow is starting to go away I'm starting to get a lot of blue I'm still making coke out here - still green out in here you see the smoke coming off there's very little smoke in here and most of the flaming is being drawn up if I overheat this you're gonna see a few little sparks going to appear in that center of the fire I'm done I'm trying to bring it up to that point the steel becomes very active what I call active you can almost feel it when it gets to that point it starts to have this vibration you'll see small sparks of carbon being burned off and it'll be white-hot Jim just ask the question how often do I need to add coal usually I can go about a half a day on a five gallon bucket of coal with this situation without electric blower but if your Forge welding then you know it's going to take a lot more coal because you have a much bigger fire and you're trying to create a lot more heat you can see the small wisp of sparks coming up out of the fire now and this piece is probably going to be sparking when I bring it out that's white hot it's right to the area it's almost fluid on the surface it's not burnt yet I want to actually burn it so I'm gonna place it back down in there in that little pocket trying to cover cover it up with the green call we're still making some coke on the outside that's why that and I rake this up you'll see how it yellow it gets and I can add more coal to the outside areas not on top the fire but next to the fire and that core Barris is wet it almost sticks together and we're going to push that into the fire as we go that's not going to contaminate what we're heating we're just going to make the poke out of this so actually we're doing two processes work we're heating the element while we're making coke because as the cook gets used up in this process you're gonna have to keep a turn I have a half a bucket of coal when we came and you can start to see there see the smoke coming off almost immediately often here it's we're almost not quite and you see there just a few sparks coming off it now I want to give you a little burst more burst of my overheated piece now this will be sparked when I bring it out so you'll be able to see what that looks like see it's sparking the surface is sort of scaly now and this would be very easy to forge at this point I don't know if Jimmy can pan over here I'll just take my hammer and create a little bit of a [Music] [Music] [Music] you can see in one heat how quickly you can make a point out of half in stock now that this area up here is very small if I stick it in the fire again and I'm not mindful of where that point goes it'll burn off so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna rake around to that side it's um green call you can see what it looks like now I'm gonna push this down and down and push this through and I'm going to heat the area behind that point to a real hot rip a white and the tips going to not burn off it's going to heat the mask behind the tip which will migrate out to the tip if I pull it back when I pull it out the tip will be gone it will be overheated it'll burn away you see the smoke coming off the outside the green green call BIC making into coke feeding the cold down in below the piece okay I'm gonna pull that out and you'll see that the tip see how this is almost sparking back here it is sparking the tip hasn't burned off at all it's not even it's not even that hot see how much darker it is out here now the cross-section is very small and if I stuck it into fire I'll show you how quickly you can burn that off if not placing the fire correctly you see where it is now this is the area back here is very hot you can see the smoke coming off my glove and this is black but if I stick it in only that far it will only take a few pumps to make that red because the cross-section in the volume there is very small see how quickly that heated from red starting to go black again but you can see how quickly that was heated so it's it's it's the area it's you're going to place your element in the fire and this is what we consider a coal a cave fire right at the moment I've got a little hole over here as I'm poking straight through I'm pushing the coal down below and it's it's quite hard on top okay I'll scrape this away and they'll be you'll see what what is left in there so I hope everybody understands the difficulty in starting a fire if you do a lot you'll find out that there's ways that will work for you you saw one way it didn't work you saw another way that worked very easily my suggestion is to get to get a few sticks or some pine cones use some paper rolled up the more crumbly you make it the better it is put a little bit of wood on top the paper will start to wood the wood will start to coal and the coal if you have some cook leftover will start to the green call and you wind up with a a very pleasant atmosphere in your shop where you're not breathing a lot of smoke your neighbors would be a lot happier and I hope that your Forge works as good as this one I'm gonna pull that piece back has just has been setting in there idling and you see how nice nicely heated that is and how pliable it can be you can see how how you can just change the shape of something when it's hot and when it's not it makes it more much more difficult so try to heat something at the proper at the proper temperature there's a forging range for every steel and some of them are very broad they may go from from 1450 1500 to all the way up to 2000 some steals that are very narrow you only gave you a hundred and fifty degree range of forging if you Forge above or below that you're damaging the steel especially in a lot of the design tool steels like 50 to 150 160 is pretty broad oh one is a little smaller and there's variations of tool steels with alloying elements as far as chrome chrome air hardens so if you Forge it above the fire it's going to air harden on its own you have vanadium you have titanium and all the other elements that are added to steel to make it do a certain thing it doesn't mean it's going to do what you wanted to do if you Forge it outside of its range you might as well have used something much cheaper with a wider forging range if you're gonna make knife steels and things like that stick to two two alloyed steels and one of them is 5160 truck Springs and the other one is 1085 0.85 Carbon so we'll put this piece down and let's discover what's in the forge if I dig in here and let's say I push back the green coal this is still green you see how it's still wet and getting into a crust now see that's green that's green that's dry but this is is cooked up it's hard if I dig in like so you'll see on it'll just this is what you want to do when you're done with your fire is break up the coke pull it out of the fire so actually go out very hot work very hard and then you can put that out with with a little bit of water and you want to save this for your future fire starting you can see that's Coke and see how it's swelled up and it's stuck together and like a gumball and that will go out commercial coke makers they'll have a whole boxcar of coke Colt mating the coke is actually heated in a container and the volatile materials are captured and used in the mill to heat other things and then they push this block of coke out of the coal yard out of this boxcar and it's quenched with water and that's basically what we would be doing here you would take a know if we have a quench we have a quench dipper here I don't have any water because we don't have any water here today like that we're just going to break up the fire and I want you to see what coke what you're going to have we're gonna dig down in here and there probably are some clickers but since this is fairly green there's a clinker right there now you're going to wonder well how's he know that's a clinker if you do this long enough you can pretty much figure out which ones where they're at and what it's going to look like or what it's going to sound like so I you know I've done this long enough that I'd kinda and I know what kind of call him dealing with this is not very good because it was gotten free but it does work quite well there's our clinker right there and quite a nice one I might say sometimes you can see all kind of unique things in that clip that I'll pick that up with a pair of tongs so you can get a better look at the this little Jasper but it was down at the bottom it looks like a little bunny or something but that's a clinker and that was the only clinker that I it was a couple little pieces but this was a bigger piece so as you see the the without the air the coke is now going out and we use that in the next fire starting it'll be much easier to start with that with that material than it was originally when we first started so I hope there's another small clinker right there and I didn't see anything else you know Jimmy was asked and how much coal do you add and how often do you have to do that if you're reforged welding a lot of material and using flux if you go a half a day on a pretty good sized fire you're going to actually have to stop and clear clean out the forge because if you don't your Forge wounds be kind of become almost impossible because the impurities that is in the bottom of the air supply that oxidation that patina that's being generated from those impurities is going to go right on your steel and it's going to create a surface that just won't well it can't because the surface is almost like it's all rusted it can't it can't Forge well to itself unless it's very clean and it won't get very hot because what's happening is the clinker is absorbing a lot of the heat and it won't let you get the temperature because it's it's reducing the air supply to the green coal now you can see how much cook we made there's some real nice pieces here really swelled up [Music] and stuck together and you can create a real nice cave with that that type of coke if you if you wet the your cold down along the edges you can create a lot of hydrogen gas which is uh you know quite hot too and will help the coking process it'll also reduce the amount of college you're losing in the fines it kind of sticks them together so I hope you enjoyed this morning fire starting or fire not starting and that was for your benefit is to see what will happen especially if you new at this you want to you want to not get disappointed and it didn't start the first time and go back and see what mistake he made and correct it and the second time around in the third you'll get it every time with the process she used will become second nature and and everybody would be wondering well how did you do that and don't make the mistake I see a lot of beginners is they they get a whole bunch of paper they place it in the Forge Twitter they punch put a whole bunch of wood on top of it and then they light the top of the fire you have to realize the air is coming in the bottom it's not coming in the top and when you start to blower just blows the fire out they asked to be perked from underneath Wow so from hooks Tom Pennsylvania me my Dixie dog Dixie come on over here she's sleeping she's getting older aren't you dicks and gym mechanic are here trying to explain basic blacksmithing [Music]

Channel: BenjaminNelson

Views: 662,516

Keywords: How-to, Blacksmith, blacksmithing, basics, beginner, forge, techniques, DIY, tools, anvil, tongs, chisel, punch, Twist, hot cut, slit hole, taper, punch hole, forge welding, traditional forge, coal, coke, starting, fire, heating stock, Bob Rupert, master blacksmith, instructional, DVD, feature length, how to get started in blacksmithing, J.L. Porter, smithy, Hookstown, PA, chain, link, horseshoe

Id: f1jGC97ZxfQ

Length: 123min 18sec (7398 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 22 2018