Blacksmithing for beginners - How to Design a Blacksmith Forge

hi and welcome to the first in a series of basic blacksmithing videos that I'm going to be putting out I'm hoping that this series kind of turns into a mini apprenticeship for you I really hope that this series gives you a good understanding of just the basics of what goes into being a good blacksmith you won't learn everything nobody does even on your dying day you'll be figuring out something else that you should try it or you should have done or whatever so you can forget about that idea the best you can do is to have a good working knowledge of the material that you're working with the fire that you're working it in and the animal that you're working it on once you have that everything else is like a big puzzle you just keep working different variables playing around with different ideas and just basically having fun so this series is really going to help you to get to that point and I'm going to be starting today with the Forge probably the most fundamental piece of equipment that you're going to need and if you don't have a good Forge then it's going to be really hard for you to get a leg up on the whole process I mean you can start with a claw hammer and you can use a pair of vise grips and work on a rock for an anvil but if you don't have a good Forge you're really dead the water you really can't do anything so today I'm going to be covering that topic and hopefully give you a visual of what you're trying to build when you're designing your own Forge I'm going to stay away from giving you actual plans or telling you to do this or that because building a forge is really going to depend on what you have to work with and the materials that you have to use to put it together so for example if I gave you a pattern that was totally welded and you don't have a welder well that really isn't going to give you the information you need so what I'm going to concentrate on today is the fundamentals of what makes up a good Forge and once you understand that then you can put it together with whatever you have around so the first thing that you really need to concentrate on and to really understand as far as I'm concerned is the size of the fire that you need to build because the big problem that I see today is that people get the idea that you know once you've lit eight or twelve pieces of coal and you can heat up a quarter inch rod with it then you're all right you can start foraging well that really isn't the case at all what I have here is the shape of my fire pot the shape of fire pot was pretty standard you know everybody made one that was very very similar this particular one came from the canadian forge blower company which i believe came out of Kitchener Ontario and I've had it for you know since I started I was very fortunate to find this as one of the first pieces of equipment that I ever bought it is a good fire pot and it's kind of the minimum size of fire that you were going to want to build so as I mentioned this is the fire the air supply is coming in through the center here and the two flanges that hold it into the actual forge come off the sides right here so this depth is approximately five inches and it's eight inches across the front and it's ten inches deep and it's basically : shaped it isn't exactly the shape it has kind of a radius down here but essentially this is the volume of white-hot coals that you're looking to generate in a good Forge so you can start to see how something like a brake drum forward you're something smaller is going to fall quite short of this unless you have some way of building up the walls to create that depth of coal and this is just a basic forging fire I would use this for making things and it wouldn't be a problem if I was going to try to forge weld in this fire I would need to build it up another four or five inches and dome it up quite high so what I do is I put two bricks on the side flanges and then that gives me the height that I need to dome the fire even more so I have nine of nine or ten inches of depth in this fire when I'm Forge welding or when I'm working a heavy piece of metal like a if I was reshaping a three pound or a four pound sledge into a cross peen you need a big fire for that you can't do it in a brake drum Forge you can't heat it with a torch you just don't get the quality of heat that you have in a forge with a lot of coals and that is the main thing that you really need to understand when you're putting together a forge it isn't good enough to just have the coals lit and stick a rod in and have it heat up you know that really isn't what you need when you're forging now just because I was lucky enough to find a fire pot early on to build my Forge doesn't mean that I haven't built my cher crappy forges even though I like some of the design features that I built into this Forge I really undersized the fire pot so this design really didn't perform well at all this design was the first time that I used a fire pot that just sort of plugs into the forge base and making it something that can be easily modified or improved upon and I've used that design and other forges and I really like that aspect of it but this particular fire pot really didn't perform at all because it's just way too small this fire pot is built from a short length of two by six channel iron and the sides are just too shallow to build up any kind of a bed of coals there isn't enough there to really heat up the work and the minute you turn your back on this fire it just goes out here you can see a graphic comparison between this Forge and my full-size Forge you can see how the volume just isn't there this is the fire-pot on the coral forge unit that I built for my bellows even though it appears to be roughly the same size as the first forged pot that I showed you it is significantly wider it's a full eight inches and the depth has been increased to three inches so that little bit of an increase in depth as well as the width and making the top flange is level with the top of the fire pot give you the option to build a much bigger fire put this design to make sure that they wouldn't frame didn't get too hot I made the inside frame a little bit smaller so this good air circulation around the Forge to keep the wood cold and here again even though this Forge is a great improvement on my last one and it does allow me to do all the work that I need to do what I'm demonstrating to the public the critical mass of the Forge still falls well short of what I need to do general forging work in the shop this is the last fire pot that I built and the channel section is actually made out of two heavy angle irons they're four by four inch angle irons welded together in the center and you can just barely make out that seam the size of this fire-pot are vertical and the front and back slope is just created by welding in a quarter inch piece of plate and then I use a 1/8 inch flat bar to create the flange around the top edge here you can see how I place some bricks on the side when I need to increase the depth of the fire I didn't have my cardboard model when I took these pictures but this fire pot is very close in size to my Forge it's just about an inch shallower so these bricks really do make up the difference when I need it I just want to point out that I always use straight bars as a fire grill anytime I build a fire pot I'm not a big fan of the shower drain design where you just simply drill a bunch of holes to create a fire grate and the reason for that is because these fire pots are not made with a clinker breaker or a tumbler that allows you to clean out any obstructions around the air inlet so you need to be able to reach in there with a poker and clean out anything that might be blocking the air when you're using a straight bar setup like this you're going to be able to reach into the fire with a poker and find those spaces and rake back and forth until the obstruction is cleaned out it's very hard to reach into a fire and find a series of small holes to clean out whatever you need to clean out so I find this design to be much better now these last few examples have relied heavily on being able to weld pieces together to build the fire pot but if you don't have access to that you do have other options for example if you still want to go with a steel construction you could bend it up out of a solid piece you can bolt the whole thing together using corner brackets or you know designing in flanges that can be bolted together so you know you do have options a lot of forges especially around here where there was a lot of lumbering going on the lumber camp forges were basically just a big wooden box that was filled with dirt and at the top layer they would lay in a two or three inch layer of clay that would come down and then back up and basically form the pot out of that the clay would Harden and then you know it would last the two or three seasons that they were working there and then they would move on for the air supply they would take a pipe you know larger than this but you know roughly three inches they would saw in air grates into the pipe and then at the other end and they would just block with a big wooden cork you know air supply would come in this way come up through the forge when they wanted to clean the forge out the uncorked it for a cloth over top of the air grate and then crank the blower really hard to push all this stuff and the slag and the you know the clinkers out through the end of the pipe they'd cork it back up in a way they went so you know that is by far you know the cheapest option there are a lot of forges there you know more industrial sized forges and they don't have a fire pot at all they're basically just a big flat brick table that has a high ledge and the ledge allows them to pile coal inside of that pan you know however many hundreds of pounds it takes to fill that pan and at that point the depth of the coal becomes the depth of the fire pot they would dig in the center over top of the air great start the fire and then pile the coal around at the coal is actually making the fire pot they would water down the outside to keep it under control and then you know so they would work that way just keep piling in more coal as it burnt away so you know there's an option that actually doesn't require any kind of fire fun at all it does require a good cheap supply of coal because you're going through a lot of it just you know the initial volume just to fill the fire pan but it's a workable idea when I bought my bore it came with a Buffalo forge fire pen and I bought that as well it was all part of a unit the fire pot on that had rotted away and the blacksmith had replaced it with clay and metal nothing was fastened together he just lined the whole inside of the pan with clay shaped a fire pot and then when the clay was still wet he just pressed heavy metal plates into the side to form the fire pot so you know I don't know how long it had been used that way but it was obviously a workable solution and this wasn't a lumber camp Forge this was an actual Forge in a village so this thing was being used every day and that was a solution that he used it was just clay and metal and nothing else the last thing I'm Larin discuss is the air supply again it's a very critical part to the whole fire it controls the environment within the fire and it determines the size of the fire that you can build so the standard thing of course it's just a regular hand cranked blower but there are other options I've built a fairly good forges using bathroom exhaust fans I've seen people use leaf blowers and different fans like that a lot of people have used the fan that's in an automobile because it's a 12-volt you know they hook it up to a battery and it's got the variable speed so that's a very good option as well or a workable option the important thing you're figuring out the air supply that you're using is forges want a high volume of air but very low pressure so what that does it supplies enough air to create the fire but the pressure isn't there to raise the oxidation layer up higher so the air comes in filters through all the coals gets the fire hot but you're not creating an oxidizing environment any higher than you have to so if you have a high pressure blast it's going to find the weak spot in your bed of coals and it's going to drill right through that and then create an oxidizing area right next to your work and it'll start burning up so it's going to be very very hard to keep a very dense mass of coals in your fire pot and that's very very important you want to keep the coals tightly packed as much as possible when you're working you don't want to create a hollow area underneath because this area right through here is going to start burning out first then you'll start seeing a black area when you look into the fire that's because there's a big Hollow that's been burnt away it had to keep pushing the coals towards the center of the fire to pack that fire tight so that the air comes in but it has to filter its way find its way through all the coals to get out you don't want to have a high pressure blast that just kind of just drills itself through the bed of coals so that's really all you need to know about the air supply I prefer a hand crank I really prefer a bellows I think that's probably my favorite method but they are bulky I have a series on building the bells that I'm using there's a lot of options so that I built it on a real wood and leather but you could do plywood and any kind of a tight woven fabric that will you know trap the air enough to create a bellows or you know I've seen people use pond liners you know you have options the size that I've described in the bellows videos is perfect for a small Forge you know so you don't need to go any bigger than that I wouldn't go much smaller but you know that creates a good volume of air and will supply a good size to fire so I hope that answers some questions and give you some stuff to think about as always if you do have any questions or want something reacquaint ear whatever just send it along you know I'm just fine-tuning this as I go I'm you know putting out the information and as things need to be modified or you know adjusted I'm just going to keep working with that so if you need more help if you want to you know discuss this further just go ahead and contact me and then we'll get it all worked out and we'll go from there so we'll see you next time you

Channel: DF - In The Shop

Views: 234,444

Keywords: blacksmithing for beginners, blacksmith, forge, wrought iron, ironwork

Id: 9IqN-mhuhQg

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2016