Building A Wood Framed Coal Forge

welcome back to Waters Iron Works we're out on open shop night at Pioneer Farms tonight and I'm going to be building a new Forge it'll be very similar to this one super simple construction couple four by fours a frame to hold them together some angle iron and then a big steel plate cut a hole in it fire pot drops right into it an incredibly easy forage for anyone to build if you're looking at building your first Forge I've got all my supplies here and in the back of the shop I need to cut some wood which is not the most exciting so I'm going to do that and once we've got the wood cut and ready to go we'll start assembling this thing see you in a minute so if you're curious I am cutting these to about 29 inches that's a good height for sort of all kinds of different people low enough that it's easy to work with high enough that you're up off the ground foreign we've got all of our wood cut and at this point it's pretty much just screwing everything together long boards go on the side well the front and the back short boards go on the sides you can use the boards themselves to make these measurements you probably want to put this three four five inches something like that up from the bottom the ones on the top should go a little bit above the top the one I'm making I forgot to measure long enough for an overlap here so I'm going to have a little knock on each corner it's probably nicer if you do measure those front boards a little bit long so that you don't have a gap right there where we've got the two long bottoms on we're going to start screwing on the tops what we want to do here is make sure that the tops come level with the top of our angle iron so a piece of angle iron is uh at least this one is an inch and three quarters High so I'm gonna overlap the top of the board by inch and three quarters that way this is hidden from view once the forge is put together so let's mark this the angle iron is actually an inch and a half tall I've got five and a half inch long boards so we'll mark off four inches and four inches foreign overhang here we've got our two uh front and backs done next we're going to flip this over short pieces go on the side nice and easy just line them up with what we've already got on here [Music] I thought I had more angle iron in the uh Steel Supply out back but it looks like I'm out so I'm not going to put it in tonight what you're going to do though is just cut your angle iron to size the angle iron isn't screwed in it just sits in here on each side it provides a little bit of extra support is it strictly necessary probably not from a structure standpoint but it will keep hot coals right off the wood and that is something that you want to do so I'm going to finish this up minus the angle iron but the next step would be putting the angle iron in so the situation we're in is I was a little too precise with my measurements and I forgot that angle iron as thickness also um and now that we're in the situation I actually remember being in this exact situation when we built these in the past and forgot to do this so I'm popping off the sides I'll screw them back in with the piece of angle iron in place so that this will all sit down there properly um I'll give you a quick cut through that but I don't think you guys need to see all the details there pretty easy I've got a little bit more adjusting to do I'm going to do that once I've got the angle iron I can drop them in just unscrew it a little bit screw it back together I think that's going to be a lot easier so when you're putting yours together cut each board a little bit longer make sure you've got your angle iron um you might put the bottom on put the angle iron on the top and then screw it all together once you've got that once you do get it put together with your angle iron in there so you're not burning the wood then you want to position your fire pot more or less in the center and we're going to come around here draw a circle Trace that line of where I want this to go oh and now I need to cut this circle out this is going to get noisy I'm going to do it with an angle grinder my goal is to you know I need a inch Gap or something here for this to sit on so I'm going to come in just the little ways like that and cut that section out with an angle grinder then we can drop this in one thing to note is my handle here is not going to come out beyond the piece of wood I find these to be a little bit short so I'll go in and Forge another one that's going to be long enough that I can swivel it from out here um I could obviously put this closer to the edge but that starts getting pretty close to the wood I'd rather keep things a little bit more centered give me a little bit more room as I've got coal and I've got my fire going so we'll just forge a longer handle there but let's get this cut out and drop this bad boy in a lot of hand cutting without power tools there we go we need we need this piece here so this is going to come on screw in here for our air holes let me go find some bolts a couple videos ago maybe last video I talked to you guys about the Centaur forged fire pots I mentioned that they didn't come with I think an easy to use little connector so I have fabbed one up here you'll notice it has three screw holes in it three bolt holes and this one has four but this other one I bought at the same time they missed a bolt hole so when I was making my template it only got three holes in it this one will actually wind up going on here then so it matches um this fire pot [Music] we're out of time for this evening and I don't have the angle iron pieces I need so we're gonna finish filming this next week at next week's open shop welcome to week two of the forge build uh we just got the angle iron in um you need to measure it and cut it rather than doing any fancy work with the tape measure I'm just going to stick it in there and Eyeball it and we'll cut it a little a little short here so I think I need two pieces about that length let's go put it on the chop saw and cut it if I remember it correctly from last week we've got it the right length this ways but not this ways so I need to unscrew that side open it up a little bit screw it back in same thing on this side let's try and get it right this time let me grab the angle iron again and let's measure off what we need for these sides foreign [Music] we've got all the angle iron in um let's toss the piece of sheet steel back in and make sure it all fits the outside um foreign foreign centimeter too short or something I think here played in angle iron in time to put the uh fire pup back in I mentioned we were going to swap out this clinker breaker for a longer one so I'm going to put this back together with the clinker breaker out of it foreign we're gonna have to slide that in and then attach the clinker breaker once it's in there since we want the bar to stick out from the wood all right that goes in there are screw holes up here if you wanted to mount it um completely unnecessary in my opinion it's not going to move around that much I really never noticed and move around especially once a bunch of coal and grit and stuff gets in there you're going to be fine so let's attach our hose attachment next up we've got to drill the hole um this can be a little tricky I tend to just eyeball it and I've had pretty good luck with it um what I will do a lot of times is compare it to one of our other forges to see how high it is up there so let's do that I'm gonna jump in do you mind if I look at your Forge for one second so I know we're shooting for about that high up and then I can wedge this into the bottom to make sure that I'm lined up vertically so I think right there is about where we want [Music] look at that foreign this can be a little tricky here I mean everything all nice and lined up go let's clamp this down nice and tight foreign here we go all right clinker Baker is installed and working you got a blower it sounds like it's a little uh a little loud a little knocky it may just be that we've got no oil in there let me grab a wire wheel I'm going to clean this off a little bit we'll open it up we'll see if it's got oil in it if it doesn't we'll put some oil in it see if it runs a little bit smoother so we've got two screws here which will take the top off this one is actually nice it's got a little oil inserter but I just want to check out I think I can get it open what is going on inside that looks like it is pretty well empty so let's grab some oil and dump it in there foreign so it's still pretty noisy it sounds like the fan is rattling in there which may mean it needs to be adjusted on the set screw I'm not going to worry about that for right now we've got the forge in place um we've got the blower pretty much where we want it might have to do a little bit of work on this here in a minute let's hook them up so I've got um some dryer venting this is really not a great material for it but I've got it so I'm going to use it I've got some duct tape also we'll just duct tape it on to both sides and call it good enough for right now ideally something that doesn't fall as part as easily as this is a good choice and having a clamp or something that you're holding it on there with is also a better choice but to work with what you've got right foreign that's going to get so hot close to the fire the glue on and the duct tape is going to melt you've never really had that problem with it if anything the problem we've had more frequently is it gets too cold out here sometimes and the duct tape will get brittle so if you're trying to do a forge repair sub zero degrees duct tape gets hard to work with so I can definitely feel I don't know if you can see that on the video or not but there's definitely some good airflow coming through there let me uh let me grab some coal this bucket holds about a bag of coal which is about 50 pounds of coal one of the reasons I like making these forges so big is it lets you keep a lot of coal on there so you can push it in from the edges Coke it up try and keep a nice clean fire all right we're just going to steal a little bit of fire from our neighbor there we go all right would you bring me a color rake so we've got all fresh coal here it is going to smoke like crazy when we first get this fire going this is flammable though foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] blower needs some work that's terrible um but we've got a fire we can see it is clearly up and running so two weeks four hours or something like that could have been less definitely and we've got a new Forge up and running so hopefully this was informative but this is a great Forge design if you're looking at building a forge you don't need to move around a lot I love these forges they work really well we have a lot of new students that we teach on these and they have a great time with them as well the extra space really helps out so thank you very much for joining me and we'll see you again soon

Channel: Waters Ironworks

Views: 6,585

Keywords: blacksmith, blacksmithing, forge, forging, pionner farms, austin, texas, living history, building a forge, blacksmithing for beginners

Id: -Ja6_HBFyx4

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2022