Coal forge vs Propane forge a look at the pros and cons

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I've done a few videos lately where I've discussed my coal Forge setup people had asked me about my hood my chimney and that prompted questions about the forage itself and the fire pot and blower so I did a video on that now that has prompted questions about the pros and cons of one type of Forge versus the other type of Forge or several other types of forges as it really is so I'm going to see if I can talk a little bit today about the pros and cons of various types of forges and mostly I'm going to be discussing fuel source as opposed to construction details there are so many different details burner types blown gas forges versus aspirated gas forges with high-tech burners with low-tech burners with this insulation with that insulation with doors without doors with pre heaters without pre heaters I just can't even keep track of it myself and I'm not an expert on that so I won't really discuss all of the variations in Forge styles and the same goes for solid fuel forges like a coal Forge because there's bottom blast side blast there's riveters forges there's break room forges there's trench forges dug in the yard with simple blowers there's all sorts of primitive other options out there and sometime I would really like to cover all that but it may take a month-long tour to various people shops to see what other people have and right now that's not in my timeline I just don't have the time to do that it'd be a lot of fun though because give me an excuse to go visit a lot of different people like Smith's in the area and maybe even travel further just to see their forges that would be a an epic adventure as far as I'm concerned but not going to happen today so we're just going to talk about pros and cons and we're going to talk about the environmental issues the social issues the romantic issues the economic issues because yes those things are all real considerations when you're looking to buy a forge but first let's talk about the practical issues because that's really what it should down - it's not what it wrote comes down to an end but let's talk practicality first this is an electric resistance kill or oven or furnace however you want to call it it is one that was meant for burning out ceramic or yes ceramic flasks or lost-wax casting it gets things hot it's great for heat treating because it's very exact very precise and while you could achieve forging temperatures in it it would be agonizingly slow it might take you an hour to bring a piece up to forging heat take it to the anvil work on it put it back in here for another hour terrible as a Forge I would never even consider using electric resistance as a source for Forge Heat however electric induction heat is extremely efficient I have never used an induction for it I can't show you one I can't tell you exactly how good they are I would love to try one out so if you're a dealer of induction forges and want me to do a free review for you I'd be happy to take one off your hands okay that's not gonna happen but anyways electric induction forges have real possibility they heat very quickly very precisely I suspect they have limitations specifically in size you need a an induction coil that fits the work you're working on but I think if you can design your and make your own coils which most people do you can adapt to a lot of different kinds of work I suspect you can Forge weld in one but I've never actually talked to anybody that has so I don't know that for sure but electricity is a possibility as a Forge fuel very few people use it industry is using electricity more and more our local steel mill no longer burns coal they use electric induction processes for all of their work so it's a viable thing for the future I just don't know that it's the thing for the small home shop right now it's rather pricey and rather high-tech and would be easily damaged and I know I would ruin one but I'd like to try it anyways so electricity is a possibility for fort refute what we're really talking about probably our gas forges and solid fuel forges those are the ones that most of us are going to have access to or we're going to be able to build ourselves of the technology that many of us have in our shops so we'll talk about the gas Forge because it's sitting here right on top one of the big pluses to a gas forward we'll talk about the pros and I'll talk about some of the cons is that it's super easy to light the gas forward lights very easily a gas Forge is also very clean it does not in part any impurities into your work whereas coal can certainly do that a gas Forge you don't come in at the end of the day just filthy covered in coal dust you don't have blow your nose and get coal dust out of your sinuses which is quite real when you scratch your head after working with a coal Forge you rain coal dust all over the place gas forage is very clean keeps your shop clean keeps you clean keeps your work clean a gas forage has the advantage that you can put three four or five I sometimes have had more than a dozen pieces at a gas Forge doing production runs and it's not going to overheat them it's not going to burn them up you can set the heat be assured that that's nothing is going to get any hotter than that you can go forward your piece come back the next piece is hot ready to go you replace the first piece by the time you get to the end of the run that you've got in there the the one you replaced is hot again and you can work almost indefinitely that way very good for production work IRA Nets one reason I use a gas for it so much as I do a lot of small production runs and having that ability that I don't have to worry about destroying anything don't have to take concentrate on fire maintenance I can concentrate on foraging and don't worry about working a fire a gas forage is excellent for that gas Forge does not require a chimney or a hood in most cases depending on your local codes that might they might require that if they're going to come inspect you but most blacksmith shops don't worry about it their area enough drafty enough and you can get by with a gas Forge inside as long as it's running properly and it would be a good idea to have a low oxygen sensor and a carbon monoxide just a sensor in your shop to make sure that these things are running properly and or have a hood over the top of it so it Vince the heat out another advantage of the gas Forge this time of year is it puts out a lot of heat this thing just this really warms up this area of the shop it's better than most furnaces would be right right around the forage area and in the winter when it's cold outside a gas forages of delight to work around and another advantages are easy to come by there are lots of people making gas forges out there today you can go online you can buy these they're small enough light enough they can ship them ups there are lots of instructions out there on how to build your own lots of different options different sizes they're just very available and if you're just getting started this is a very good Forge to get started in it's got a lot less effort to start with one of these and you can concentrate on learning to forge more than concentrating on learning to maintain a fire so gas forges are wonderful for that stuff it's portable that this one's heavy and I wouldn't pick it up now that it's been running because it's going to be too hot to pick up right away but it's something that I can load up in the back of the car and I can take to somebody else's shop if I need to if they were having a workshop and we need more forges I can take this I can take a small propane tank with me and I can work in it and it's not limited to propane you can get gas forges that will run on natural gas and that's a possibility natural gas is almost always lower pressure than what we run most of these on but forges can be designed to run on the low pressure natural gas or if you have industrial natural gas it can be run at a higher pressure all those things are possible I believe it's even possible to run these on diesel fuel or biodiesel it has to be a specially designed forge that has a fuel pump and some sort of atomizer or vaporizing system to turn to to give you something that you can burn and not just squirt diesel fuel into the Forge but I have heard of people doing that and waste oil forges so those are all possibilities kind of around the gas Forge general concept I have no idea how you build some of those oil burning forges so I'm not the one to ask you'll have to hunt those down on your own if you're interested in exploring that and try to be safe because I can see those being a bigger problem than gas for this could be what are the cons to a gas Forge what what's the downside well the one downside and the reason that I sometimes don't like this particular Forge I said it was a delight to work around in the winter it is a misery to work around in the summer this thing puts out so much heat if it's 80 degrees outside it can be 120 degrees in the shop even with all the doors open and a fan blowing it is just a huge amount of heat comes off of this thing in the summer the flame front can come clear out to here there are ways to deal with that and we may cover that in another video but the heat is the main reason I don't like a gas forge in the summertime and even that today it was not all that cold out and it was kind of hot in here it's a good idea to close the chokes if you have adjustable chokes on your gas Forge so the heat doesn't damage your burner tips another disadvantage of gas Forge is the shape of the opening if you're working big odd shapes this thing may not fit in the opening actually that one will just barely but trying to do a corner for a big framework you're never going to get it both pieces in there after you weld that corner up it's not going to fit through that door you might be able to get us gasps Forge designed to do that but then you start getting into the situation where you need two three four five gas forges so that you have one for every possibility so they are not absolutely versatile gas forges sometimes don't really want to get up to welding heat that can be a real problem in some low-end gas forges most of the commercial ones that are being made now we'll reach welding heat at least at sea level if you get too high in altitude it starts getting hard for them to bring in enough oxygen to achieve what welding heat reliably and that can be a little bit of a problem the other problem is that the inside of these things and this one you can just seal all sorts of loose junk if you look close don't worry about fishing it out but the the welding flux destroys the for aligning you have to have sacrificial material in there and keep changing it or you destroy the floor of your Forge you burn all the way through it you have to replace and rebuild the forge more often gas for just one way or the other you're gonna have to realign eventually I had one that I really liked it was a super efficient Forge didn't put out this much heat into the shop kept it all in the Forge but it was very fragile and when I went full-time I found that I was having to realign that Forge way too often and I just gave up on it because it was not working for me this one's more durable this is a chilly Forge commercially made they you can go online you can buy these and they make them in several different sizes and they sell you the burners if you want to build your own Forge so that's some of the pros and cons of the gas Forge from a practicality issue like I say we're going to talk about the social economic issues here in just a little bit on all of these forges but we'll stick with practicality so the next thing to look at is the coal Forge so the coal Forge that's kind of the classic Forge most of us think of when we think of blacksmithing we see the the coal fire the open hearth and it's what we we are somewhat attracted to is blacksmiths what are the advantage of the coal fire well the number one advantage from my point of view is its open I can put odd shaped things in here we talked about doing a big frame of the corner weld if I needed to reheat that corner to adjust it after the weld was made I can get a whole big frame in here it's dictated by my length here and my width here and this is open enough that I could get a four foot square frame or bigger in here and still be able to get it out and get it to the anvil if you're doing wagon wheels you can get a wagon wheel in here full the four foot loop of a three inch wide wagon wheel you can bring up the welding heat to weld the joint to make a tire for a wagon that's possible in a coal Forge coal Forge is capable of very small heats if you're doing little delicate Forge welds you can do that McCullough forge where as the gas Forge can be awfully harsh on those little welds so lots of versatility a coal Forge will do just about anything you ever need to do in a typical blacksmith shop if you're doing specialized stuff like making anvils obviously you need something different than this kind of a Forge but for most blacksmiths making ornamental work making knives making axes making tools making pokers and bottle openers for the local craft fair doing house jewelry light fixtures things like that you can do all of that Nicole Forge it's it's got lots of options you can build different size fires in it and you can I say coal you can burn coke and you can burn charcoal and you can even burn wood it turns to charcoal just like coke turns to coal turns to coke wood will turn to charcoal but a fly you got is a lump wood you can actually make that work I wouldn't do it as a matter of everyday procedure but that you could do it and somebody comment on one of my earlier borge videos that they'd seen something about burning feed corn haven't tried it I don't know much about it but apparently that's possible there's some stuff out there on the internet you're welcome to go look for that so that's one of the big advantages to a coal Forge super versatile you can do anything you want in it one of the disadvantages is they are filthy the flux at a gas Forge creates a problem on the floor of the forge and can be kind of gooey and a coal Forge it creates clinkers and clinkers are this nasty stuff that collects at the bottom of the forge it's all the old welding flux the impurities in your coal anything that burns off your material scale or burden the tip off the fire poker it goes down in here and becomes clinker and that's a problem it's also just filthy working in a coal forward you are going to be covered in coal dust your pants are going to be black your shirts black if you're married your significant other may not let you back in the house without changing clothes first and you'll probably have to shower as soon as you go in before dinner because you're just a disgusting mess and coal is also becoming harder to find propane is easy to go find you can go to your your local propane dealer if you're in a rural area there's somebody that delivers propane and they might even bring it to you some sometimes I'll even fill bottles right at your house but that's getting harder and harder to do I have a 500-pound tank in the yard that I have filled for propane but coal I'm not so lucky and we will talk a little bit more about that at the end when we get into the social economic issues of forges but that's one of the big disadvantages these days to a coal Forge it's just hard to find good coal so those are the big things coal forges can be site blast bottom blast like this one is they can be simple things built out of rock or brick in the ground they can have blow they can have bellows they can have compressed air inlets and all of those things or options but the pros and cons remain about the same so to sum it up gas is very convenient gas is readily available gas is very clean and it is very suited for production work coal on the other hand is very versatile you could coal tar coal coke solid fuel forages do just about anything in in one of those forages the best forage work that has ever been done and the history of mankind was done in solid fuel forges all of that spectacular iron work you find in the European cathedrals all done in solid fuel forges not in gas so you can do anything in solid fuel that you want to do and it's a little bit more difficult in gas and electric conduction I don't know enough about to tell you what the complete limitations are but I think it's a lot more limited than a coal Forge would be so now's the part where we talk about some of the social and economic although I've talked a little bit about economy coal is getting more and more expensive and because coke is made from coal coke is going to get more and more expensive and more difficult to find in our area we have some very high-grade coal excellent black smithing coal and nobody's mining it anymore those mines are all developed for the CF&I steel mill in pueblo which is about 30 miles from here and it's one of the reasons the steel mill was built where it was that because of the the ready access to coal iron ore and the arkansas river for water for cooling that's why they built that mill there but they don't burn coal there anymore now you now use electric induction it's cleaner it's more efficient for them and it works for their process just fine so those coal mines don't have anybody to sell or coal to anymore so they're all closed there's not a good high grade metallurgical coking coal mine that I in Colorado anymore there's still some mines but they're they're mining heating coal and you can use heating coal you can use anthracite it's not as good you won't get the same results that won't coke as well it may be more dirty it's just not necessarily a good idea and it's worth tracking down good forage coal even if you have to have it shipped the coal that goes by here on freight trains two or three times a day there's enough coal in one of those trains to probably supply every blacksmith in the United States for the next ten years or more but it's junk it is a very low BTU coal it is very dirty it's what the power plants want they don't want that high-grade coal it will burn out their equipment they want the lower grade coal because it doesn't burn so hot so that the coal that's being mined in this area or coming through that coal actually comes out of Wyoming is a cheaper coal it's just not something I want to burn in the Forge it's not worth my trouble I value my time and I value my work and it's not worth my effort to burn that kind of junk even though you could get some results if you're making tools so I would avoid junky coal because it will have impurities that will make your steel do funky things that you can't predict and it's very bad for tool steels to have dirty coal so gas maybe a better issue there gas is cheaper natural gas that's piped into your house if you can run on that low pressure with a forge design for that it's probably the most economical way to go right now propane is pretty affordable ice by oh it's been maybe six hundred dollars twice a year to have my propane tank filled and that that would buy a lot of coal but I don't think I would get as much work done and that dollar amount of coal plus it's delivered coal I got to go get last time I bought a coal I went to one of the mines it was closing down it was an all-day trip it was a fun trip enjoyed it but it takes a full day of my time to go get one pickup truck load of coal time before that we took two days to over to Colorado's western slope because somebody there was having it brought in from back east on rail cars so we got a got a ton of coal back there and again nice trip but it took two days out of my shop time and time is money when you're running a business so coal has its issues and I think it's on its way out which is really too bad because it is such a versatile fuel and I will talk a little bit more about why I like coal in just a few minutes but I think propane is and natural gas are gonna push coal out just from from practicality and economic points of view I think that's just the way it's going to have to be however charcoal is still a viable option charcoal can be made from waste wood can be made from scrap from construction projects old pallets in our area I have to cut trees for fire mitigation because we live in a wild fire area and it is severely overgrown they logged this off back in the 70s and what came back in was brush more so than big trees and that brush is a real fire danger but it makes good charcoal and we will do videos just on charcoal production so I think for a small-scale charcoal may be both economically and practically a good solution to burning coal and it will do pretty much everything coal will do and it has some other advantages and again we're going to will talk about social issues here just real briefly the electric induction uses an incredible amount of power when you're heating but it doesn't run very much the heating cycle is relatively short compared to how much of your day you spend doing other things or you're at the anvil with that hot piece of steel so I think it's actually fairly affordable to run an electric induction Forge again I don't have one never used one never been in the same room with one and I'm looking for my opportunity to get a chance to try one out so that so there's practical and economic issues how about social issues well social issues is really getting along with your neighbors if you live in a residential neighborhood and it's typical American suburb your neighbors probably don't want to smell coal smoke they probably don't want to see a chimney on your garage and they don't want to see smoke coming out of the chimney when they're outside barbecuing on a Saturday afternoon and you're in there creating a bunch of green nasty coal smoke because you screwed up and put too much fresh coal in your fire so in that environment propane again is pretty nice they might not even know what you're running a blacksmith shop unless you tell them or unless they can hear the anvil the propane Forge might keep you out of a lot of trouble with the neighbors and that's that setting so propane can be a little bit friendlier and charcoal there again it smells like you're barbecuing it doesn't smell like a coal Forge so those charcoal may be a another good advantage to keep happy socially with your neighbors and let's we'll talk about environmental issues not everybody's worried about the environment people think it's no big deal and really as blacksmiths I think the amount of coal we burn or coke that we burn is such a small drop in the bucket it's not a big deal but if you are concerned about environmental issues then fossil fuels or something you need to think about do you want to burn fossil fuels and unfortunately that's coal it's coke it's propane it's natural gas if your electricity to run an induction for just coming from a coal-fired power plant you're still burning fossil fuels so which one pollutes less probably the either the power plant electricity or the propane natural gas is a little less polluting than then coal or coke might be now remember the coke has been burned somewhere else there's something that's discus it's clean fuel in your shop doesn't mean it was clean wherever it came from and I'm not sure how that process works to really talk about it but I know they use it and the coke is almost a waste product for a lot of industry so if that's important to you you have to consider that that brings us back to Terkel charcoal even though it does put smoke in the air and it does have some particulate emissions and it does put co2 in the air it's putting co2 in the air that is from an active carbon cycle from the trees that have been growing more recently it's trees that are less than 30 years old and the trees are going to reabsorb that carbon fossil fuels is carbon that was sequestered in the earth and has been out of the active carbon cycle for millions of years until we dug it up and burned it so one thing you're just recycling the same carbon over and over again but with coal coke propane natural gas you're bringing new carbon into the issue again it's up to you if you want to worry about that stuff as blacksmiths I think our impact is very minimal and it's not really something I'm going to lose sleep over at least not at the moment there are other bigger things to worry about so that's the environmental issue and earlier you may have heard me say romantic what are the pros and I'm not talking about your wife although if she has an opinion it might get you in hot water if you don't listen to her I'm talking about when I walk it they've been burning coal in my Forge and I walk in the shop the next morning there's this kind of funky sour old wet coal smell and I love that smell that reminds me of my first blacksmithing experiences when I watched Francis Whitaker working in his shop at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School it reminds me of taking the master class with Dan almond it reminds me of taking classes with clay Spencer and Ernie Doral it just brings back all those memories and I just really enjoy my time in the shop when I can have that little bit of coal smell and that's a real thing it may seem silly to use that as part of your your decision-making process but I do this because it's the fastest way to build things forging is not always the best oftentimes it may be I blacksmith because I like it I want to be a blacksmith I want to experience the sights the sounds the smells the textures I want to feel the heat I want born all of that and smelling the coal smoke or Terkel is a makes for more pleasurable day in the shop for me than burning propane so something to consider in the long run you have to decide for yourself you and there's going to be something that's going to make the decision very likely when you're starting out it'll be economic because it's the only thing you can get but a lot of us want that coal Forge or we want that coke forge because that's what the guy that taught us used or that's what grampa had on the farm or that's what we've seen in all the movies and that's what we see in our head and that's really what we want to do so that's something you have to decide something you have to consider in the long run you can do almost everything you need to do in a propane for it you just have to think about it and that may be caused to adapt and use a torch or a MIG welder a little bit more often than if you're working out of a coal Forge and have the ability to forge weld at the moment's notice but if we can go to charcoal or some other solid fuel maybe feed corns of good fuel I don't know I may have to try that that lots of different things to consider this has been a long ramble I hope I wasn't a rant I hope I wasn't getting preachy about environmental issues it's up to you you decide what forward you need in your shop those are just some of my thoughts on the pros and the cons and it's why I still have both a gas Forge two or three gas workers actually I'd have to look around and a coal Forge and why I would add an electric induction Forge if one ever became available and I would use whatever is appropriate at the time and that's not a bad way to go either but if you can just have one you're going to have to make it as anyways thanks for stopping by thanks realistic listening to me ramble I hope you like the video and can give it a thumbs up hope you can subscribe to the channel hope you can get out to your shop and make something enjoy your time blacksmithing have fun stay safe wear your safety glasses and we will see you later
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Channel: Black Bear Forge
Views: 140,276
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Keywords: Wondershare Filmora, gas forge, propane forge, coal forge, coke forge, charcoal forge, forge, forges, solid fuel forge, bottom blast forge, side blast forge, pros and cons, best forge, worst forge, comparison, review, forge review, forge styles, forge construction, blacksmith, blacksmithing, blacksmith shop, forge shop, black bear forge, john switzer, how to, howto, basic blacksmithing, beginner, beginning, blacksmithing for beginners, coal forges
Id: GUACTUWMvTA
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Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)
Published: Thu Jan 11 2018
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