DIY Crucible Tongs! TKOR Guides You How To Make Furnace Tongs!

Make that look smooth and post hey guys, I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop in the past when using our backyard forge We've been using these stainless steel tongs to pull things out and they are stainless steel Which means that they don't melt in the furnace? But they do get red-hot and very soft to the point that trying to pick up the crucible just makes them Bend And I'm pretty sure these things were originally designed to be used on Salad so you can see we haven't been using these for quite what they were designed for so today We're gonna see if we can build ourselves some more industrial tongs that can really take the heat of our Forge We've got some mild steel bars that we picked up at Home Depot along with some steel hardware And we're gonna try and form two pairs of tongs one pair That's designed to reach down inside the top of the forge and lift our crucible out and a second pair That's designed to grab our crucible from the side, so we can easily pour it out to be building these tongs We'll use a drill a hacksaw. We'll probably end up using the bench vise and a pair of channellocks as well first let's just sort of get a measurement idea for how long we want these tongs to be I'm not trying to make tongs that I Can operate up here just something about that long? For the most part these will work, just like a pair of scissors We'll have a hinge point in the middle and then somewhere around here We'll try and get them to twist 90 degrees so that we have the flat face pointing at the crucible We'll then take another piece of steel and bolt that on to the end In sort of a claw shape so we can really grab onto the crucible We just take some more of the steel bar beyond where my hand is and double that over. That'll give a nice handle That's easy to hold on to I will still be using the furnace gloves while I'm using these tongs, so I do want something That's easy to operate and doesn't require a ton of manual dexterity because they're pretty thick this is all very much an eye balled sort of experiment if you want longer tongs you just use maybe the whole bar if you want shorter tongs then you're gonna burn your Hands, but just use less You go for right about there Let's see how long it takes me to cut through this 1/8 inch thickness 3/4 inch wide mild steel bar using a standard hacksaw I Wasn't too bad I actually got through that in like 30 seconds pretty good try the next one We've now got the two shorter bars that will be the main body of the first set of tongs and we have the two pieces That we cut off of those and we're going to be using these for something as well We can cut two shorter pieces out of one side of this bar and those will become the two curved claws that will actually hold on to our crucible It looks like to get a good curved claw shape we aren't gonna have to cut this whole bar right in half That would be a little bit too big, but just something I don't know 5 or 6 inches long should be pretty good claw I think We actually want to make sure that our claws don't wrap all the way around our crucible because then the two halves would just hit each other And they wouldn't actually grab the crucible at all so we want them shorter than that so it just grabs onto the sides again I'm just kind of eyeballing it here Now let's cut these two pieces off of our short bar Got a magnet attached to our bench vise here, and it's really picking up quite a bit of steel filings from this I Think we want to put our scissor hinge Pretty much in the middle here There are advantages to having it higher or lower if it's lower down Nearer to the crucible then it's easier to hold pressure on it that lets us lift the crucible up out of the Forge but If it's higher up then we have more space to fit around a crucible and maybe even a Larger crucible than this one, so I think just putting it right in the middle will be a good middle ground It should be fairly easy enough to hold pressure to lift our crucible up and out But we should also have enough space that we can fit around the mouth of even our taller and bigger crucibles The hardware we have is one-quarter inch bolts so I have a 1/4 inch drill bit But I don't have a punch to get my hole started So I'm gonna be switching out using a smaller drill bit just to put a little bit of a divot into the steel and then I'll switch back to my 1/4 inch bit That should work I Don't have any sort of special drill bit This is a normal drill bit that I'm gonna be using to get through this mild steel And if you use it correctly it should work pretty well There's a couple of things that you want to remember when you're drilling into metal though One is you don't want to use a high speed? That will create a lot of friction Which will heat up the tip of the drill bit and that can make it get soft? If you keep a low speed you should be able to get through the metal no problem The other thing to remember is that it's always good to use some kind of oil when you're cutting through metal I don't have any machine oil around but I do have this cooking oil, which while not perfect should still do the job Doesn't need a lot Steel hardware fits beautifully through that little hole with just a tiny tiny effects err space almost none But it fits through nice and easily Just what we want Just got a little bit of a burr on the bottom of our steel So let's take some sandpaper and just get rid of that you know It's a quick test if we fit our bolts through both of those We've got ourselves with a hinges pair of tongs or scissors are really they're neither of those yet It's just two pieces of metal on a hinge, but making good progress let's see if we can't bend the ends of our steel 90 degrees so that the flat portion will be facing the crucible I Like that that's pretty good alignment, it looks like right there, so now we need to add Little claws on to both ends first of course we need to add a little bit of curves into this parts Straight right now, which is not going to be good for grabbing a crucible You're just putting it in the vise bending it in one spot Gonna have to move on to using tools after this because my hands are not going to be stronger I Think that will work great now we need to attach one of the curve pieces to each of these handles and Of course that means more drilling holes As a final step before we assemble everything using our hardware Let's take our extra bits of Steel and fold those over to create our handles Alright, that's looking like it should work. Let's start assembling with hardware It's pretty good not too shaky these pieces are going to be assembled largely the same way But they don't need to have any play to them these aren't supposed to move so we're just going to tighten them down a lot It seems to be working But I think we could make it a little bit easier to use if the claw pieces were a little bit more in line with The shape of the crucible in this case that actually means bending the bars a little bit more inward That way they should be Lined up with the direction the crucible sits there we go that is Perfect look at that. It just goes nicely down Our little claws are perpendicular to the walls of the crucible Easy to grab these things are working pretty well so far of course It's going to be a little bit more of a long-term test than that when we start using them in the furnace We'll see if the hardware holds up nicely Or if the change from getting hot to cooling down over and over ends up weakening them somehow It's possible that we'll have to come back later and weld some of these pieces in place We have tongs that are really good for picking up our crucible from the top But if we want to go and pour it these aren't gonna do too much for us so what we need to do now is build a second set of tongs that has these claws facing the other direction so that we Can come in at it from the side all Of our pieces are cut our holes are drilled. Let's just bend some handles into this and then do our final assembly wait That's not right There we go Now these ones will attach mostly the same way, but instead of attaching them with the claws perpendicular to the posts We're going to go parallel Let's give that a test so with our sideways Tong we should be able to just come in grab it Tip you can even hold it upside down and pour out all of the dust that's down in there that works pretty great Ha yeah, and now I can be farther away from the metal as it's pouring and Our tongs aren't going to get destroyed like our salad tongs kept doing Guys thanks for watching if you aren't a subscriber yet just hit the bomb to get in the club if you missed our last video Or need to check it out again here. It is up at the top and down there You can see what the internet thinks that you should be watching next that's it for now have fun. Be safe. See you tomorrow

Channel: TKOR

Views: 429,205

Rating: 4.905201 out of 5

Keywords: furnace tongs, crucible tongs, crucible tongs diy, how to make a crucible, foundry tongs, tongs, DIY crucible, DIY crucible tongs, making crucilbe tongs, foundry tongs king of random, foundry tools, crucible, DIY foundry, DIY foundry tongs, homemade crucible, how to make tongs, king of random foundry, TKOR foundry, homemade tongs, homemade crucible tongs, smelting tongs, making foundry lifting tongs, lifting tongs, micro foundry tongs, how to make foundry tongs

Id: g2ZVw42u9kg

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018