How to Make a Simple Propane Forge for Blacksmithing | I Like To Make Stuff

hey I'm Bob and I like to make stuff today we're gonna make a forge [Music] I'm a huge fan of watching blacksmiths work here on YouTube especially the essential craftsman and Alex Steel and I've always wanted to really try it out but I don't have the right stuff I've got an old piece of railroad tie that I can use as an anvil I've got the wrong hammer but it's pretty heavy I don't have a forge so today we're gonna take inspiration from a bunch of other people who have already made simple forges and burners here on YouTube I'm gonna have all those linked down below we're gonna make our own let's get to it basically I just bought a couple of boxes of fire bricks now these are made specifically for really really hot places they're in the back of your fireplace or in a brick oven and so we're gonna use these to first lay out the structure of the forge and then we'll wrap it in steel I've got these pieces stacked up but there's an opening in the back that I need to fill and so I'm gonna take one of these bricks and cut it down and try to make it as tight as possible so it will fit in there and fill up this back then we also have to cut down some stuff on the front I decided that I wanted this three bricks deep I think that should work for one burner going in the top but I also want to have a little shelf on the front of it just to have a little more support for taking things in and out of it so I've got these two side pieces here I'm gonna cut them off and then I can place them as doors just to like keep all the heat on the inside but they'll be easily removed I'm gonna use an angle grinder with a masonry disc on it and it's made for cutting stone and tile you could also just chisel these apart if you really didn't have something like this that you could use [Music] [Music] I've got the pieces in place pushed tightly together in all the different directions and then I took measurements from that so I'm gonna try to make a steel frame out of angle iron that goes around the top and the bottom and then that will sandwich all of the bricks in between it then I'll weld the top frame to the bottom frame and then hopefully that should all hold together as one piece now the bricks themselves won't actually be attached to anything they'll just be held in and kind of pressed inside the frame if I ever need to change one out if it gets broken or whatever I should theoretically be able to pull everything out through the front opening and replace a single brick it's not gonna be easy but it is gonna be possible I have seen a lot of other forges like this that actually have nuts and bolts on them so that you can take the frames apart I think that's a little overkill for what I'm doing so I'm just gonna weld it together [Music] I got all these cut down with the bandsaw and I just made straight cuts I didn't notch these I didn't miter them it doesn't matter in this case you could do this with an angle grinder or even a hacksaw if you've got patience these are just gonna overlap here on the corners and I'm just going to weld them together they don't even need to really sit against that but I want to make sure that they are tight on the sides of the bricks and to do that I'm going to put some clamps and then just squeeze the pieces together and then once I've got them tight I'll tack weld all of these joints take off the clamps and then do full welds [Music] got the two frames made the top and the bottom so now I just need to attach them together so I'm going to lay out the bricks where they're finally gonna be stack the whole thing back up and then just cut some strips to go on the side that I can weld on to connect the two frames together [Music] I decided to use angle iron to lock the corners together and on the inside of this angle iron there's actually a curve down in the corner so I took an angle grinder and beveled this outside corner of the top and the bottom so that this fits really tightly [Music] [Music] [Applause] I've got the back corners welded in and the crosspiece so this back panel won't fall out and then the original plan was to put some pieces here as well but actually everything is held in place pretty well and if I don't put members here that means I can pull these out in case I need to I think that'll make it a lot easier to change out the bricks in the future if needed now if for some odd reason this thing ends up not being stable or whatever I can always just weld in some supports right here but I think I'm actually gonna stop right there for the welding and move on to the next step we've got that Forge pretty much squared away and now it's time to move on to the burner like the Forge I'm not creating anything new I found several videos online of simple ways to make a burner and I'm just gonna kind of pull some of those ideas from different videos I'll have all those videos linked down below if you want to check them out let me show you the parts we're dealing with to connect to the propane I've got this regulator which is a 20 psi regulator which is more psi than you would typically get out of a gas grill so that's kind of important that gets connected by this flare adapter to a ball valve and this is how you'll turn the gas on and off that has another connector that goes to this coupling piece we're gonna work on that one that's important and then the gas is gonna come out of this square tip we're gonna drill a really tiny hole in here and that's gonna be our jet a lot of people will put a MIG welding tip here and you could certainly do that but I'm gonna try it with this this whole assembly is gonna be mounted and go into this pipe this is actually the body of the burner all the flame will happen down here on this end we'll just have to modify this end a little bit but we'll get to that soon these are the three pieces that we're gonna have to modify this is gonna be the nozzle it'll get a hole drilled in it later but this piece is going to hold the nozzle and needs to be mounted right in the center of this so we need to grind some flat sides on this piece and then drill some holes so that we can drive in some set screws and hold that piece in place I just made these little marks so you have a point of reference so I can flatten on this side turn it about 90 degrees flatten on that side and so on I mark the four spots on this one as well and just need to drill holes in from each one of those sides so I'm going to file a small flat spot and that'll give me a place to Center punch and drill the hole [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I've got the holes drilled in this piece and now I need to tap them I just got a tap that matched the screws that I had I don't think it matters what the size is as long as you have the right tap for the screw now I've got these four retaining screws in place they all turn freely and the point of flattening these sides is so that you can put this piece down in between these screws and then tighten in the screws and they'll hold that in place you can also adjust these two in and out and these two in and out to make sure that this piece is centered within this opening now the last thing to do is to drill a hole for the nozzle the inside of this cap actually has kind of a bald end here and that'll help Center the drill bit I don't want to push hard because I'm using the smallest drill bit that I have and I could probably actually go smaller than this for the jet but this is as far as I can go this is a 1/16 bit so if you have anything smaller than that you might want to try it out [Applause] [Music] almost all the way drilled through this thing before the bit broke so I went back to the store to get another one and they actually didn't have a galvanized version so I got brass instead it actually works better because brass is softer and easier to drill through so we have our nozzle done on this one and I did want to point out something about using galvanized metal in this whole thing when you heat up or grind the galvanized metal it puts off some gases that are not good for you and so we don't want to heat the galvanized piece but luckily this is gonna fit right in here but the heat is all gonna happen down on this end so we don't have to worry about any of that affecting the galvanized piece you can easily swap that out if you can find this fitting in a different metal so now that we've got the nozzle done we're gonna put all these pieces together with teflon tape to make sure that it's nice and sealed up and we're gonna test it for leaks before we use it [Music] [Music] we want to make sure that we check for leaks in all of these connections so first I'm going to take out the tip that I've drilled out and put back in the solid cap with some teflon tape seal up that end and then we can put some soapy water on all these add pressure to the end of it and make sure that nothing is leaking [Music] we're ready to test it now I've got everything taped up and tightened together but I've connected it to the gas so I'm going to go ahead and throw up a disclaimer if you are a kid don't do this don't even think about it without the help of an adult and if you're an adult be really really careful gas is flammable everything from this point on is dangerous you are on your own but be careful okay so we're gonna take this and instead of using soapy water we're just gonna submerge the entire end down in here I've got it opened up so that gas should flow all the way to the end of it and I'm going to turn on the gas and then slowly open the regulator and look for bubbles [Music] so you can see right down here I've got some coming out of the tip but that tip piece is gonna be replaced so that doesn't actually really matter because once I put the nozzle in there that'll change we've also got one coming out right here where the hose is attached to the flare so I might take this piece off and try it again [Music] all right we've got the pressure back on the regulator open and I don't see any bubbles coming out of the top so I think we are good to go out and test it [Music] now it's time to mount the burner in the forge itself now I thought about coming in from the top because that's the way I've seen most of them before but because this particular forge is wider than it is tall making it coming from the top heats up a lot of the vertical space so instead I think I'm going to come in from the side and as long as we put it back about right here we should have plenty of room in there to put something in the Forge and still have room enough for it to get heated all the way so I'm gonna start by drilling a hole in this brick right here I've got a really cheap hole saw this is not made for brick but this is eight dollars instead of $30 for the masonry ones so even if this is a one-time use only this will save me a lot of money so I'm going to start by drilling a hole right here it's probably slightly too small so we'll drill the hole with this and then kind of ream it out just to make sure that the pipe will fit in [Music] so that kind of worked a little bit but it definitely destroyed the teeth on that pretty quickly and I didn't get all the way through I've also got that dead step bit by dead I mean it was overheated it's not sharp anymore but I think this will actually allow me to get through the material enough that I can come back then with a rasp and actually open it up so we're gonna give this a shot [Music] [Music] all right I've got the hole ready this thing does fit it in and it's a nice tight fit so we don't have a bunch of extra open space around it that's good I will point out that using one of these not made for masonry it's not really worthwhile even though it was a cost savings using an old step bit actually worked pretty well and using a rasp worked the best this is what really did all the work to get the right shape in the right size we did our initial tests with the burner outside just to be safe just in case something were to go wrong we made sure to put the gas source around a brick corner from the actual burner I just wanted to go through it and make sure piece by piece that everything was working and we didn't run into any danger everything actually worked out fine so what we ended up doing was moving the nozzle back as far as it could possibly go and those set screws are actually holding the piece of brass at this point that was the best way to get the best flame that we could get unfortunately it doesn't really show up on camera outside so we're gonna go install this thing in the Forge and then we'll get some video in there I took off the end of this and I'm gonna slide it into the hole that I made I also made a really simple little shelf that's lined up with two sides of the hole just to support this so it's not hanging out and pivoting on the brick itself [Music] it works which is fantastic and the flame looks really good it looks far better in here than it did outside it's very blue so I think it's gonna be plenty hot enough I did notice a couple things while we were testing it though having the burner coming in from the side creates a convection on the inside which may or may not be what you really want when you're doing forging I don't know because I don't have any experience but if you did have it coming in from the top it would put direct heat down below it so if you had a piece of metal in there it's gonna get the most amount of heat we're gonna go ahead and test it as it is but if we need to we can always put more fire bricks in there and set the metal on top of it or we could just set the whole thing on its side that would work as well another thing I wanted to point out is that we are currently testing this inside I've got the ventilation running but if you're gonna use a forge you need to use it in a well-ventilated area for sure I've got this piece of steel we're gonna heat it up and see if we can flatten it out [Music] the middle is definitely red-hot so I'm going to go ahead and pull it out and Hammer it flat with the wrong tools because honestly this is all I've got [Music] it's a tiny spoon [Music] after that initial test I realized that although it worked the forge was not getting hot enough the steel was not getting past kind of a bright red and it needs to get all the way to a yellow and so I looked up some different ways to make it hotter and one of the big things I found was the nozzle so this nozzle that I made by drilling out the hole we're gonna ditch that and I went back and did a little test off camera and use the MIG tip like I mentioned earlier I took the same cap as this one drilled a larger hole and tapped it and then thread it in a point O to five MIG tip we're gonna try that one out I did this one really quickly so it's off-center I can always redo this if I need to and actually use the old one since it's got a center hole and just drill from there [Music] and there it is it is a simple but working for words I'm pretty excited to have this now I have a whole lot to learn about doing some very very basic blacksmithing but I'm looking forward to it now one thing that I would definitely change if I were to do this again is to put the burner in from the top I do think that makes a pretty significant difference being able to focus the heat directly on to the metal now in this case like I said I could always turn it on its side I just won't have this little tray that I made to hold the metal like I mentioned there's going to be a whole bunch of links down in the description of other videos that I watched learning how to build simple forges and simple burners there's tons of variations so be sure to go check those out before you make it and if you do anything like this please be safe we've got tons of other types of project videos for you to check out and if you're not subscribed please go ahead and do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching see you next time and then I want to take something did for Georgia apply f afdf them in in big here yeah yeah yeah looking at how the help that I saw to learn how to

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 1,047,551

Keywords: forge, make a forge, make a forge burner, forge burner, blacksmithing, diy forge, diy forge burner, diy forge burner parts list, diy mini forge burner, mini forge, mini forge build, alec steele, forged in fire, metal, metalworking, fire bricks, fire bricks forge, fire birck, firebrick forge, firebrick, propane, propane forge, propane forge burner, propane forge burner tuning, propane forge burner troubleshooting, diy, how to, make, iltms, i like to make stuff, electronics

Id: jcaqhNlRRB0

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019