Is a $200 Forge Kit Worth It?

[Music] i'm sure a lot of you can tell from the title of the video i've bought another piece of import machinery of a questionable quality more specifically it's a 200 forge kit or i guess it's more of a foundry and i do hope everything arrived in one piece now metal casting is something that i've wanted to get into for a long time about three or four years ago i made one of those coffee tin forges that you might have seen on youtube and to be completely honest it worked about as good as you think it would i had to heat treat a bunch of steel and i thought it would be the best way to do it and sure it worked but it didn't work all that well and using plaster of paris as the refractory was a pretty bad idea because it ended up chipping and cracking after one use so hopefully this forge slash foundry does a better job than that one did [Applause] so it looks like we have some forge tongs and some instructions the forge comes with about two meters of welding hose and to give them credit it actually feels like okay quality there's the burner and i guess everything else is going to be stored inside the forge itself so before we go over the forge itself let's quickly look at everything else the propane burner seems to be pretty simple it's just two pieces of steel pipe that's screwed into one another at the other end there's a sleeve that will cover the air holes so we can adjust the air gas mixture into this end i'll be screwing in this very interestingly named valve that has a small nozzle at the end and in spite of the name it actually feels pretty nicely made now the valve itself will get connected to this gas regulator and the one included is a dual gauge regulator that measures both the gas flow pressure as well as the pressure of the gas bottle itself and from what i can tell it's actually quite well made and that's a little surprising given that dual gauge propane regulators aren't exactly the cheapest things to buy and for a forge it's definitely worth knowing at least your output flow rate and that's something that you can't get with those cheap no gauge regulators to melt the metal in the kit's going to come with a four kilogram clay graphite crucible and when you touch it you'll end up rubbing off some of the graphite and apart from some chips missing on the rim it arrived in one piece and it looks to be well made though i do wish it had a pouring spout moulded into the side just to make pouring the metal out a little bit easier now the thing about crucibles is they are a consumable and they will wear out after multiple paws and you will have to replace them eventually they should last quite a long time at least if you stick to using aluminium and in any event a replacement one should cost about 30 or so though the general wisdom is you do get what you pay for and they definitely are more expensive ones and it's also recommended that you stick to one type of metal per crucible so for this one i'm just going to stick with melting aluminium in it now according to the listing this is a four kilogram crucible and i can certainly tell you this doesn't weigh four kilograms however after doing a little bit more digging i found out that four kilogram actually denotes the capacity of copper that you could melt in this so in this crucible you could do four kilograms of copper or i guess 1.2 kilograms of aluminium so the overall capacity is about 450 mils of molten metal though you probably wouldn't want to fill it all the way up to the top furthermore you definitely don't want to use those included tongs to lift the crucible i tried doing it with the crucible empty and i ended up chipping the crucible so discard those and go ahead and either buy some proper crucible tongs or make some yourself the final thing that i'll mention with regards to these clay graphite crucibles is that general wisdom is that you temper these before you use them the first time round tempering is just a method of removing any moisture that's left in the clay graphite though unfortunately this kit didn't come with any instructions on how to actually do that so after looking at a few documents online the way that i did it was i put it in the oven at 200 degrees for about an hour or so and then i put it in the forge and heated it to a red hot temperature and then i left it to dry overnight inside the forge there is a bit of nuance into how long you soak it for and the temperatures but this should be fine for aluminium though it should be noted there are people that don't temper their crucibles and they do say they have no issues with them so there is that also included with the kit is this graphite mold and i'm sure it would work fine for jewelry scale casting but this mold is just way too small to be used here so i'm not going to use this for this type of casting the final accessory that they included are these leather gloves to help protect you from the heat and the hot metal and whilst i appreciate them including some type of protective gear these gloves are made of the thinnest leather and they just aren't heat resistant at all so if i was you i'd discard these and opt for a proper set of leather gloves i'd also recommend opting for a leather apron leather shoes a face shield and a respirator because when you deal with hot metal it is quite dangerous with all that out of the way let's finally take a look at the forge itself essentially it's just a can made from half millimeter sheet metal with a gas inlet and a lid overall the build quality seems to be okay i have no major complaints though it's obviously not going to be amazingly built though it definitely feels sturdy enough the worlds do look a bit questionable though who am i to judge when it comes to welding overall it's built fine enough and you're not going to have any issues in terms of the build quality however and this is a big however i have some really big concerns to do with the insulation that they've used in this situation for the lining they've chosen to go with a ceramic wool blanket which is a great insulator and it's really common to find ceramic wool blankets on small forges like this one the problem that i have is that they've left it completely exposed the wool by itself can certainly irritate your skin if you touch it hence why i'm wearing gloves when i need to touch it the real issue though is that at high temperatures ceramic fibers are actually really dangerous to breathe in if you believe the people who deal with this stuff on a regular basis it can be as dangerous as asbestos debris then and this concern should not be taken lightly however there are steps that can be taken to make it safe before i do that let me make one modification to the lid i'm going to drill four holes into the lid and then i'll get four screws and then screw the ceramic fibre blanket into place for whatever reason they didn't fix the blanket in place at the factory and it kept falling out of the lid four screws just screwed into the blanket should hold it in place it's a five minute job and it's certainly worth doing now to make the ceramic safe what you need to do is you need to give it a spray of sodium silicate to make the wool stiff and rigid this is known as rigidizing after you do that you need to give it a very thin coating in a high temperature mortar the stuff that i'm using is rated to about 1800 degrees celsius which far exceeds the 1400 degree temperature rating of the forge itself now in hindsight it might have paid off to give it two coats of the rigidizer solution and adding a drop of food coloring would have helped me get a more consistent coat and don't worry too much if the coverage is a little bit spotty since you can do it in two coats if you need to just make sure that you keep the coat as thin as you can because the coating tends to absorb heat which is not what we want on a small forge like this and after giving it two days to dry out the coating has formed a very hard protective layer which will keep us safe from any harmful ceramic fibers the total cost for this was about 50 australian and it's a small price to pay for safety i am pretty disappointed though that it wasn't done at the factory and i'm very disappointed that this step wasn't mentioned in the instruction book with it all dry i set it up to do a quick test run the regulator uses a type 21 pol valve which is found on most standard gas bottles in australia now the position of the nozzle needed a fair amount of adjustment to get a stable flame and i do suspect that it's still not getting enough oxygen for the amount of propane that i'm able to pipe in however fixing this is a job for another day rather concerningly though was about two minutes into the test the whole thing started to smoke up a bit it was a bit alarming at first but it turned out to only be the paint that was burning off the end of the nozzle and thankfully that stopped after a few minutes and in that time i was able to get the forge up to a light red color now because this was only a test and i was a bit low on propane i didn't let it get up to full temperature so i let it cool off over the course of a few hours after letting everything cool down you can certainly see just how much paint was burnt away off the end of the nozzle as for the coating that we applied it certainly held up quite well to the heat now rather embarrassingly i ended up dropping the lid by accident and causing a pretty big crack to form thankfully fixing it is pretty easy all you have to do is mix up a little bit of leftover mortar and then you can easily patch it up with all that done let's finally test it for real and let's cast something i went and got a full size eight and a half kilogram propane gas bottle to replace the smaller camping one that i previously used now the metal casting i'm going to do in this video is going to be very basic for the mold i'm going to be using this steel pipe as a cylindrical mold as for the metal that i'll be casting i'm going to be using these scrap pieces of aluminium that i've had lying about for the past two years they're pretty much just off cuts from old projects now technically these wrought alloys aren't going to be all that great for casting but they should be okay for this very simple casting like this and in any event this is not a casting video so i wouldn't worry about that all that much now to lift the crucible in and out i made a simple lifter from some scrap steel that i removed the galvanizing from [Applause] and for a five minute project they work quite well for pouring but they are a little bit big and cumbersome to maneuver inside the forge so i'll probably end up making a set of crucible tongs in a future video [Music] now with this setup and this amount of aluminium it was fully molten within about 15 minutes of putting it in and there was surprisingly very little slag and oxides to remove from the poor now the first port was a bit rushed and i did run into a few problems the aluminium poured surprisingly well but i suspect it burnt off a fair amount of zinc and it created a fair amount of air bubbles inside the mold after this first failure i went back and recast the metal and it turned out a lot better the second time round it wasn't porous and it actually machines up okay the aluminium definitely doesn't machine up as nicely as it used to though that is a discussion for another day i'm just really happy that i was able to cast some metal and to my surprise that 30 minutes of melting only used a fraction of the propane in that propane bottle obviously it's not going to go down in a linear fashion but i'm really happy with how efficient it was and after the first two pours the crucible is still in great shape too there was a bit of aluminium that's stuck to the bottom but thankfully all of it just flaked off and thankfully the forge held up really well too with all of that out of the way that brings us to the end of the video and time to answer the question well was it worth it well it certainly did work and i was very happy with what i got for the price that i paid funnily enough the thing that really made it worth it was that dual gauge regulator it's definitely come in handy just knowing both the pressure of the propane tank and the pressure that i'm letting out into the forge however i am still very disappointed about the lack of refractory and the absence of any warnings about it and given that the listing on ebay said that it should come with a refractory lining is very disappointing with all things considered if i was to do this again i'd probably opt to get a little bit more of an expensive forge that comes with a proper refractory lining rather than buying this and having to do it myself so at the end of the day it's going to be a judgment call as to whether you think this is worth it and doing the refractory lining yourself or paying a little bit more money and getting one that is ready to go from the factory and that's about it for now i have a bunch of casting videos planned so please keep an eye out for them i hope you enjoyed this video i hope you learned something new and with that see you next time

Channel: Artisan Makes

Views: 69,235

Keywords: forge, forge kit, worth it, is it worth it, budget forge, kiln, cheap firge, cheap forge kit, is a forge worth it, metal casting, metal molding, melt aluminium, forge aluminium home forge, home forge, melting metal at home, vevor, vevor forge, cheap forge

Id: KzPehIw017E

Length: 18min 14sec (1094 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2022