Multifunctioning Gasser?

[primtechsmith]

First off i love coal!!!!!! Ok now that I have said that I have a question for you gasser guys!

I have no choice if I ever want to forge at home I must use a gasser. No coal or any open fires in town limits. So I think in the next few years I will get one. just for simple around the house stuff. My wife is a great stain glass artist. And I want to get into glass blowing.......so can a gasser be used to blow glass as well? if so are there different settings for blowing glass?

peyton

[Swamp Fox]

No open fires in town limits can be argued a bit with folks grilling out on the back porch. You may want to consider charcoal and throw a steak on when your finished forging. :wink:

[yesteryearforge]

Im not so sure a coal fire in a forge can be refered to as an open fire.
Your town is an old one and there may be some houses or factorys that still use coal for heating or to fire boilers if so you have a legitimate argument .
The main complaint from town folk is the smell but lots of things stink, including their attitude towards coal smoke.

[HWooldridge]

To answer your question, I imagine there is a way to combine function but I know nothing about glass so am speculating to the requirements for that purpose. If it was me, I would try taking a working glass furnace and putting a piece of steel in it to see what happens.

[Glenn]

T-Gold works glass and if I recall correctly, he suggested that using a coal forge and blowing glass did not work well together. Something about the dirt and uneven heat.

We need to get his input into the forum on that one.

[T-Gold]

You can use a gasser to blow glass, and you can use a glassworker's glory hole to work steel, but neither is much suited to both tasks if it was built for just one purpose. I have a design in the works for a firebrick forge that would be triple-role (glory hole, forge, kiln) with several different doors for various functions... but in general, given the relatively low cost of building gassers, you want to build multiple furnaces suited to each role. Working glass offhand means you are working with stuff that is flopping around madly sometimes, will definitely do damage to your liner (replacement every 2 years) and needs a lot of space to move -- working steel in a gasser is usually the opposite of this, in that it doesn't need lots of space beyond having a fair bit for the burning gases to circulate in, it doesn't move around much, etc. Also, for glasswork, usually two or three "furnaces" are used: annealer, glory hole, and crucible furnace, or if you're Italian, a lehr (continuous annealer) and dual-role furnace. Annealers nowadays are almost all batch annealers and run on electricity -- if you can't run a 240V@15A line out to your shop for a day or two at a time, you're not going to have a lot of fun blowing glass. For more info on backyard glassblowing, check out Mike Firth's "Hot GLASS Bits" website. Good luck, and feel free to email me (or preferably continue this board discussion) if you have any questions!