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[dragon]

I was experimenting with making brass today in a small charcoal fire. The process was awfully hassle-some, what with sparks jumping everywhich way and having to feed the fire every half minute. So I went and looked into arc furnaces. They sounded much more convenient. (Ok, plus it was just an excuse to go build something more complicated than a pile of bricks with an air inlet.)

I slapped together some leftover kaowool, a metal can, and some glass tubing (to insulate rods from metal can), stuck some carbon rods inside, and hooked it up to the arc welder. It heats up. I expect even better once I put some itc-100 type-stuff on the walls. Then I got the idea of sticking some iron inside. A crude testing of this shows that it seems to work as a forge. But since I have never heard of this sort of thing being used as anything other than a melting furnace, I thought I would check with you guys for any possible hazards or other problems that I might be missing. So far I've worked out that I'll need to be shielded from the light while in operation, wear a welding mask, and such. Plus it's sort of hard to tell when the steel is hot; It looks dead cold at a medium orange through the welding mask. But that can be worked around. The idea of using this in my air-conditioned basement as opposed to the propane or charcoal forge in the non-cooled shed this summer sounds awfully attractive..

Any thoughts? And pardon if this has been covered before. "arc" was unacceptably short as a search term.