Mountain

I am going to attempt some photos here.... My forge as of this morning..... My forge after adding a hood and some more clay.... Testing heating up an old horse shoe.... got plenty of those experiment with.... A rod that I was makeing into a set of tongs.... My tongs after I assembled them.... I was going to bend the tire iron handle straight, but after assembly I liked the feel of it, it is very easy to use and grip tight one handed that way, think I will leave it bent...

I set up a very simple forge this afternoon, just an old tractor rim about two feet tall and about 20 inches in diameter. I cut an old car ramp and placed tha inside atop some fire brick. I left under the ramp piece open and drilled a hole in the side of the rim, I used an old vegetable can with both ends cut out to guide the air out under the ramp piece. I then packed everything in on the sides with wet clay from one of the ponds here. I used an air compressor to feed the air into it, though it doesn't produce enough cfm without running continuously I think I will go after a car heater fan tomorrow for the air feed. I didn't have any charcoal to use and I wanted to dry out the clay, so I built a wood fire in there. After I had it going pretty well and had a deep layer of coals, I thought I might go ahead and try to heat some metal. I laid some junk boards from my mill garbage pile over the coals, and placed two metal rods into the coals under the boards. It didn't take much to turn them cherry red and I went ahead and beat them into shape for some tongs. I hated to waste all those good coals so I went and grabbed an old 55 gallon drum that had one end cut out of it and the other end was somewhat rusted out and I put that over the fire. I realised I could fill it with junk wood and much of it might turn to charcoal from the heat of the coals. So I filled it with a bunch of wood chunks and put dirt around the edges of the bottom of the barrel, and put a metal garbage can lid over the top of the drum. With any luck I will have a bit of charcoal tomorrow, we will see. Had fun with that, looking forward to tomorrow.

I don't know if this is an appropriate area to post this in, if not sorry..... I have been following a blacksmithing thread on a survialist forum I am a member of, and this site was mentioned on it. I checked it out and I thought this would be a usefull source of information on my next venture, blacksmithing. I designed up a forge system last fall, but I have not had the time to get into it yet. I have been a bit busy this year, we sold our farm in January and bought this one in February. I wound up buying a wood mill early this summer and have been busy playing with that the last couple months. Fall is coming fast again and I want to get setup with a forge before winter hits. So here I am, a blank slate..... point me in the right direction.....