Buzzkill

I'm guessing neither of those has been up against some large elm logs. That was some of the most frustrating wood to split that I've run into. For wood that splits as easily as they were working with a simple splitting maul would be about as fast.

Will it work? Yeah, kind of. Are there much more suitable objects to use that will be as cheap or cheaper and the same weight or less? Definitely. The more solid steel (not edge welded, stacked, etc.) directly under your hammer blows, the more force will be transferred into the hot steel you are beating on and therefore the more you'll move steel with the same force. I beams have a very narrow section where there can be steel under your hammer blows no matter which way you turn them, so while you can make it work, they are far from ideal. A large sledge hammer head mounted in a stump, a solid chunk of even mild steel, an axle with a diameter of 3 inches or larger mounted vertically, forklift tines, rail track on end, etc. - all of those are better options by far than an I beam.

Ranmatt, welcome to the forum. Just a couple comments here. If cost is an issue for you at all for the forge components and then for operation I'd suggest going a bit smaller than that. After building one that seemed right to me when I started, but was really far larger than needed, I built one from a disposable helium tank - which is also the same size as a freon/R134 tank. I mainly forge blades and have been able to forge everything I've attempted in it so far, with the largest being a kukri style knife with an overall length of about 23 inches. Blown burners are dead simple to make and you quickly learn how to adjust them, but you do have adjust the air every time you increase or decrease the fuel in order to maintain your preferred forge atmosphere. I used one for a while then went back to naturally aspirated, mostly because I forge outside and like to be able to move to shaded areas without power cords and/or tubing for air being an issue. Your comment about forced air being less likely to freeze up the propane tank is inaccurate. Whether you are using forced air or a naturally aspirated burner, if the fuel to air ratio is proper, it will take the same amount of propane to get the heat you want in either case. The difference is the naturally aspirated burner will have a small orifice to introduce the fuel to the burner and it will be running at higher pressure (most likely) than the blown burner. However, the amount (volume) of propane leaving the tank is the same in either case. In the blown burner it's typically lower pressure at the fuel inlet for the burner, but that's because it's entering through a much larger diameter tube. Remember, you can typically only work on about 6 inches of hot steel at a time before it cools to the point where it needs to go back into the fire. So if you have a forge with a slightly longer chamber than that and a pass through opening at the rear of the forge you should be able to work on any length of straight stock that will fit through the openings. Obviously if you are working on oddball shapes then opening and chamber size become more of an issue. Spend some time reading on here and head over to Wayne's website and you'll get lots of good info. And yes, I would give up the idea of one forge for all. It's tempting, but normally things that are multipurpose can do several things in a mediocre way, but probably none of them as well as you'd like. Again, start small. Why spend more money on building supplies and propane to run 2 burners if you can do what you want to do with lower startup and operating costs?

I wouldn't knock either of them too much. It costs little or nothing to ask that way, you can reach a fairly large audience, and if you're looking for one to use rather than resell you only have to get lucky once. Although the chance may be slim of getting what he wants at that price it's significantly better than if he didn't put it out there at all.

Right. I too am offended by all those people who are so easily offended. At the same time I will not tolerate intolerance.

You may have covered this before, but it came up in another thread so I thought I'd ask it here: For the purposes of calculating forge chamber volume to determine the size and/or number of burners needed to properly heat the forge, should you deduct the volume taken up by things such as fire brick or kiln shelf? I know they are initially heat sinks to some degree but then they help radiate heat back to the steel, so I'm not really sure how to treat them in those calculations.

Ahh, so the diameter you gave us was the outside diameter. On the fire bricks I'm not sure you should subtract them from your calculations. If they are inside the insulation then they will be part of the forge that needs to be heated - and full size normal fire bricks are big time heat sinks. However, once they have absorbed the heat they will help radiate heat back into the forge. Frosty or Mikey might have a better idea if they should be excluded from volume calculations for the purpose of determining how many burners you need. Regardless, it sounds like you're willing to abandon the behemoth pipe idea and travel down a more economical path, so kudos and good luck.

I didn't subtract any length for the refractory on the 2 ends, but lets assume you decrease the length of the chamber by 4 inches on each end due to refractory and the curvature of the domes. That still leaves you with 18 inches in length and over 2000 cubic inches of chamber to heat, requiring about 6 three-fourth inch burners to bring up to temperature and keep it there.

Hmm. You might want to check your calculations. Based on what you told us you'll end up with a 12 inch diameter chamber after adding your lining. The radius squared times pi times the 26 inch length is more like 2940 cubic inches unless I did my math wrong. If I did my math right that would require 8 to 9 three fourths inch diameter burners to keep hot. It will also require a lot more kaowool and refractory to line that beast. The point is you're planning to spend WAY more money up front AND way more money to operate it than needed by a very wide margin. My advice is to hang on to that pipe for some other project and scale your propane forge down to BBQ tank size or smaller until you know what you really want/need.

Welcome to the forum. First, if you'll take the time to update your location in your profile you may find someone close by who can help you get started on your journey. For your 2 inch thick plate, it will work best as an anvil if you place it on edge with the 18 inches vertical. The more steel directly under your hammer blows, the better it will help you move metal. 2 inches is a little thin, but it only needs to be as wide as your hammer face to get full effect. Sometimes for knife making a narrower anvil is better anyway. The hydraulic hammer bit sounds like a sweet item for a post anvil. Your pipe for a propane forge is overkill by an order of magnitude at least. 18 inches in diameter at 3/4 inch thick and 26 inches long is quite heavy to begin with. Next you'll need to calculate your volume after lining it to figure out how many burners of which diameter you'll need to heat that monster. It's pretty hard to work on more than 6 inches or so of metal at a time before it cools to the point where it needs to be put back into the fire. Your proposed forge will use a LOT of propane to keep it hot and the reality is most of it will be completely wasted. Your enthusiasm to get started beating on hot metal is understandable and it is addictive for most of us here. However, you seem to be falling into the trap that a lot of us did when starting up. It's easy to get caught up wanting to go big and best before we even really know what will work for us. I hope you'll take some time to pull up a chair, some snacks, and a cold beverage and read at least the pinned and sticky posts at the top of the sections that apply to your interests. Based on your post I'd recommend hitting the gas forge section and the intro to knife making/knife making classes for a start. You'll find that a fair amount of material on here may contradict what you've seen on YouTube and some other sources. The main difference is a lot of the regular posters on here are experienced smiths whose work speaks for itself, some have written books on their areas of interest, and the community here will usually quickly correct erroneous information.

Lighten up, Francis! (Sorry for the "Stripes" reference). The OP didn't fly way off the rails here. He said what he was planning to use and asked if anyone else had done this and if so what their experience was. IIRC the inside diameter of 5 gallon buckets tends to be around 10.5 to 11 inches for most of them. A couple layers of 1 inch thick kaowool brings the ID down to 6.5 to 7 inches. That's probably still larger than needed, especially for a first forge, but it's not crazy big. One more layer would yield an inside diameter around 4.5 to 5 inches. Sure the amount of insulation is overkill, but it will be that much easier to re-line later when needed. Oberu, if you're set on using that pail then just use extra kaowool layers to bring the diameter down and try to keep your total inside volume under 350 cubic inches. That way you can heat it with a single 3/4 inch diameter NA burner (or a couple smaller burners). As already mentioned, there is a wealth of information on here about good gas forge design and construction. It would be a good use of your time to make sure you have a decent handle on as many of the specifics as possible before moving forward. I'm guessing that you can find a smaller option fairly easily, but your pail will also fit the bill if you handle it correctly.

You only gave us one picture, but from what I can see ..... it's hard to offer critique on something that appears darn near perfect to me. Proportions and craftsmanship are spot on. That beauty would be welcome in my home I can tell you.

This is the type of thing that will make me jump on a soap box for a good 10 minutes or so. It's easy to cross the line into political topics on this one, but I'll just leave a few short thoughts: The right to speak your mind cannot coexist with a right to be free from offense, Words only have the power over you that you allow them to have, and You cannot control how other people behave or speak. You can only control what comes out of your own mouth (unless you grab hot metal and then all bets are off).

You chose wisely when you kept the forge running. I like 'em both, but that wheat twist takes the cake. Very nice!

Every treadmill I've seen so far uses a DC motor. However, since you plug them into an AC circuit and they pretty much all have a speed control built into them, they already have what you need for variable speed tool repurposing. You may have to build some enclosures to keep the dust and such out of the electronics though.

Is that 12 minutes 36 seconds from the time you lit the forge, or the measured time after you felt the forge was up to temperature and added the wrench? That seems like a long time if it's the second option and a wrench which I will assume was 3/8 or less thick and probably less than 3/4 inch wide in the shaft part. However, even that doesn't give you a good idea of the maximum temperature you are reaching with your fire unless you left in there much longer and it never ended up higher in the color spectrum. If you have your fire pot constructed correctly and you have fuel for your fire, the determining factor on the temperature you will achieve is the air flow. Either way too much or too little air can make your fire cooler. In between that, more air = hotter fire.

Hopefully Mikey or Frosty will join in here, but I'll get it started. The diameter and length of the jet and the burner tube as well as the air inlet openings are "matched" fairly well in a good design. The result is that, once tuned, the NA burner will pull very close to the "right" amount of air in with the propane anywhere in the functional operating range of the burner. So, if you tune your burner to be a little on the rich side (slightly less air than the amount for complete combustion in the forge), then raising or lowering the propane pressure a little should affect the heat output, but not the relative ratio of air to fuel - you'll stay with a slightly rich flame at 3 psi or 12 psi. The bottom line is guys like Frosty and Mikey have already done the hard work for us. They've figured out the correct diameters, lengths, and general design so that all we have to do is initial tuning and then raise or lower the propane pressure to get the desired temperature.

If you like that shape you may want to look for a non-functional oiless or "pancake" compressor that has a tank you can repurpose. They are fairly cheap compressors and therefore people tend to toss them out and buy a new one rather than repair them when something goes wrong. Since all you need is a shell to hold insulation and refractory it doesn't even matter if the tank still holds air.

Ultimately I got something that works well. Used it yesterday and it makes the chips fly effortlessly. Looking back now I would have formed it differently. I took 3 sections of leaf spring from a semi trailer (each 3/4 inch thick) and made a blacksmith's helper so I could do the project solo. I placed 2 pieces of the leaf spring I was using for the gouge between the 3 pieces of trailer spring then welded the 2 outer pieces in place with some flat straps between them. Using a smaller leaf spring, I bent a U shape that fit through my hardy hole, welded one end to the previously mentioned contraption so it sits on the anvil's sweet spot, and then bent the other end around so I could weld the 3rd piece in place hovering above and between the other two. All of these are in the on edge arrangement, and they are rounded on the edges already so I didn't have to do much more than clean them up to use them. After welding a couple guides to keep the piece centered I heated my stock, slid it into place and used an 8 pound sledge to get things started. It worked fairly well (although it took more heats than I anticipated) until the flute was more than halfway to where I wanted to be and then the piece started turning sideways and slipping down between the 2 pieces rather than continuing to wrap around and form a good U shape, so I had to finish that up by hand. It's a little over a quarter inch thick, so it's plenty sturdy and it worked better than I had anticipated. If I had to do it again, or if I do it again, I will probably try to get the flute started with the step of the anvil and a straight peen hammer. I think once the middle starts to flex I can get the rest of it where it needs to be with just hammer and anvil. I may keep one of those pieces around so I can have the 3/4 inch thick rounded edge to use for straightening and getting a uniform flute shape though. That's probably somewhat confusing and a lot more info than you wanted, but you did ask. If it wasn't such a PITA to get pics from my "dumb phone" to the computer I'd snap a few shots to help explain, but....

In my experience there are 3 main factors that will bring people to you, whether you are selling widgets or providing a service: 1. Quality 2. Price 3. Marketing They are all important. You've probably seen crappy products that are overpriced sell well due to a good marketing strategy. Conversely there are high quality products that are reasonably priced which hardly get any sales. For most of us a decent balance of the three will be most beneficial in the long run. There are people I've done business with for more than 20 years and I know they are not the least expensive option around, BUT every time I need them they are there to fill the need. As that relates to selling your forged items your customers need to be happy with whatever you make for them. If they are they will come back and probably bring more people to you. If they are not they probably won't tell you. You just won't hear from them again. Personally I'd rather sell a few items of a quality that I'm proud to put my name on and charge a little more than a bunch of quickly made stuff of poor quality at a cheap price. That doesn't mean you can't sell quickly made and relatively inexpensive items, but you should be comfortable and/or proud of every piece you sell.

Nice job. I like Game of Thrones, but I think your friend got the better end of the exchange.

All I know is that no matter how much room I have it's never enough. To be fair though, a lot of that is due to tool migration. Any time I have open space some destitute tool in need of a home shows up on my doorstep with puppy dog eyes and I just can't turn them away. I swore i would always make room for my truck in the garage, but it hasn't been inside for a year or more now. I don't know what the minimum working area is; I just know the correct size is always more.

JPH, I have got to learn the secret of your puttering technique. My puttering never turns out so well or so much. If it did I'd become a full-time putterer. Fantastic work as always and I'm also looking forward to the next book.

Thanks for the additional replies. bigfootnampa, I'm not sure how much I'll get into turning wood, since so far I enjoy hitting hot steel a bit more, but if I do move forward with it I'll definitely check out the Nova lathe. Jspool, thanks for the link. I was forging some of the tools when you posted, but the info regarding shaping the bowl gouge is helpful for grinding the cutting edge and possibly for future gouges as well. Now I need to turn some handles for the tools I made and see how they work out. The tools I made from coil spring still have a long enough "handle" portion that I can use them to turn their own wooden handles and then cut them off at the end of the drawn down tang areas for inserting into the wooden handles. I just need to see if I have some suitable pieces of wood, a day when sweat will actually evaporate, and a little time. Thanks again for all the responses.

I don't have as much experience smithing or teaching as a lot of you, but a technique that works in some situations is to put the disruptive person "in charge" of something. For some people if they are given a responsibility which makes them feel important they will start to focus on their task and slow down or stop the disruptions. I'm not sure what would work in your situation. Maybe he could be the monitor making sure everyone has their proper safety gear in place before forging begins or something of that nature. Having said that, there are some people that you just can't seem to reach and at that point it's better for everyone to part ways as quickly as possible.