MattBower

First ask yourself whether you really need HSS for your application. You're not going to be able to heat treat it anywhere near properly without some real for-sure heat treating equipment.

I use an old soda-acid fire extinguisher body made of stainless steel. The brass/copper ones would probably work well, too. 3" tubing likely won't hold sufficient volume of quenchant unless it's very long.

I found castable refractory locally by calling a boiler installation place. They were willing to sell me a couple bags. If that doesn't work out, there's a place in Londonderry called Salem Refractories. 1A Rockingham Rd # 4 Londonderry, NH 03053-2289 (603) 434-4455 And these guys retail Plibrico refractories. Looks like they should pretty well have you covered, as long as they'll sell in small quantities: Cutter Atlantic Refractories 10 Micro Drive Woburn, MA 01801 Cutter Atlantic Refractories Office (800) 592-9200 Cell (781) 789-4799 tcutter@cutteratlantic.com

Thanks, Frosty. You're a regular humanitarian. I had a feeelin' somebody was gonna give me a hard time about that. I just wanted to make sure I understood what you guys were talking about.

Could one of you gents post a photo of a set of reworked slipjoints?

Hey, I didn't realize you're in Maine. I was up (probably "down", from your POV) in Wells Beach last week. Nice state you have there. Winter sounds a little rough.

Hi OddDuck. Nice to see you around here. I was about to point this feller over toward BYMC, but I guess you came to him. My main complaints about the Dasifier -- aside from the finickiness you mentioned, which I haven't experienced first-hand -- are that (1) it seems like it'd put a lot of unnecessary miles on the air compressor, considering that (2) there are simpler ways to get steel hot. Any thoughts about either of those issues? Matt(22191)

If you don't wrap the refractory in ceramic fiber, it's going to be less efficient than it could be -- period. Heat loss through the castable -- which is pure wasted heat -- will be far greater than if it were insulated, and that will continue as long as the forge is running. All you have to do is look at the insulating value of a castable vs. a good ceramic fiber. There's no getting around it. So unless your forge fuel is cheaper than your heating fuel, and you want to make the forge do double-duty as a space heater, insulation is always a good idea. The more the better. I'm frankly a little skeptical of the idea that a big, thick castable liner is an advantage because it forms a heat sink. (Heat reservoir might be a better term.) I've heard that argument before, but I'm not sure the thermodynamics work out. Ultimately, it takes a given number of BTUs to heat a given piece of stock to a given temperature, and you pay for all of those BTUs. A well insulated, lightly built forge may experience a temporary temperature drop in the process of delivering those BTUs, but because it's lightly built it will recover quickly. A heavier forge may not see as much temperature drop because there are so many BTUs trapped in the castable, but the BTUs sucked out of the castable ultimately will have to be replaced -- and you pay for that. Either way, you're paying to put the same number of BTUs into the work piece. I suspect that at the end of the day, if you do all the complicated math, it's kind of a wash. Could be wrong, though. It's certainly true that the longer you run the forge without shutting down, the less significant the cost of the heat trapped in the castable becomes. Eh, that really all depends. Ceramic fiber isn't that expensive, the lower-temp alternatives aren't that much cheaper, and you'd have to pay for the extra thickness of castable required to achieve a significant temperature drop by castable alone. Plus the initial cost of materials pales in comparison to the ongoing cost of fuel, so it can easily be a matter of saving a dime to spend a dollar.

By the way, there's a neat series of videos on YouTube about making charcoal the old-fashioned way. The guy who made them is kind of an amateur historian. They're pretty well done, I think. Search [Pennsylvania charcoal making pit] on YouTube and you should find them.

It's the difference between concrete and fiberglass insulation. Like concrete, castable refractory is strong, and very resistant to damage, but a rotten insulator. Like fiberglass, ceramic fiber is an excellent insulator but very fragile. A forge made entirely of ceramic fiber will be very fuel efficient, will heat very fast and will get quite hot (with the right burner), but it'll be extremely susceptible to mechanical and chemical (welding flux) damage. (And if you don't seal the surface, most ceramic fiber blankets will give off fine dust that's very bad for your lungs.) A forge made entirely of castable refractory will be darned near bulletproof, but it'll be an enormous fuel hog, it'll take a long time to heat up, and its maximum temperature may be somewhat limited. So yeah -- ceramic fiber lined with a thin layer of hard refractory to protect and seal it is a pretty traditional compromise.

Charcoal making doesn't have to be complicated. Much depends on how efficient you want to be, and how much smoke you can afford to make. Here's a reasonably efficient solution: Picasa webbalbum - eklof - The simplest ... A very simple solution is just to use a large steel drum with several holes around the bottom. This drum will be very similar to the outer drum in the link above, but make the holes smaller. You want to give the fire enough oxygen to sustain combustion, but not much more. This isn't a campfire; you want the fire producing enough heat to force the wood to offgas all the volatiles, but only that much. For the most part the fire should be starved for oxygen. You'll also need a lid for the drum. Pack the drum full with dry wood, leaving a little room for heat and gasses to circulate. (I use a lot of cut-up hardwood pallets for feed stock. They char fast and uniformly, and I can usually get them for free.) Light the wood from the top. You'll be surprised at how cleanly this burns. As the wood in the drum burns down you can pile a little extra feed stock on top; there's no point wasting the heat. When the steel around the holes at the bottom turns orange, you're just about done. Let it go another fifteen minutes or so, then plug the holes with clay, mud, etc., put the lid on the drum, and leave it to cool. I haven't weighed my raw materials and completed product to calculate the efficiency of this method, but it works well enough for my purposes.

Yes, well, around here anything older than 400 years will be man portable and made of stone, and you'll likely find it in a freshly plowed field after a rain, or in the wash of a creek or river.

Hay Budden Anvil Looks pretty darned nice, at least on the side he's showing. About $2.50 a pound.

UnicornForge, are you with BGCM?

For a buck a pound you can't go too badly wrong.

I think Thomas has it about right. First, I don't think the situation is as dire as you think. The stuff about destroying anvils during the Civil War is mainly myth. And yes, there were lots of anvils made in the U.S.: Columbian, Hay-Budden, Fisher & Norris, Trenton, Vulcan, and a bunch of others. But as American society has urbanized I think many have been scrapped over the years. Edit: Or just lost, as DKForge is suggesting. (This craft of ours is currently experiencing something of a renaissance in the U.S., and has been for a while, but for a long time there it was darned near dead in America.) And yes, WWII accounted for the destruction of incredible amounts of old metal in this country -- not just anvils, but historical items (e.g., the Civil War cannons outside the county courthouse where I grew up) and lots of other wonderful stuff. All that said, anvils really aren't that hard to find here. I used to think they were, but I just hadn't learned how to look. The main problem is just that good ones tend to be somewhat expensive, and so many folks are looking for a deal. (There may be more demand here than in the U.K., too. I don't know.) Having to compete with collectors doesn't help; I don't know whether anvils are a collectible item in the U.K., but they are here. It also matters where in the U.S. you live. The parts that were settled later in history likely have fewer old anvils kicking around than places that have been continuously inhabited by metal-working European types for hundreds of years.

Grant, I love the idea of using the auto parts. Fabricating properly fitting ram and ram guides and drive shaft has always been kind of worry for me when I think about building anything other than a very simple helve hammer, and this seems like a really clever way of getting around that problem. I wonder if it'd be possible to incorporate this idea (using an engine block, piston and crankshaft) into a reciprocating ram hammer, Little Giant-style. (This is all more or less theoretical for me; I don't have a place to put a hammer right now, and likely won't anytime soon. But I can't help thinking about it. )

That's really cool. Very creative, very sensible use of materials.

A shop vac will be waaaaaay too much blast! I was actually going to suggest that your problem might be that you have too much blast as it is. It's possible to blow the heat right out of the fire, and with an unregulated shop vac you certainly would. If you're going to use a shop vac you need to add some sort of valve between the shop vac and the firepot in order to regulate the blast. You're also likely to get very sick of the noise.

That set looks kinda like hammer eye tongs to me.

I believe there are kaolins and ball clays "growing wild" in Texas, but you're still likely to waste a lot of time hunting down and mining a pure source. Impurities (esp. iron) destroy the refractoriness of the clay. And as someone else pointed out, clay is cheap. Dirt cheap, in fact! It's hardly worth the effort to dig your own, unless you happen to be sitting right on top of a vein of pure kaolin. You're in Austin. It's an artsy-fartsy kind of place. There must be a pottery supplier there. I suggest you go buy some EPK or a good ball clay, and be done with it. But realize going in that working with raw clay is a much, much bigger pain in the rear than working with commercial castable refractories, etc. Here, I went ahead and found a place in Austin for you: ARMADILLO CLAY - Equipment, Tools & Glass Their C&C ball clay is $11.65 for 50 pounds. It's a cone 33 clay; EPK is cone 35, so C&C is very nearly as refractory as EPK. (Both should handle 3000 degrees F without much trouble.) Or you can buy EPK for about $18/50 lbs. Note that homemade firebricks will require a lot of fuel to fire properly; it's unlikely you'll be able to do that economically, compared to buying them

This could be the same guy. I think he posted some of these in the Tailgating section: ANVILSFORSALE - ANVILS FOR SALE Update: Yeah, same guy.

Ask for pics of these: 3 STARTER BLACKSMITH ANVIL..CHEAP If you can get to East Stroudsburg, you can get to Allentown.

Thanks to all for your tips and suggestions. Celticforge, can you explain a little more about the firebricks? I'm not sure I understand what they're doing for you.

http://www.iforgeiron.com/forum/f91/intro-heat-treating-9292/ BP0078 The Metallurgy of Heat Treating | Blueprints 000-100