Emet

Thanks for the help, I'll talk to my buddy this weekend and see what we can do.

Ok so I'll need a burner whigh means we can go back to propane right? What do you think would work best to insulate?

I get very small sections that hot, yes its enough to heat railroad spikes enough to work them, but eventually we want to make bigger things swords eventually and with this design only the ends could be heated and only with careful balancing and placing of the torch and the metal.

Myself and a friend are very new to blacksmithing, we've done very simple work on rebar and made some ugly railroad spike knives. Although we have a coal forge the forge we use mostly is a bulk size can (that used to hold nacho cheese) we lined the inside with a 50 50 mix of sand and plaster to insulate it. Originally we wanted to run it of of propane torch fed in via a hole in the side, very similar to designs using smaller cans. but it didn't get hot enough, so we moved to MAPP gas which gets the forge barely hot enough, but it will get iron and low carbon steel yellow/white hot. I'm wondering if there is any way to improve the design? It's open on one end, but I'm thinking about redoing it with two open ends so we can do bigger projects, but I'm worried it won't be insulated enough. we already have to put the metal directly into the flame for it to get hot. Price is a big issue so low cost is better, sorry I don't have any pictures I'll try to post some soon.