JHCC

EPILOGUE After over a year of yeoman service, the JABOD has been retired and disassembled. It had a good life, and it taught me a lot. I will be forever grateful. While it is no longer in our midst, its fill and air inlet live on in my new side-blast, which is documented here:

Read these two threads, and if they don't answer your questions, we'll talk further: Oh, and when you have read those threads, start a new thread with the headline "Asking for advice on a JABOD-type forge" or something like that. Makes it easier for others to find if it's not buried in a thread on CFM recommendations.

Black pipe is a good option. Also, consider a side-blast rather than a bottom blast; the latter really needs a better clinker-management system than you'll achieve in a JABOD-type forge.

That's basically what Alec shows in the video where he makes the original of this forge: the base and top are separate monolithic casts, and the walls are firebrick.

There is really only one good answer.

Hello, and welcome to IFI. If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST! Looking at your forge photo, I have to say STOP RIGHT NOW!!! By the looks of it, that pipe may be chrome plated, and you would be putting yourself at high risk of serious health issues if you put it anywhere near a fire. Look up the health effects of hexavalent chromium exposure if you don't believe me. That said, your forge is a step in the right direction. Look at the threads about JABOD forges in the Solid Fuels section for some ways you could make that into a really top performer.

It's "prusik", named for Austrian mountaineer Karl Prusik, its inventor.

Yes. In Latin, if there’s no other verb, you can assume the verb “to be”. Thus, “Art is long; life is short.” The original was in Greek, from Hippocrates. Geoffrey Chaucer similarly observed, "The life so short, the craft so long to learn.”

I found some more short pieces of bed rail angle while cleaning the shop, and it occurs to me that I could use that to both create a lip and extend the top a little bit.

Only on the dark side.

Where in CT? Your profile still says MD.

Going to have to ruminate on that one. It's rather ... Chewie.

This is definitely a one-person anvil. In other words, you'll be forging Solo.

Little too soon to say, but I'd probably go with a slightly larger hearth (currently 26" x 24") and a more horizontal bosh (as you noted elsewhere). The leakiness of the bosh is mostly a function of my inexperience at welding sheet, so that would hopefully be a bit better the next time. That's a long way off, though, unless I find myself in a different space than my current corner of the garage. In that case, however, I'd probably be thinking first about a hood and chimney stack. One modification I'm considering for this one is be to cut the rim and fold it up, leaving the middle third as-is. That would help with sand and coal dribbling on the floor, while keeping the center sections at the right height. I'm also planning on adding an adjustable stock support to the front and maybe some firebrick as a shelf across the back of the hearth.

^ That's good advice.

After delivering my daughter in the back seat of the cab, cutting the umbilical cord was nothing!

I don't know -- a second guide might not be such a bad idea, both for precision and the overall strength of the system.

Hang onto the I-beam; there's a lot of stuff you can make from it. For example, an anvil stand.

The older I get, the simpler I become.

I've never built one of these, but it makes sense that you'd want the guides as close to the work as possible.

There's some good discussion of this in the Solid Fuel Forges section. Don't get hung up on CFM ratings; a hairdryer should be adequate. I use a stripped-down vacuum cleaner with the hose fitted to the exhaust port; it's much too powerful on its own, but I've got it on a variable transformer to bring the speed down. A forge of this size isn't going to need anything really powerful.

Yeah, paracord/550 is designed to support a human's bodyweight, but not by one strand!

The bladesmiths and metallurgists can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think one of the ideas behind the triple normalization is to do it at a slightly lower temperature each time. As I understand it, this makes new grains forming at the boundaries between the old grains, which results in a finer grain structure; heating to a higher temperature creates a new, coarser grain structure, so having your second or third normalization at a higher temperature undoes the good work of the earlier cycle(s). Is that correct?

That looks very nice. Good move to put a little flare on the legs, for greater stability.

I used to have a T-shirt with a hot-cut-shaped burn in the center of the chest, from when a red-hot one flipped out of a set of poorly fitted tongs. THAT's how we know these things.