ClevelandGuy

Clark had one of these at Quadstate last month and I liked the form factor. Lot of power for such a small footprint. Anyone have any comments on his presses and products in general. Very little presence out there in the internet of things.

Thanks, Thomas Powers. That helps a lot. The pricing structure makes sense, but it doesn't help if I show up on Sunday and there's nothing but mostly empty tables with junk nobody wanted sitting there at bargain prices. I'm going to plan to be there by mid-day Thursday.

Thanks for the reply. Do a lot of people show up on Wednesday?

For the past several years, whenever we've gone to Quadstate and actually shown up Friday, the majority of the stuff for sale has already been picked over and sold. In fact, it's not unusual to see vendors packing up and getting ready to go home Friday night. Can anyone offer any insight into what day would be the best day to show up, for maximum purchasing opportunities? I'm willing to take time off work and go down early, even on Wednesday, if that's what it takes.

Obviously living out in the middle of nowhere has its advantages. A coworker is always telling me how much better it is living out in 'the township'. But my wife and I enjoy many of the aspects of suburban/city living as well and wouldn't want to lose them. Unfortunately, having an amazing blacksmith shop and also living the urban life are somewhat mutually exclusive goals, which means a compromise will always be required. And as everyone knows, a good compromise just xxxxxx BOTH parties off.

Makes sense. I'm heading down there today...I'm off and they're open, and it's too cold to forge (although maybe later this afternoon). Would you like me to grab you a couple bags? Text me at phone number removed if you want me to pick some up for you.

Copy that. I actually just called them a minute before reading this. No answer, but left a message. I've been there a couple of times over the past couple of years.

Gulp! Cumberland's prices: 2 ea. square 3/8" x 10-ft $23.50/ea 1 ea. square 1/2" x 10-ft $34.85/ea 2 ea. round 3/8" x 10-ft ***Offering 1018 CR*** $18.65/ea 1 ea. round 1/4" x 10-ft ***Offering 1018 CR*** $14.35/ea Guess I'll be giving my business to North Coast Metal Mart!

I ended up going to North Coast Metal Mart. Small place, just a guy and his son for the past 16 years, working out of a small warehouse down on Hinckley Industrial Pkwy. Very easy to deal with, none of that "we don't like dealing with hobbyists" attitude. Not the largest selection, but more than adequate for my needs, with all the usual versions of round and square/rectagular in 10-ft lengths. He even cut everything in half for no charge. I was planning on doing that myself in his parking lot, but he offered. For $50 I got: 2 ea. square 3/8" x 10-ft 1 ea. square 1/2" x 10-ft 2 ea. round 3/8" x 10-ft 1 ea. round 1/4" x 10-ft I asked Cumberland Steel for a quote for the same list, for comparison. They certainly look like a larger business with more inventory, so it'll be interesting to see how their prices compare. They're both convenient to me.

I've used the Metals Supermarket for my last couple of projects. Nice people, but expensive, and I ordered over the phone and then picked up. I didn't notice if they had an actual browsing area where I could pick and pay for pieces, which would be my preference. Much easier than putting an order together in advance.

Once upon a time there was a place called The Metal Store, but they don't appear to have survived the big C. I'm just a hobbyist, so not looking to buy major quantities, but I'm willing to cut larger pieces into manageable sizes for transport myself.

The subject says it all. I know the local club has historically made 50# bags available to members for a reasonable price, but they're offline until March, and I don't know if they're even meeting in the world of COVID anyway.

I appreciate the time you took to explain further. I understand all the ramifications...I just have to figure out how much I care about them. I'm an HVAC guy from one of my previous careers, and after I installed a forced induction hanging unit heater in my big garage, the city guy told me I couldn't do it the way I did. I explained that I most certainly could and flexed my knowledge a bit and he backed down without much fuss. But you're right, a forge would raise eyebrows a LOT higher, although I expect Forged in Fire has probably spawned more attempted garage installs in the past five years than in the previous 50 combined. I've waited most of my life to have the time, space and money to really get into this hobby seriously and it would be very frustrating to be thwarted at this stage. And talking my wife into moving probably wouldn't go over especially well. My only other option would be to make the forge portable and move it out of the garage when I want to use it, but then there's the headache of moving a freaking anvil, not to mention dealing with working in direct sunlight, and the smoke likely heading right for my neighbor's house 30-ft away...

Thanks for your reply, Frazer. You're right, we're thinking along similar lines. The garage IS attached. I hadn't done any research on applicable codes/laws. While I prefer to be legal, in my life I've often found that nice guys often finish last, so I have mixed feelings on this subject. I do know that I can't build a usable outbuilding for my needs...the city forbids anything larger than 80SF.

Hi, Thomas. I'm in northeast Ohio. The garage is a stick-built framed design, all wood. It mimics the original 2-car attached garage on the other side of the house. Google Maps is behind the times and doesn't show it, so imagine a 10-ft wide single-car garage in front of my white SUV in this pic. The chimney would penetrate on the back side of the garage roof:

Thanks in advance for checking this thread out. I built a single-car garage onto the side of my house to be used as a forge area. I've got a nice large table-style forge, purchased allegedly from the deceased forgemaster of a NY blacksmith group. It originally came with an overhanging vent hood and 6-ft of 12" single-wall steel chimney. I read that the overhanging vent hood styles of flues don't work especially well, since there's so much open space between the fire and the actual flue entrance, and the resulting dilution causes you to lose too much heat for effective convection, so I am converting it to a Super Sucker hood which will vent to a 12" round chimney. I'm torn between exhausting out the side of the building or going up through the roof, but I'm swaying toward the roof penetration; less exposed pipe for my neighbors to complain about, more direct draft path, etc. Whenever I google around, it seems like DuraVent is the product that keeps coming up. I see specifications for 1,000F nominal operating temperature, with the ability to handle three 10-second sessions at 2,100F without damage. Has anyone ever figured out what kind of EGT a good-sized coal furnace is capable of putting out? I realize that a huge amount of room-temp air will be sucked in and dilute the heat. Some heat will also be lost on the way up toward the roof, but not a ton, I expect, especially with the Class A insulated product. I have the option to install some kind of chimney support box in the trusses and use that as a point to change the type/composition of the chimney pipe, if that would be useful. Ultimately, I just want to avoid starting my house on fire and/or turning the chimney into molten slag. I know there are website calculators for wood stove installs and such, but I have to think a coal fire exhaust is MUCH hotter than anything like that, and so I turn to you guys for help.

You misunderstood. I didn't say that the type of burner is irrelevant to the amount of heat produced. I said that the amount of heat needed is a given requirement that must be the starting point. From that number you can use whatever burner you like, as long as it achieves that end and meets all your other requirements as well.

Okay, the math looks doable, all the way around. I just have to come up with a suitable forge size and configuration for my work. The comment about using firebrick may be the simplest and most effective way to accomplish things. Just got off the phone with an engineer at my gas utility. We'd spoken last year when I was considering the addition of a NG backup generator and he'd given me a price to upgrade our meter, which currently can source 400 MBH. The next size up will go to 900 MBH. We still envision the generator installation at some point (budgeted for 265 MBH) so with our home and garage furnaces, water heater, and kitchen range, that leaves something around 400 MBH for the forge. So far I'm not seeing any dealbreakers.

Okay, assuming some scale for that pic, I'm thinking that forge is something like 36" long and about 6" wide. So that's ~1300 cubic inches. So at 540 BTUH per cubic inch, we're talking 702,000 BTUH, or 140,000 BTUH per burner?

This makes sense, although I suppose the point is that you build the forge around the small spot you need to have heated, thus removing the requirement for a large internal forge volume. Trouble is, in order to work the piece, you'd have to at least partially disassemble the forge to get it back out...and then put it back and close up the forge. You could leave some kind of space to move the piece in/out, but then you're letting the heat escape and will have to counteract that. Understand that I've got no experience working with gas forges, so I'm envisioning these possible scenarios, not talking from experience. I do find that I often have trouble even working with coal forges at times, when the piece is of a certain shape. With a standard firepot coal forge, the hottest part of the fire is actually slightly down below the lip of the firepot. If I'm trying to heat the middle of a piece that's long and flat, it's often difficult to get it into the hottest part of the fire. It's this type of thing I'm trying to address with the gas forge design.

I agree on the flame impingement issues. I would think that 'baking' the steel would work best if you're attempting to, say, heat a billet piece. Like ThomasPowers said, if I just want a small piece of the structure heated, a torch could to that. Or a coal forge, for that matter. I've always thought that one of the points of a gas forge was the ability to heat the ENTIRE piece without having to build a bonfire of coal 2-ft tall. Which brings us to the size of the forge discussion. While I agree that I'd never have a piece of metal 18" x 35" long that needs to be heated in its entirety, my concern was more about the ability to get the part I DO need in there, if the piece isn't shaped like a bar. In this regard, knifemakers have the advantage of those of us who prefer to do more artistic stuff, as EVERYTHING they work with is a small thin rectangle. But for instance, how would you heat a larger scroll, say something that came out to 15" in diameter, in a smaller gas forge? You might only need a small part of the scroll to be hot, but how to get that part into the heat without a larger internal space?

Okay, so I took the most conservative number I saw in the discussion Buzzkill referenced, which was 540 BTUh per cubic inch of internal space for the forge and drew up an imaginary forge that might offer something like the working space I'd like to have. I imagined it as a 55-gallon drum on its side, filled with 3" of the appropriate insulation/fireproofing, so that the resulting internal cylinder came out to 18" diameter x 35" in length. See attached pdf. Google says the internal volume of a cylinder is (Radius x Radius x Height x Pi), so that means 9 x 9 x 35 x 3.14159. Which makes the internal volume ~ 8900 cubic inches. Which comes out to almost FIVE MILLION BTUH!!! Since I don't have access to a Saturn V engine, I'm stumped here. I realize that this imaginary spitballed forge is quite a bit larger than the knifemaker coffee can forges I see people making, but something doesn't seem right here... forge.pdf

Wow! I'm amazed at the quick and informative responses to such an old thread. In response to Buzzkill's statements about "3/4 burner", I'm not sure what's being referred to by this dimension. Is this the diameter of the burner outlet itself or the feeder tube? Or is this even relevant when discussing blown burners? The subsequent statement of 450 BTUh per inch of cubic space inside the forge seems usable, although I don't understand the statement about it being related to a certain size or style of burner. Required heat would be a target number, regardless of how you get the heat in there, similar to the way we calculate the heat loss for your home...if you need 60,000 BTUh to keep your house at 70F on a 15F day, it doesn't matter whether you create that 60,000 BTUh with a furnace, a fireplace, a heat pump, or by leaving your oven open and running the broiler. What I was basically looking for is a required amount of BTUh inside the forge to get the steel to the required temperature, so if that 450 BTUh number is valid, I think we may be there. I can back out of that equation by next figuring out what equipment will put that amount of heat into the forge, and then determine whether my gas meter/gas supply has the ability to give me what I'll need. Latticino, I'll definitely look into those books/links you recommended. Your statement about the surface area being more important than the internal volume is a bit confusing, since they're basically linked together. I suppose one could make a really oddly shaped forge, but for most of us, a cube or cylinder will be the way to go. Your point about thicker and more insulating wall construction is taken. One thing I'm curious about...a lot of videos I see show the flame impinging almost directly onto the metal. I'm wondering how much of the heat being put into the metal occurs from the flame, itself, and how much from the ambient temp inside the forge? In other words, are we baking the metal or roasting it, or is this even a relevant question as long as the metal gets hot? Holding an oxy-acetylene torch against a piece of metal will heat it up one heck of a lot faster than trying to heat the metal by placing it into a small container with the same torch. The ribbon burners are interesting. I see the advantages of spreading the flame over a larger area to keep noise down and provide more even heating, although this harkens back to my previous paragraph about whether the flame should strike the metal or just put heat into the cubic space of the forge, as the wider burner will have less actual flame coming out than, say, a single port burner. Here's a drawing of one of the Ward Burner setups: http://www.wardburner.com/images/MB_Operating_Instructions.pdf If I built/purchased such a thing, would I be able to feed a ribbon burner directly from it, or would I have to stick with their burner design? Maybe that's a question for Ward..

Obviously this is a long-dead thread but I'm new to the subject, and this had the most informative thread I've seen so far, so I'm tagging on here. I spent some time on the Ward Burner Systems site...you're right, if you're looking for a blown burner, they have the goods. I haven't yet decided whether to go with one of their setups or build my own; I'm an HVAC guy by trade and everything they use comes right from an HVAC supplier, so DIY is totally doable. What I don't know is how to calculate the amount of heat required. There are HVAC calculations for determining how many BTUh's the equipment needs to supply given the desired internal temp vs the exterior ambient temp vs the heat loss of the structure, but I'm not sure how they'd be applied to forging, or if they even could be applied. If we use forge welding temps as the target for the internal temp, then we're talking 2300-2500F. The R-factor (insulation) of the forge wall construction could obviously be calculated, but there will be a ton of loss through the open ports where the working piece is inserted. The internal cubic space also figures in, obviously. I saw a mention of Giberson's book on glass blowing furnaces and I'll look into that, but I expect that those temps will be significantly below what we need for steel. Does anyone have a source for calculations of this sort? Thanks in advance

Agreed. The pricing on these things isn't high to begin with, and if you figure in the time, material and aggravation spent building your own (unless you like that kind of thing), it's kinda a no-brainer in my opinion.