All but deleted account

I found this website on a post quoting another post. Thank you for the search method suggestion, JHCC! Squirrel Motor Blower

A friend recently gave me two centrifugal fans and I want to make an electric blowers with them but I don't know where to start. I've looked around here but I can't find anything on the topic. All I have are the motors with the two wires (pos. & neg.) sticking out. I was thinking about maybe using a variable light switch to increase/decrease the speech at which the fan rotates but I don't know how to do that nor do I know how to actually power it: what to connect how to connect, etc. I'm trying to melt some copper and silver to cast a couple of rings but with the old "blower" I had, it didn't work (it was a hair dryer duct taped to the end of a pipe that was stuck into the ground into the forge). Can anyone give me any advice? I would also like to have a pipe attached to the blower with a container or something on top of the end of the pipe to hold the coals and the metals.

Awesome! Thanks! I will definitely look into that!

Thomas, isn't that illegal? I thought that melting/defacing/destroying U.S. currency was a federal crime. I didn't realise it, but mokune-gane is almost exactly what I'm trying to do.

I'm a 16 year old Junior in high school looking to start blacksmithing! I'm a very . . . busy musician. I make a lot of stuff on a whim and most of the time it all turns out right. I've made instruments, I'm working on casting a couple of rings with cuttlebone (the technique is called cuttlefish casting), I've made stands for some instruments, and a lot of other stuff. If you search, in Google, "copper and silver ring", that's the effect I'm hoping to have once I've filed it smooth and polished it. I haven't gone through all of the posts/topics yet but I plan to. If anyone has any advice for a broke beginning blacksmith, I'll take it gladly! Thank you, Gideon

natenaaron, where is that?

Mr. Stevens, that last paragraph was Koro, to me, I'm sorry. What's a drop, a circle drop, and a plate?

I'm looking to make two anvils out of railroad tracks. I need about five feet total (about 2.5 ft. each). Does anyone know where I can find some in NC, preferably around Lenoir?

I just built a furnace, I don't even have a fuel picked out yet (post answers pending), and I want to spend as little money as possible until I get into it and know that I'll enjoy it enough to put money into a proper bellows. At the moment, would a vacuum cleaner that blows work as a bellows when connected to a steel pipe? The pipe goes into the base of the furnace so the air is blowing directly onto the coal/charcoal (again, fuel question answers are pending - Coal vs. Charcoal) in the bottom of the furnace. I'm not just using the furnace to heat metals; I'm also using it (with a crucible) to melt soft metals to cast into jewelry.

I'm sure there have been numerous posts about this topic but which is better to use: coal or charcoal? I have never done any blacksmithing before but I want to. I need to have a fuel first, though. My furnace is a hole in the ground lined with kiln bricks (I know not what kind; the potter that lived in my house before I did left a huge pile of them in the woods). I had originally planned to use a steel pipe with a vacuum cleaner on one end for my blower. After reading a couple of other posts, I'm not sure if that'll work; at the moment, I have no idea what blower I'll use (if you have any advice, that would be wonderful). I don't have an anvil yet, either.