Kyle Hayden

Thank you for the advice on both my profile and my bellows. I am using lump charcoal, though I have used briquettes before. And yes, there is a lot of sparks.

I started out with what I think a lot of blacksmiths started out with: a 5$ hairdryer bellows, and charcoal. That worked pretty well, but it conked out on me a while back. One of my friends, as it turns out, used to own a bouncy castle, and still had the air blower for it. He was kind enough to let me have it, so I hooked it up to my bellows. It's much more powerful than the hairdryer, and has varied results. Sometimes it works great and gets really hot and powerful, sometimes it gets the inside of my forge glowing red, but there is no flame or heat at all (I can even put my hand over the top and it feels like a stove). My question is; is it possible to have a blower that puts in so much air that it's bad for the fire? or is this just an issue of me needing to build a better fire before turning it on?

I'm fairly new to blacksmithing, but I've worked with a few types of metal already. Most of them worked very well, but last week I attempted to make a knife out of some sort of steel I found under a bridge (I know, already not the best place to be looking for metal). I heated it up to about a cherry red, because there was a bend that I wanted to flatten out and I figured that would be hot enough just for that. When I hit it, the steel just compleately broke apart, as if I had hit some pottery or something. The steel was very low carbon (I know from a spark test I did). Could this be the source of the problem? It was also cold that day, so maybe the contract of air and metal temperature made it brittle, although I've never heard of this being the case. Could it just be due to impurities in the steel?