So a guy I work with asked me about two months ago if I could build a forge. He said that he's always wanted to make his own knives. I told him I'd give it a shot but he had to help with the process. I've always been relatively good with my hands and not bad a building things with just a little idea of what I'm doing.
It's amazing the times we live in when you can look up just about anything online and find a good group of like minded people to help you along when you get stuck. I found this forum a little late in the process, most of the ideas are based on what I found on youtube.
We still have a lot of work to do before a hammer strikes hot metal but we are getting there. The body of the forge is a hydronic heating thermal expansion tank, which we got from work, returned to us for a warranty claim. Over all dims are 16" round by 24" long, I know it seems huge but it was free and is a good heavy gauge steel, thicker walled than a propane tank. Given the size we thought that 3 3/4" pipe burners would give us enough heat, I drew my ideas out before the process of building, there's a few things that we winged a little not fully knowing what we are doing but know where we want to go.
The gas train is 3/8" to 1/4" needle valves and gauges to 1/8" to the mig tips. A question I have here is why doesn't anyone source offices from the heating industry?
Still need to insulate it, still have a few questions on what and how much we are going to need. I was thinking of 3" of kaowool and lining it with layer of castable after the wool.
The picture below is the tank on a cart I made from some leftover pallet rack that I have.
This one is the concept of the gas train, at the time I was still waiting for the needle valves to arrive.
Gas trains and burners complete, just not securely mounted yet.
At this point I think I have everything welded up and mounted, we chose to use tabs to hold the front door on rather that trying to get a hing to work.
