robie1373

It's rubbish. After less than one summer in the sun it is noticeably faded and feels ... 'tatty?' It blew over once and tore a hole where the mid-span stabilizing loop attaches to the sheet. I got a little bit of snow on it recently (not much. I'm in the DC area not the midwest.) and wow! I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on it. I can see the whole roof shredding with a couple of inch snowfall. Having said all that, it was _cheap_. I don't expect much for the price I paid. I was seriously hoping to be under more permanent cover by now, but... life. That peak style shelter has one thing I wish I had with all the rain lately. Sides. I'm not convinced it is worth the price difference but those sides would keep things quite a bit dryer in there. It would be horrifying in the summer, though. such hot. The garage in a box thing looks nice. That would be like working in a gymnasium! If the sides roll up and you can find a way to rout a chimney, that thing could be a contender. One consideration, though. I did some napkin math recently about what it would cost to build a 10x10x8 timber frame out of big-box material using a thin-skin sheathing as infill. Depending on how you roof it, I was in the ballpark of twice the cost of the garage in a box. If you can get any part of that for free/cheap, you might be able to make something much nicer for a reasonable cost. As long as you don't burry the posts in concrete (bolted to steel plates buried in concrete for example) you can even take it with you when you move.

I am a fellow suburbanite. Different suburb, but that's a minor point. For what it's worth, my "shop" is all housed under an 8x8 El Cheapo tent roof thingy mostly on my back patio. I have a nice sized forge table (30"x 45") with some 8" duct hanging from the tent frame / resting on the forge table as a chimney. My anvil is mounted solidly to a stump (thin rubber mat between anvil and stump) and the stump sits freely on my patio. It makes very little noise and can be moved easily. My vise is mounted to a horse shaped contraption which can double as a vise mount for demos. I have a second stump sitting nearby that ends up being used like a coffee table. It just collects crap. All that sits under the 8x8 cover easily and I get plenty of work done there. Even in the snow. I do small stuff 99% of the time. As far as noise goes, I find that hammering orange hot metal doesn't make much noise. Missing the work makes noise. Cold chiseling makes noise. Filing makes noise. But the actual smiting part of smithing is one of the quieter in my experience. I'd spend a bit more time making cookies to buffer the days you have to cold cut and file something out of 1/8" plate rather than inventing a stealth field for the anvil. I'm not sure I hit my quota on opinions or not. I did try.

I was at Mt. Vernon this week and happen to take a picture of the coal bunker at the blacksmith shop there.

Depends on how long you want it to hold

I think these came out of the art of blacksmithing. With this you could easily copy tongs you like. To calculate the weight per foot of steel bars Square - (Width in 1/8ths) * (thickness in 1/8ths) / 19 Round - (Width in 1/8ths) * (thickness in 1/8ths) / 24 To calculate the weight per inch of steel bar Square - (Width)*(Thickness)*2 / 7 Round - (Width)*(Thickness)*2 / 9

Changes! After taking on some advice about air supply I did some shopping today. I found a little vacuum that does a ton of air and fits my tuyere like a glove. Sadly, It does not react well to a dimmer. I had to come up with a plan b. I admit to feeling pretty clever about this solution. Until I tried it. The air dumps out the top of the T. I was thinking there would be just a trickle of air going into the fire pot when to top was full open. I didn't account for Bernoulli, though. In fact, I get a vacuum pulling air out of the fire pot and up the T. Sigh. I'm going to have to do some experiments to figure out how much of the outlet I need to tape off to ensure I don't get that back draft. Idealy I would like to find a more elegant location for the adjusting cap. After a quick test fire, I can confidently say I didn't have nearly enough air. I have ample air now.

Ah. That's capable of a lot more air than my bath fan. I'm starting to see a pattern of indicators. More air. Or at least the availability of more air.

It's turning into an episode of "This is your life" in here

I think I need to check an assumption. When I was reading about tuyere size, I thought I saw a chart recommending different diameter tuyeres for different fuels. Or at least different types of fire. I made the logical leap that they intended to compare different pipe sized with a constant air source. With that assumption I then deduced that the velocity of the airflow must be important. Is that a bogus conclusion? I'm not trying to turn a box of dirt into a space shuttle, I'm just trying to improve my tool kit for troubleshooting my forge. Thanks as always for the thoughtful and useful responses! JHCC, May I ask what kind of blower you are using?

I got a bit wrapped around the axel trying to figure out tuyere size for coke. I feel like most of what I’ve read is aimed at charcoal. Is approx 7/8 I.d. Appropriate for a coke fire? I do small work. <= 1” your comment about more air is making me wonder. Also, I’d love to live in a house with that address.

Did a little scrolling practice and a lot of drawing out and rounding practice. 1/2"sq bar to ~3/8" round. The one on the left was my exemplar. I didn't have time to smooth out the scroll today. Also made my first spoon. It has two ends. Why? because the first end wasn't quite what I was looking for Lastly I finished reading The New Edge of the Anvil. That was a pretty good read. I think I learned some stuff, and the metallurgy chapter was enlightening.

But the extra 'r' just sounds so much better!

I am using my JABOD with some coke I bought from blacksmith depot. I forge in a close subdevelopment and chose coke to reduce the amount of smoke and stink produced. My neighbors have been cool so far and I'd like to keep it that way. What I'd like a sanity check on is the layout of the fire pot for coke. In the first few burns I feel like the sweet spot is sitting about 2" below the surface of my table. The truer is 3/4" black gas pipe sitting 3.5" below the surface of the table. Those dimensions were set based on the assumption of a charcoal fire and I suspect they are less suitable for coke. When burning the coke, I shop my fire pit to be 1" below the truyere. I fill up the pit with coke and heap a pile another 3" over the top of the table. The hot spot seems to be sitting from the top of the truyer to 1 or 1.5" above the top. I'm using a bath fan on a dimmer as a blower and have an elbow sitting loosely over the gas pipe. As a result a fair amount of the air just escapes and I get what seems like a pretty reasonable amount of blast. My planned fix is to rais the truyer 1.5" and run a couple more fires in that configuration to see if it is better or worse. I'd like to here people's predictions / thoughts on the issue. Am I heading the wrong way? Is some other aspect of my fire the actual problem?

And then I learned that Frosty not only looks like Chuck Norris, but he knows him too. Smiling and shaking my head. Fun fact, I was an unofficial stunt double for the original Marlboro man in a white water rafting episode of Walker Texas Ranger. They spray painted my head silver and shot the scene from 3/4 of a mile away. I almost passed for him. I was 21 years old at the time.

In my mind, a joint where the depth = the width|length seems "wobbly". If the depth was 1-1/2 it might seem more stable. I'm thinking about an offset shape like a small bik. With a short fuller or hot cut, no big deal most of that energy is going straight down. Does anyone have any ideas on why this might have been made this way?