idacal

i fired it up today like you all figured I had way to much air. had flames 3' in the air even with the slide gate closed.. I cut in a gate valve on the down side of the blower and let it run to waste and that seemed to help a lot. I finally got some metal to at least orange but its going to take me some time and a ton of coal to get to were I can make this do what I want.. does a chimney help guide some of the heat away? it was cooking being close to it. and I need to build a diverter to keep the heat off my motor.

I have never worked with coal before so begin trip my whole forge is som kind of cement it actually has gravel in it but it’s definettly been used this way

alright I drilled a grate out its free hand so the holes are all over I will see if it works. if I crank the blower all the way up it try to blow it out of the hole. I think I will start shopping for a used 1800 rpm motor. I want to light it tomorrow so how much coal do I pile on it just a few inches?

This was the only stuff available in the local area unless I want to ship a long ways

when I got it it had an 1800 on it with shot babbit bearings but when I measured pulleys and punched it into a calculator the fan was at around 3500 rpm. but it was in an old lineshaft building so who knows what rpm it was designed to originally run. it has a good blast gate that will shut the air completely off. Im going to cut a circle and start drilling. would I be better off with .250 stainless plate or .375 milld steel. when you say go through fuel fast do you mean 2lbs an hour or 20lbs an hour? coal here is 22.00 for 80 lbs of nut size.

its a 3400 rpm motor built a new sheave and now its tracking a lot better. Im using an old tablesaw motor with the sheetmetal mounting system and that flexes and moves the belt around but its working right now. cleaned everything out and it flat out moves air sounds like a small leaf blower, had chunks blowing out of the hole. now im moving on to the next thing to work on I dont know what the air port into the forge is called to look it up ands see how to rebuild it

I dont know how much air flow it needs. everything I have read says I need at leaast 5" of pressure. I have this belt so Im probably going to use it at this speed and see if blacksmithing is something I want to stick with.

I forgot about this post and am finally working on this again. I test ran it just for belt alignment. but need to build another sheave I didn't have a small enough boring bar so just drilled it, of course it wobbles and kicks off the belt. o well. it seems to be kind of a lazy air flow I was thinking shop vac type pressure and its not there. my rpm is the same as it was originally set up I did change the motor though may have to upsize the pulleys. here is some pictures of the build.

I haven't had much time to mess with reassembling and rebuilding the motor and blower mount. It it does have a throttle on the air, a slide gate of some sort underneath the tub. Im ordering a new belt, I need that to make the blower and motor mountings. also need to figure out wiring on an old single phase 110/220 motor with out any capacitors or diagrams want to make sure that can be used before building anything.

I got my forge picked up today, pictures are before I had to disassemble and get it out of the building. the blower was mounted on a cement pedestal and fan motor mounts were mounted into the chimney of the building. I need to build a new mount for the blower and motor. it has a .5 horse motor with a flat belt design that Im going to see if I can reuse, but the belt looked pretty bad. sure I will have questions as work my way into this.

Im a total newbie to forging so here is the first dumb question, I have ran the search multiple ways, but Im not getting answers, probably asking the wrong questions. I have been doing reading for a few days here and am wondering about using a beckett burner and diesel fuel on a forge. they have changeable jets and the fan is already in place and can be set up to hold a temperature . I have a hot water washer that has a 2.5 per hour diesel nozzle in it and it gets with the program. or is there something with the fuel that ruins the steel to much or something? I guess the oxygen level in the forge could not be adjusted very easily. I dont want to mess with waste oil because of the contamination hassles. but I always have a few hundred gallons of diesel around and propane is a bit of a pain. is there something Im totally missing? I saw there is a one of them on youtube but all it was was the build and not if it worked. Im wanting to build a forge big enough to put cable tool drilling bit in to do an old-time demonstration of bit dressing the hard way.

I was told about this site over on another forum when I asked a diy forge question. I haven't ever been around forging but have bent big metal with rosebuds if that counts. I have read for a couple of days getting the site figured out. bIL is a potter so he had some bricks and kaowool. I tried to get a piece of 4140 hot enough with a weed burner inside a insulated chamber could only get to bright orange and realized there is more to it than just that. I have a larger size shaper that Im wanting to modify some # 5 lathe tooling to run on it make them more of a gooseneck style. just saying hi and Im probably going to be asking some dumb questions.