Donal Harris

I am still not certain it is an axle. It could be just mild steel. One of the pieces I picked up from my mechanic yesterday would probably be better. It is definitely an axle.

Yep. Wrong Chris. ChrisC not Chris C.

I sent you a PM. The place looks to be bigger than Frontier City!

Which place is this? I have a dolly.

Did they have any more? This is what followed me home. The slave cylinder for my clutch went out in my truck and the mechanic who replaced It for me had a stack of stuff out behind his shop. He told me I could just take anything I wanted, but I gave him $10. Way over scrap price, but I will likely want to go back later for more. Next time I will bring gloves. Steel laying out in the sun is bloody hot. I am still “tooling up” and will likely use most of this for drifts, punches, chisels, and other such. The leaf spring looks to be from a small utility trailer or some other small thing. That I am not sure what I will have use for. My FIL owned a place that made trailers. I already had plenty of them. The other stuff is mainly tie rod ends and things similar to tie rods.

That would work. I was just going to use flashing and duct tape.

If you use a hair dryer, plug it into something with a switch you can easily turn off. That is what killed my pot. I had a switch I could click with my foot, but the switch was weak and broke after a month of use. Reaching all the way under the table to turn the hair dryer on and off was a pain and I was lazy. Even the lowest setting put out quite a bit of air. After three to four hours of use, the bottom of the pot would have quite a bit of color. The first to go was the weld on one side of the pot. The table itself at that spot also warped up a good inch. You can expect to replace the hair dryer every couple of months, or at least I did mine. But then they were all the cheapest I could find at Dollar General. I purchased a perfectly usable Champion #40 blower at the same time I began blacksmithing a couple of years ago. I just never hooked it up. The friend who made the forge for me used pipe that was larger than the flexible tubing I could easily find, so I just never hooked it up. This new pot has a smaller air inlet. I will be using the blower and not the hair dryer now.

Ask before you go dropping a ball bearing on someone’s anvil. They shouldn’t mind, but it would be rude (in Oklahoma anyway) to not ask first.

I may brace it later, Chris. Still not sure. As for my Dad, I wish he would come up here every now and then, but Highway 81 only goes the one way apparently. Human, my brake drum pot was maybe 3.5” deep. It was Ok, but it didn’t seem to work well for anything thicker than an inch. Charles once said coal with a bottom blast needs to be deeper. I went with 5” just because it seemed a good compromise between 4” and 6”. If I find 5” is too deep, I can weld up a grate from 3/8” square stock that is just a bit larger than the bottom of the pot. That would raise it. i wouldn’t really refer to my pot as having any sort of design. I did the math and even built a mock-up out of cardboard, but what I actually ended up with in steel didn’t quite match what I had envisioned. I had wanted the pot to be rectangular and not the square I ended up with. I don’t know this is true, but logically it seems as if a square pot would require more coal than a rectangular one. I had also planned on having a clinker breaker, but at the last minute decided against it. Our club has pretty clean coal. I can usually go a couple of hours before it is a problem. It is also pretty inexpensive. I buy it two 55 gallon drums at a time. As for the tuyere, I went with 3” because I had always felt my old one was too wide. If the 3” proves to be too small, I will just build something to divert part of the air. I don’t want to go any narrower than 3” because a friend has one which is 2” and it is easily clogged. Clogging is also why I went with quite a bit of distance between the air intake tube and the ash dump. I won’t have to dump the ashes as much. On my next one, assuming I don’t go with a cast iron pot, I will do like Glenn suggests and not weld the pot completely until sure I like it.

What is the exchange rate? I have a gamer friend who lives in São Paulo. He is a pilot, so he could live anyplace he chose to. I am beginning to understand why he chooses to live there. He is paid in USD, which based upon anvil prices, means he lives there for just a little higher than free. The last anvil you posted a picture of appears to have had some grinding done on it, especially around the step area. If true, you wouldn’t want it. Repair done correctly is fine. Repair done wrong will leave you with dead spots and pretty soon, chipped edges. A 157 lb. Sodefors sold here in Oklahoma last year for $750. Except for a bit of rust, it was near mint. I almost bought it, but the guy wouldn’t budge on the price. At $750 it was a very good price, but I generally won’t buy anything from an individual unless the seller moves a little of their asking price. I just checked. That is 4,053.67 BRL. Any Mouseholes? They are the undisputed King of All the Anvils, but for some reason the prices don’t seem to reflect that. Just saw your $47 post. You are being a bit cruel now.

Your girlfriend’s father must like you a lot. No bloody way I would have ever allowed any of the yahoos my daughters brought around go rummaging around my barn.

If you can find one, a hot water tank is probably your best bet. Used gas cylinders or empty propane tanks must first be completely emptied or they can explode when you take a torch to them. I have never done so, but there are tutorials on how to safely work with them. Someone here has probably done a post on it. Hot water tanks have many uses. You can cut them in half and make a box blade for a lawn tractor, cut and shape them into lawn art, turn them into meat smokers, use them as a shell for a gas forge, or cut them down the middle and use them as water or feed troughs for animals. I have had one in my junk pile for a couple of years now. Some day (meaning likely never to happen) I will turn it into a forge.

I am thinking that what I have forever thought was drill pipe is actually some other pipe used in the oil and gas industry. Everyone has always referred to it as “oilfield pipe”. There are pipe yards all over the state that sell it used in various sizes, as well as sucker rod, storage tanks, and even entire rigs. People buy the pipe and sucker rod to build fences and gates.

Thanks. I debated replacing the top of the table as well. It was pretty rusty and had cracked in two spots around the old pot. But It seemed to be reasonably sound, so I just welded the cracks. I also cut a piece out of far side bed rail to allow me to put longer pieces in the fire without them being tilted. The bed rail on the near side I had cut out shortly after I first got the forge. I am a little concerned that having now cut away part of both side rails I may have weakened the top. It may begin dipping down in the middle. I wish I had braced it. I have to say that after having done all of this, next time I will probably just buy a cast iron pot. I didn’t this time only because I wanted a reason to get my Dad out into his shop. I am thinking there aren’t going to many of those times left.

Finished it yesterday. I decided against a clinker breaker. It isn’t that hard to just remove them with a poker. I still need to weld up a grate. I had forgotten to bring square bar with me. My Dad is great, but is very funny about his scrap. Asking to use even a piece from his trash barrel will cause him to sort of scrunch up his face, so I thought it best to just wait until I got back home. Until I have time to make a grate I will just place a couple pieces of scrap square bar across the opening. The pot isn’t quite square, but it sits flush with the top without rocking. I hope the welds hold up to the heat. I am not a welder.

I cut the plate today. Didn’t finish welding all the pieces together, but did finish the hard part, which is welding up the sides. The camera on my phone doesn’t work, so I have no photos yet. Before driving down to my Dad’s to use his shop, I borrowed my wife’s phone and took a couple of photos of my totally trashed forge as it was before I loaded it up. The first shows the pot as it looks below the table. The second is from the top. You can see it was in very bad shape. The friend of mine who built it for me had welded the top of the drum to the bottom of the table. I was pretty sure that was going to fail pretty quickly once it was in use, so I asked him to secure it to the table by placing flat bar under the drum and welding the drum to the table. It worked well for a month or two, but after that I began to see smoke coming out from beneath the table as I used the forge. You can see from the first photo that what I expected to happen did happen. The lip of the drum cracked. Had the straps not been there the pot would have likely fallen to the ground after the first few times I used it. He is a blacksmith (and an engineer). Since he is a blacksmith I had assumed he would just use solid pieces of flat bar for the straps, and not do what he did, which was take small pieces and weld them together. That was a bad move. One of the joints broke after I had been using the forge for about a year. The other three joints, plus his welds to the bottom of the table itself held, otherwise the pot would have fallen. I used it like that for about two years (cracked bracket and lip of brake drum. “Cracked” lip, not busted lip. The gaping holes formed much later.) The second photo shows what the inside of the pot looked like. You can see quite a bit of daylight, but the photo doesn’t quite show the extent of the damage. A few hammer blows would likely knock the bottom out. My plan is to use the same table, except this time, drop the pot in from the top, with the pot supported by the lips around the pot, I don’t plan to weld the pot to the table. I don’t think that is necessary. The table is in reasonably good shape. I will have to clean it up and cut the round hole into a square and repair a couple of cracks, but not much else.

That is good to know. Thanks.

So it is only actual links to commercial sites that is forbidden?

I saw that one. If was the basic plan I was trying to go with. I just didn’t like the depth. Last year or perhaps late the year before that I had sent a PM to Charles Stevens, who lives fairly near me, about my brake drum forge. I was having problems with clinker. He asked for measurements and pictures. After seeing them he felt my pot wasn’t deep enough to do the mods he was going to recommend I do. Thus my desire for a 5” deep pot and not 3” as the BAM plan seems to be. He was supposed to drop by the next time he went to Norman to visit his daughter, but my wife was having none of that. She told me until I cleaned up “that mess of an area”, no one was coming by to see anything. She is not too pleased with the pile of scrap I have collected, even though compared to the size of most scrap piles I have seen, mine is practically nonexistent. As for laying it out in chalk, not an option for me. My dad can do that sort of stuff in his head and doesn’t need the chalk. Me, folding boxes in my head is just not my stick. I have to have something I can actually touch.

My math was wrong. While it may have been correct in 2D, it was not in 3D. I had cut patterns in cardboard and I could quickly see it just wasn’t going to go together. There must be some way to have a rectangular top and square bottom, but it won’t be this one. I cut the bottom so it is 5”x6” and then cut the short sides to a length that work. The fire pot is still rectangular in shape, but only just barely. I am really glad I did a mock-up prior to cutting anything. As is I think it will be too large.

I believe I have one or two of those as well. Each must weigh at least 8-10 lbs.

I was concerned my depth was not enough. I forget who said it, but in one of the other solid fuel threads, someone said 6” for coal was the minimum and even that might be a bit shallow. Ad for the clinker breaker, I had planned to go without one, because I couldn’t figure out how to make it so I could swap out the clinker breaker when it burned away. I was just going to weld up a small grate out of some square bar I have. But on the Fiery Furnace website I saw a welded fire pot. The pot was bolted to the tuyere. The clinker breaker goes between the two. I should probably just buy a fire pot. All the plate and pipe is free and it gives me a reason to drive down and see both my Dad and FIL. If it weren’t for that, I would just buy one.

I will try to get a photo of what it looks like when it starts. It isn’t from an oil drilling rig, or at least I don’t think it is. The only two times I have been on a rig the pipe was very large. This stuff isn’t nearly so big. I picked up a few other things at the same time. I will post picks of those. You likely will know what they are.

There is or was a company in Oklahoma that was dying t-shirts with Oklahoma red dirt. It can be rather hard to get out.

Intentional or not, it is still cool looking. The flame on top is a flame isn’t it? And not a blacksmithing related question: you are a married guy, correct?