tardster

Thomas, Thank you for the advice. I will make sure to get 1" kaowool next time so I can do like you suggested. My burner is on bit of an angle, I'd say probably the 1oclock position when you look at it from front of the forge.

once I have the wool/blanket inside the forge and covered with castable refractory should I use a fire brick for the floor or will it be strong enough to hold up? My plans are to start off small with railroad spikes and other similar objects. I have no plans for anything like Damascus or forge welding things together until I can get a lot of experience just using the forge.

irondragon, looking at waynes website and reading posts on here is what confused me and got me mixed up with cement and castable. Im sure I read it to fast or just read the refractory part of it and didn't realize they were 2 different things...

As I was reading through some of the searches I found where Vaughn T said "The best thing to do is use a combination of materials that maximizes their strengths and minimizes there weakness. 2" of a batt insulation like Superwool or Kaowool will keep the heat in the forge chamber, but it's easily damaged.  So apply a quarter-inch of refractory cement over top of it.  You get a hard surface, armor-plating the soft batt, while retaining the better insulating quality of the batt. My Majestic forge uses solid insulation, including hard bricks for the floor.  It's the biggest gas hog I could imagine, and it radiates heat far more than it should. The softer cast insulation on the sides and top of the chamber is extremely soft, easily chipped and abraded by the stock being heated or the tongs reaching for said stock." This is why I was asking, it wasn't because I wanted others to do it for me. Again at the beginning of my post I said I was confused and asked the questions I asked. Some posts have said you can and others say you cant. I'm trying to build this the proper way. I'm not much of a game player and I don't play games with others so if I ask a question it is because the information I have is conflicting and I want to make sure I'm doing it correctly. Again I'm sorry if my question bothered you or that you thought I was just trying to be lazy.

Frosty, I miss understood what you meant when you said not to use the cement for the flame face. I thought you meant not to let the flames hit it so that is why I said I was planning on using firebricks for the bottom or the flame face as I took it. I'm sorry if I bothered you or you thought I was expecting you to as you said save me a little work, Ill make sure I just creep the forums and not ask questions anymore since it is such a bother to you and others...

Frosty, my plan was to use the 2" wool then coat it with the cement and for the floor I was going to use a couple fire bricks over the top of the wool and cement. Is that doable or does it have to be the castable only? my burner is one of those geode stainless steel 130000 btu burners I got off amazon. I tried to build my own and it didn't quite work as well as I thought it should so to get going I figured to get one that works and once I get use to it I'd try to build one of your burners once I'm more comfortable, if that makes since.

irondragon, I have been to wayne's website and that's where i'm sure I got the castable refractory and refractory cement mixed up. I have the wool and refractory cement ordered already, they should be here next week sometime. so now that I know there is a difference between the 2, what is the difference and why wouldn't I be able to use the cement instead of the castable?

Irondragon, I did read the "read first" thread and I searched for about 4 hours reading different threads but as I said it confused me even more. I will just go with the 2 inches of wool/blanket and use the refractory cement over it to start and see how it goes from there.

Hello everyone, I'm very new to all of this so please bear with me. Before I go to far I did use the search function but to be honest I'm quite confused on the proper way to line my forge I'm building. Are there 3 diff layers of the lining, the wool/blanket, rigidizer and then refractory cement or do you just need 2 of them such as the wool/blanket and a rigidizer or the refractory cement? Im building my forge out of a old portable 11 gallon air tank that has been cut down to 12 inches long and in the middle at the widest part its 12 inches across. I figured that would be big enough for me to learn with and honestly I have no intentions of making swords or anything the long. How thick should the wool/blanket be, there is 1 inch and 2 inch? My plan was to line the inside of the forge with either 1 or 2 inch wool/blanket ( I was leaning towards the 2 inch wool/blanket, just sounded safer to me but I could be wrong) and at the bottom us a fire brick for the floor area. I am also planning on using 1 burner for it since this is my first forge and my plans are just for the part time to see what I can do with it. And finally is it better to have the burner straight up and down or on an angle? Thanks in advance Ed...