Hi all!
I've just joined IFI and thought I'd introduce myself.
I was luck enough to go to a secondary school (ages 11-18 for people using different school systems!) that had a propane chip forge and a decent set of metal working tools. I've always liked buidling things, but I got fairly hooked on metal working.
That was 12 years ago and since then I've done bits and pieces of metal working (currently lucky enough to work somewhere with a reasonable set of mills and lathes, and a company that doesn't mind you using them for personal projects at lunch), but hadn't been near a forge since.
Last year I finally realised that if you want to do something, you can't just wait for it to happen spontaneously and I found an "intro to blacksmithing" course up in the north of England (Peat Oberon's School of Blacksmithing). Was a great course and I started looking around to see what my best next steps were.
After reading a lot of info, I've decided that the best bet is to build a forge and get started at home. So now I'm just in the process of building a Frosty T burner and setting up a beehive forge, based on the T-Rex Hut Forge design. There seems to be a huge amount of collected knowledge here, and I'm pulling together my amalgamated designs based on what I can get in England, during lockdown, so I'm hoping to share that at some point before I build it all, so hopefully i won't make a silly mistake.
Anyway, sorry for my rambling! From my several months of lurking on the site, everyone seems great and I'm looking forward to spending time both here and out in the garden with some iron.
(finally, I might not be able to give much help in the form of blacksmithing advice but I'm a PhD trained chemist with a decent knowledge of metallurgy so might be able to help out in that way?)