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I Forge Iron

Paul TIKI

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Everything posted by Paul TIKI

  1. I've run nothing else on my home computers for almost 20 years. Currently running LXDE mint on most of the machines and puppy on a really old one I keep around because I can
  2. 4h by 4w by 8 long for the firepot. The pipe is down angled at about 15 degrees and is 3/4 inch pipe (I think), which may be part of the problem. I know charcoal doesn't need a ton of air and I had too much in my other build. Another potential problem is the way the blower is hooked up. from the Tuyer back it goes from 3/4 inch pipe to a funnel to a standard flexible dryer duct and then to the blower. It just kind of sits there so there is a lot of room for air to escape and not go through to the fire. I'm thinking a liberal application of duct tape will fix that. I need to be careful because I'm trying to think in terms of modularity. The duct was originally acquired for use with my son's hand crank Buffalo blower and what I come up with needs to be able to come apart so I can switch between air sources. Time to get creative with that. I may have had better luck if I just stuck to the hand crank, but I'm out of shape and didn't want to work quite that hard. I inspected the Tuyere after everything cooled down and there was no blockage except a bit of ash which blew out with a puff of air down the duct. Didn't look like there was any debris in the bottom of the fire pot. Yesterday, I did not use briquttes, just regular lump charcoal broken down to about walnut sized chunks. I used about 3 lbs worth over the course of 3 hours farting around yesterday. I'd go test some stuff today, but there is a wind advisory. Playing with fire not recommended outside.
  3. Have you seen the videos of solar death rays made from the Fresnel lens from old rear projection TV's? I wonder if you find the focal length, then set a work surface a bit above or below to give a heat zone over 6 inches or so could you heat steel rapidly enough. Solar death ray
  4. it appears the word "Vintage" adds at least $2 per pound. sometimes more.
  5. Thanks! I'm trying to be methodical as I make changes and do things. Make a change, test, observe. It works well until something seems to work like I want and then I get excited. Still trying to nail down the air flow through the tuyere. In my 2' square wood JABOD I was chewing up fuel too fast. I read more and found out that I need less air and more control. In this Grill Forge I have a much smaller tuyere and I'm not getting the heat I want. I'm pretty sure I need more air, but I need to figure out how to deliver it with what I have. It may turn in to a "duct tape to the rescue" situation. I think I may prefer the bigger box because I have more room to maneuver the metal. I found it harder to heat the areas I wanted in the Grill Forge because the length of the material got stopped one way or another not allowing it to get in to the middle of that fireball. Just gotta keep tinkering
  6. here is a pic of grill forge. had to make a few adjustments, but it's working better.
  7. Ain't that the truth! Duck Duck Go isn't a bad search engine. It's the default on my Linux computers and you can specify it in your browser settings rather than Google. They don't sell your information either. Speaking of, Duck Duck Go just gave the address and phone of a Metal recycling place here in town that did NOT come up in Google! I may have found a source of good stuff that I don't have to drive 45 minutes to get to
  8. I got a chance to play with the forge last night and made a couple of things and more importantly learned a bunch of things. First was a slight adjustment to the Grill Forge to get the tuyere angled slightly down. It had a remarkable impact on air delivery, but it wan't getting as hot as I would like. Pic of that was taken as I was letting things wind down. The next thing I did was drag out and resurrect an old stereo called Ampenstein. It's cobbled together of parts from dead things, like a Cerwin Vega car amp from my wifes wrecked car from years ago, a computer power supply, etc. I reassembled that while waiting for the kindling to catch and for the charcoal to get hot. Then I took a hunk of rebar, heated it up and flattened one end and bent it 90 degrees to make a rake for keeping the coals heaped up. It was too wide for the firepot so I put a little curl on the end to make it look neat and also fit inside the trench. Next I tried to make a part to hold a bar as a crude door latch for a fence gate. flattened a nail and put 2 90 degree bends. It was too long so I got an Idea to hold one end of an old lawnmower blade in the vise and let the other end sit on top of the post that is next to the main part of the anvil. I then heated the peice and whacked it on top of the cutting edge of the lawnmower blade to cut it off to a size that would work. I didn't finish the matching part, but I have a much better idea how to do it now. I also used an old center punch to knock a hole through another flattened nail just to see if I could. I swung the vise around and used it to hold the punch and then put the hot metal on top of it and hit it. It worked, sort of. All in all, I learned a lot. It's gonna take me a while to get to your guys level though.
  9. Paper!?!?!? Paper!?!?!?!!! It has excellent data retention but the search function can get wonky. come to think of it, there is a shop that makes round bale truck bed adapters, they may have some interesting stuff. There is also a large plumber shop close by. Maybe I could hit them up. I have an idea to use a water heater tank as a retort for making charcoal. I could lay it on it's side, cut a door from the bottom of the tank and hinge it. The water inlet or outlet can be used to connect a pipe to route the gasses back underneath the retort.
  10. It seems like all the scrapyards nearby are all in the city and mostly seem to specialize in auto parts, though I haven't really looked too hard locally. It would make sense out here in the sticks that there would be places that have farm equipment scrapped. They don't seem to be advertised on the internet. Probably too busy actually working . I'll have to spend some more time looking. I did take your advice on searching for another old gas grill to turn into a forge. No luck yet except of one sitting on the property of an empty rental house nearby. if I can hunt down the owner, I'll offer a few bucks for it unless I spot something on tomorrow's trash day drive around. Could I be missing something obvious in my search for the scrap yard? Think asking at the feed store nearby might get some results? I realized that might be a good place as I was typing this.
  11. Interesting, I was watching an episode of forged in fire, and one of the competitors had an improvised anvil made of a steel I-Beam with what looked like timber filling in the sides at his home forge. Just so happens I have an I-beam. I may reinforce it so I have an additional large striking surface. It won't have as much mass under the hammer as my pig iron slab, but it may work for some things. I'm also wondering if I could cut something like a hardie hole in it for the future
  12. Ya'll should probably give me 50 lashes with a wet noodle as I forgot pics, but.... My son and I got the grill forged built up and fired up. The body is one small propane grill with the guts torn out. Soft firebrick used as the bulk of the fire pot then packed around with sand and unscented cat litter.. Side blast with about a 3/4 inch steel pipe (ganvanization removed) for a tuyere. Air supply is a nice Buffalo Forge hand crank blower. Had a lot of issues with getting the temps up to where I wanted them. This time I used actual lump charcoal for fuel. Very few fire fleas (yay), but it just did not seem to want to get hot. I noticed a good improvement when we shifted a brick on the side of the fire pot opposite when the tuyere closer and built up the pile of charcoal higher, but it was still tricky. We also noticed that we didn't quite align the hole for the tuyere pipe quite right and it was angled slightly up. This was allowing debris and ash to block the pipe and we would be doing fine, move something, and then much less heat. So my guess is tuyere placement, and maybe too small a pipe with a lot of air leakage maybe? I don't think we got anything near hot enough for more than just simple deforming metal. So some tinkering before the next fire, and I promise I'll get some pics.
  13. That particular scenario never happened to me, but enough similar has, so I can certainly understand the pain. it sounds like the fun of getting something tricky re-assembled and then finding that one extra screw or part, and realizing it was supposed to go on 2 hours back in the process. such fun. I'm always fascinated by old tools. It's a source of joy when you find one, then figure out how to use it. Kind of like a tire spoon. Or the taps and dies when dad showed me how to use them years ago. I now have a long term plan for those when I eventually progress to bladesmithing. they will be useful for hidden tang knives or doing stacked leather handles and such.
  14. Information overload forgiven due to the pun! I have two of them at the moment without the other half of the tool. As far as I am concerned, forget flaring a tube, I'd rather use sharkbite connectors for plumbing and hire a mechanic for my car (since it usually ends up that way for me with all but the most simple auto repairs. Frosty, dad passed 3 years ago and stuff will still catch me sometimes. I have a feeling he would have liked you guys. It's funny when you come across stuff of theirs that was way before your time, and it can be really exciting when you find a use for it, kinda like that old iron slab that is now my anvil. As a joke one time, he promised the boys (they were 12), the finest computer from when he was a kid. They were all excited, then he handed them each a slide rule (his 'computer' from when he got his bachelors). The look of confusion on their faces was priceless. They still have the slide rules....
  15. Huh. that would be it. I don't have the other part though. The tool box I was clearing out was the equivalent of a box marked "misc." Dad almost never threw anything out. I found a Marlboro hard pack, before the surgeon generals warning, that had Vacuum tubes in it, when we started clearing the garage after he passed. We also found a coffee can filled with bent nails. It took my brother and I along with various nieces and nephews 2 days to sort through everything. I now have tons of projects of things that dad had meant to fix or tinker with. Good to know I could use them as a riveting tool. Thanks guys!
  16. Hello all. I was cleaning out one of Dad's old toolboxes and found a treasure trove of good stuff. Feather Shims, a big collection of taps and dies, an assortment of 5/8 and 11/16 box end wrenches, and a ton of punches of chisels. I also found two of these and have no idea what they are. each hole has a marking for diameter and is threaded on the inside. I have no idea what these are used for.
  17. Not just to ressurect an old topic, but a sincere thanks for this. It answered the question that I had before I could ask it. for anyone who cares, the suggestion to google and add the condition "site:iforgeiron.com" is brilliant. It's one of those little tricks that has been around but not a lot of people know about it.
  18. Well, I don't own that house anymore. The catalytic stove was probably from the 70's or 80's . I think it was installed after the house was built in 1977. I believe it was a Federal Airtight, built by Vermont Castings. I had read about the catalytic and replaced it yearly around the same time we got the chimney swept and cleaned it once a month while using it. It was designed to burn either wood or coal, you just slotted in a couple of really heavy cast iron plates for coal and removed them for more volume if burning wood. I left them in place most of the time because we were burning hedge wood. It was installed in the basement with the stack turning 90 degrees and going outside, into a small cement well, then straight up the outside of the house. I think that contributed to the cold stack problem, and burning a paper bag just filled the basement with smoke. That chimney had a topper on it, and if there was a 5 mph constant wind, it would draw fine. On a still day though... It had a main flue in the chimney stack and an internal one where you could route the smoke through the catalytic. You had to get the whole stove pretty hot before routing the smoke through the catalytic, but once you did, heat output went up pretty quickly. I miss having it though. I liked all the fiddly bits of keeping the house warm with burning wood. It felt Manly!
  19. Hah, with hedge wood I wouldn't be so sure it's totally dry yet. That is some tough stuff. I remember looking up tables about relative btu's in different kinds of wood and Osage Orange was top of the list on a couple of sites. 32.9 million btu's per cord. need's to season for 2 years and it is a devil for popping. can't really burn it in an open fireplace. we regularly used it in our closed wood stove and it would get hot enough to get the cast iron slabs used to hold coal up to a dull red glow. I left those plates in place because I didn't want anything that hot directly against the glass. It was perfect for the long nights because I could load it up at night, dial the air flow back and when I got up all I had to do was toss another log on and open the air and it would catch in a matter of minutes. the burner also had a catalytic converter in it and when you opened that up, you could get the basement up to 100 degrees. The biggest downside was if the fire went out completely and there was no wind. Without wind, the chimney would develop a column of cold air that made the whole thing act like it had a closed flue (the chimney stack was actually outside the house.) I once tried to use the vacuum to force warm air up the chimney, but that just ended up getting a lot of smoke throughout the entire basement and setting off fire alarms. Aside from that though, it kept almost 2000 square feet nice and warm when it was below zero outside and with the power out.
  20. Ahh, I miss mine. I had one in the last house. It was wonderful for keeping things toasty warm. I used about a rick and half each winter of Osage Orange (Hedge wood).
  21. Too late for that. He already ate a fair amount of cedar wood.
  22. Two bits of wood, a drill, some staples and some duct tape and that problem is solved! Thanks! We shall have 2 JABODs in the back yard and the wife will be annoyed I have hopes that by using a hand crank blower that I can balance things so both arms get a workout.
  23. The gas grill is going to be my son's forge. We have one, just need to fill it and hook up his blower. That's going to require some problem solving as his blower is a nice hand crank Buffalo Forge blower so we need to neck it down to whatever tuyere he uses. The JABOD above is showing us several instances of what to do and what not to Believe it or not, this is the kind of problem solving that I love to do, so even if it's not working, I'm having a ball finding out.
  24. If I drill in to the side of the pvc and the steel pipe underneath, that would put control of the blast much closer to hand. That's if that method would work at all well. A simple twist to close the hole or holes and you get full blast. Another twist to align the holes and the blast gets reduced, slight adjustments to add finer control. To shut off blast, lift the pvc and let it swing down off of the fan opening. Or am I way off base and this won't give me nearly the control I need. It would be simple enough to just stick a ball valve in line on the PVC pipe, but I don't want to spend the money right now (yeah, I know 4 bucks won't break the bank.) There is kind of a bet between me and my wife that I could get this going without spending a dime except for on fuel. So far I have managed with what was lying around. That 4 bucks is a point of pride !!! So much so that the connection between the fan and the PVC pipe is made from an empty sports drink bottle!
  25. It'll easily blow out ash and a little of the dirt that gets in there. Since it was placed with a slight downward angle, not a lot got in there to begin with.
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