Hi, all!
I’m 51, retired Army, now on my second career. I’m married and have 3 kids (now grown and moved out). I own a house with a big backyard, but live in town.
I’m a brand-new hobbyist. I was trying to learn how to cast small bits for a project, and while researching DIY foundries, I discovered forges instead.
My interests lie more in making tools, hooks, simple strap hinges and brackets for my woodworking projects, and so forth. I’ll bang out the occasional knife, probably.
So far, my forge is a hole in the ground with a few common bricks around it — but I’ll be posting a thread in the Solid Fuel section here in a bit, because I’d like to ask for suggestions on how to build my next one.
I’ve done a fair bit of lurking already, and learned some valuable stuff. Glad to be here!
Edit: I guess I should add that I’ve made one thing — a simple rebar knife. I did that to get an easy win starting out, and to see if I like it. I’ll probably use rebar a bit to begin with. It’s lousy metal, but I have a fair bit of it around, and I guess it’ll be useful for learning to square, draw out, bend, etc.