Building a Blacksmith shop...Need a forge

[dswi]

Picked up 80# of coal today...and can't wait to burn it....
Also talked to a guy (friend of a friend of a friend of a google search by me)...He is going to let me use an anvil and some tools that he is currently not using...How cool is that??
I also am entertaining ideas of a cooling fan (about 1' x 1') instead of a hair dryer....either, I will have to hide and "silence". I put a dimmer switch so I can control the amount of air that comes out.

[ThomasPowers]

OUCH!; Sorry this was posted after I left for Quad-State. I research and re-enact historical smithing from several eras including setting up and running a forge for the local Baptist Church's "City of Bethlehem Market"

The style of forge you put on face book is only about 1800 years off, using coal is only about 1300 years off.

You want a side blown adobe forge set up burning real chunk charcoal (*not* briquettes which came around in the early 1900's...). Out here in the arid southwest I can just build a simple forge from old adobe bricks, (or slather a coating of wetted adobe over a stacked fire brick pre-form). Two single action bellows are used---alternating the stroke to keep them from inhaling small charcoal pieces. Bag bellows would be temporally appropriate; but harder to use. A homebuilt set of single action bellows is getting a bit off but are easy to train a helper to use.

Most likely forging was done on the ground. Unfortunately My knees can't handle that so I built a simple table that we hide behind a wattle fence section that I can build the adobe forge on top of. (plywood top with several 3/8" steel spacers supporting a piece of sheetmetal. A 1+" thick slab of soapstone on the sheetmetal and then the forge built on top of that. To lower the costs of using charcoal (and as a service to the other people) I have a raised firepit with a wood fire in it and transfer hot coals from it to the forge as needed.

My anvil is based on a Roman on in the museum at Bath England and is around a 4" on a side cube of steel with a spike on the bottom to hold it in place on a stump. Simple roman tongs can be forged or found as the basic design is still in use. (Look at the ones shown in the Mastermyre Find as an example or the ones shown on some of the Roman Blacksmith tombstones---again an example in the Roman museum in Bath)

Note that using an early iron forge requires at a minimum of 2 people---one to work the bellows and one to work the metal. Having only a single person at the forge would be about as accurate as the flight to Egypt being portrayed in a Corvette. I am lucky in having the youth Pastor's son as an on-going helper. MAKE SURE THAT COSTUMES ARE FIRE RESISTANT. Pure wool is both correct for the period and fire resistant. Linen is also correct for the period and can be soaked in a borax solution to increase it's fire resistance.

Feel free to PM me for my e-mail address if you would like to go into a more in depth discussion of my sources and modifications.

And Roman swords were definitely forged from real wrought iron at that period!

[Nathan Hall]

Glad you weighed in on this Thomas I was really hoping you would I feel i am going to have to make another library trip on this one yet again because their are so so many misinforming bits of writing on the web what general time period was bronze replaced by iron, I get the feeling from my brief bit of digging that it was a slower cross over and varied greatly from region to region, can you recomend any books on this, the few I have at home talk of the progression but rarely give time frames, thank you by the way for the recomendations on the books in referrence to the looks of medeival smithies. The more correct information I get on blacksmithing, the more I start to see a lot of errors in places that you would really not expect to see errors, for example the few documentaries I have been able to find on any subject close to blacksmithing ( usually bladesmithing) very often seem to have a lot of mistakes and vastly disagree with even themselves. I think a lot of this probaly comes from them getting much from interviews with guys that beleive they are right when they are telling what they have always been told or heard and very often that seems to be wrong. It takes quite a bit of work to get to accurate sources of information on these topics, never dreamed in this age of computers I would end up back at an actuall library so much.