Mak'n a Bellows

[Tinker Tut]

Greetings,
I am making my first two stage bellows and have read where people have covered them with canvas insted of leather. Does this work well? Has anyone done this?

[Shane Stegmeier]

Canvas works fine, some people like to seal it with something so that it is more air tight which is fine. One of the most important things is to build in your support brace for the center leaf of the bellows, my wife made a nice set of bellows but didn't figure that in before she covered them, now I will need to make nice little brackets and drill deep pilot holes into 3/4" pine boards so I can sink 4" screws to adequately support the bellows... It was a nice looking bellows burgundy leather covered... Just didn't work as well as we would have liked and didn't hold up well because of the bracket issue... it is all fixable... In my copious freetime... ;-)

[IronPuppet]

I have an old vacuum I'm using for air on my forge, but I think I might build a bellows and try that too.

Might be something to "the old fashioned way".

Christopher

[Michael]

I'm about halfway thru the process of building a bellows. Plywood boards, its about 4 feet long by a little over two feet wide, that was the ply that was on hand. Plan is to cover it with a big roll of naugahyde like vinyl impregnated canvas material. Got a big roll of it from the fabric/crafts store for less than $10, and used some of it as seals on the valves in the bellows. Miscalculated the size of the lag bolts that go into the center boards though. the 6 inch bolts aren't long enough to engage the frame AND support the bellows. Need 10 inchers I think, and that means beefing up the section of center board they are going into. Project stalled at the moment.

Michael-San Francisco

[Glenn]

You may want to look at the following Blueprints for reference:

BP0127 Bellows Construction
BP0141 Building a Bellows

[ThomasPowers]

I built a large double lunged bellows using heavily treated canvas that they used in the oilfields to make wind protection tarps from---free scrap from an awning maker that did that work.

I found that no further treating was needed but that the canvas only lasted about 20 years. Included storing in unheated/cooled sheds and outside under a tree. For the support bracket I bent a section of 3/4" x 3/8" double for the post section and then spread it out and forged it to fit the shape of the bellows. Lots of screws into the side of the middle board *through* the canvas.

I had the pumping lever held on a crosspiece with a loop of rope so you could switch which side it inclined towards and it was long enough that I could pump it to welding heat with my pinky.

I liked my bellows better than my hand crank blower and did a lot of demos including billet welding with it.

After 20 years it was getting a bit bedraggled so I gave it away when I moved to force me to build a new one...