Stolen Forge

[Neil Blythin]

Hello All,

 

I recently had a large (shop sized) cast iron forge stolen.  It was on loan to my school (Willowbank) in Queenston, ON.  The forge had been temporarily stored outside while the storage shed was being reorganized.

 

It's a large rectangular forge with a trough at one end, and a large arm for mounting a blower.  I never did find any markings on it, but several people told me it was a 'Champion',

 

The blower and fire pot had already been removed and are safely locked away in my garage, thank goodness (especially as the firepot is one of John's, and was barely broken in yet).

 

This is a heavy beast of a forge, which takes 4 people to comfortably move around. Two guys can move it short distances, with some effort .... I'm almost certain that this was likely the work of a couple of scrap metal guys who probably winged it into the back of a truck or trailer, and its probably been melted down as scrap by now.

 

However, on the off chance that someone knew what it was, the market for potential buyers is a fairly small community.

 

One difficulty, is that I don't know exactly when it went missing.  I wasn't around the school very much over the summer, and only discovered it missing when I went into the storage building last week in order to get set up for an event this past weekend.

 

One of the school staff tell me they remember seeing it there before going on vacation at the end of August, and don't remember seeing it after they got back in the 2nd week of September (they assumed it had been moved back into storage).

 

In any case, if you've seen such a forge pop up for sale in southern Ontario in the last few weeks, please let me know.

 

Attached are a couple of photos of it from when I bought it a couple of years ago. Again, the firepot and blower were not on it when it went missing.

 

Cheers,

Neil

 

 

 

[JNewman]

I am sorry to hear about that Neil.  I suspect you are right about the scrappers but I will keep an eye out for it just in case.   

[DSW]

Sadly I think you are right about scrappers and most likely it's long gone into the shredder. Looked like a great old forge.

 

It might be worth letting the cops know. Around here with nonferous scrap they photograph both the scarp and a copy of your drivers license when you scrap stuff. Not sure about steel and iron. I know they copied my DL when I took steel in a few years ago, but don't know if they also photographed the load or not there. Around here the cops are so so about looking for scrap thieves. Most times they take the outlook that chances are they can't readily identify scrap because it all usually looks the same and it's tough to prosecute someone who dumped a load of stolen pipe. In some cases however when items are worth serious money and readily identifiable, they get off their buts and make a run of the scrappers to look at the picts.

 

 

If nothing else a police report will go a long ways towards at least getting you money from the school district to cover the loss. They negligently left it out where it could be stolen, so their insurance should cover it. It won't bring the item back, but at least you can possibly replace it. Also school districts tend to get more attention from the cops as they can make a bigger "splash" vs ordinary citizens. That might just help get the cops to actually look into the matter seriously. You might get lucky and the scrapper set it aside vs grinding it up. They probably wouldn't tell you they had it, but they might come clean to the cops to stay out of trouble.