Not sure if I should post this here or in some other area. (Mod note: moved to its own topic)

This is my saga of building a forge or an extended post of it followed me home.

A while back I had the urge to build a forge for my little shop. After hunting through the internet I found plans and ideas for building one from a refrigerant tank. I was given a number of empty refrigerant cylinders

and went about making one

I made the burner in the machine shop.

And made a stand for it as well.

 

This  seem to bring about telling the universe that I needed forges. Before I could even finish my home made forge This monster showed up. I was doing some work at a school and they were getting rid of there shop forge and foundry. This was being hauled out to the dumpster when I had them take it to my truck instead.

It is set up for natural gas instead of propane so the next step was to do a conversion on it. I obtain the manual and was setting up to buy all the necessary materials when the universe stepped in again. This 3 burner home made forge came about.

With this forge I just needed to upgrade the insulation and I was ready to rock and roll. Then this cute single burner forge came up and followed me home.

Finally the one I just posted about ended up at my home.

What I really need to do is to convince the universe to shift to anvils.

If this post needs to go to a different section please move it. Thanks for reading my story.

 

WOW; it's hard to beat free, but you did it

Now you have forges to trade for maybe an anvil......

 

I think you would still end up with a better forge, by finishing the one you started.

The big Johnson Gas Appliance trench forge is trading stock unless you're going into production work. I'd be awfully tempted to at least look into relining the Johnson Gas Appliance pedestal forge and converting it to propane or make NA burners for it. It's almost identical to the one in every metal shop class I took in Jr. high and high school. However it's primo trading stock as it stands. Johnson Gas Appliance offers excellent support for their products, manuals and parts are available for the asking. That one is IMNSHO the best of the lot, either as a keeper or anvil trade. Check out what the new price of one of those babies is.

The one you're making is so close to done it'll be a LOT less work than modifying and or relining the others. I see an anvil, post vise and maybe some other good tooling there. 

Frosty The Lucky.

One other thing is that Johnson has all the safety gear necessary for such items in schools these days---like flame out detectors; Not something I need in my personal shop but a plus in official smithies in litigious America!