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I Forge Iron

Sweet Spot


19Branden86

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I have a rivet forge that I made from everybody's favorite, a deep brake rotor. I've been using it for nearly a year now with coal I have been getting from Amazon. I'm tired of paying $30 for a 30 pound box of coal. The nearest place that sells it is a 4 hour round trip. I work 55 hours a week and have a beautiful wife and 6 wonderful children which makes it hard to take a road trip for some coal. Now, long story short, I'm going to start buying bags of lump charcoal to forge with. It's relatively inexpensive here, much more so than what I have been paying for coal. I know coal has a reducing layer, a sweet spot, so to speak, that produces less fire scale for doing forge welds. Having used coal for so long, I have gotten fairly decent at finding that sweet spot in a coal fire and have done some decent welds, such as attaching two separate pieces with a scarf weld and faggot welding bar stock to make basket twists and such. My question is two-fold: Does the sweet spot depth change much with charcoal? If so, I will have to make the appropriate changes to my forge, and 2: Does charcoal produce more or less scale in general? 

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Charcoal uses much less air than coal and you should have a deeper fire. When I go to charcoal in a coal forge I usually stack firebrick along side the firepot to make it deeper but keep the width as small as possible---I want more of a  |__|  fire not a \________/ fire.  If you have access to scrap wood you can make your own charcoal or even build a wood fire and use a shovel to transfer hot coals to the forge.  Note highschool Bonfires can be a good supply of charcoal the next day!

Sorry but there is *NO* IN GENERAL to that question.  It will produce more, less or the same depending on your forge, air flow how you position and work the piece.  Charcoal is better used with a hand crank blower or bellows as an electric blower usually burns up way too much charcoal---and steel!

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