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I Forge Iron

Shop Build Foundation Question


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  • 1 month later...

I was supposed to break ground on my forge Monday, but when I did a last minute price check on my foundation materials I realized I was short in the wallet department.  I could have skipped insulating the foundation,, but just as I was thinking about that a 60 year-old guy appeared and slapped me on the back of my head.  He said he was me back from the future and that I better not make that shop floor cold to work on :D

Plan B emerged to get me by.  The big problem I have is rolling our 300 lbs of anvil + stand, my portable post vise, and everything else.  My garage / basement has a regular person sized door that's blocked by my scrap pile and I never used it because it just stepped out onto the lawn - easier to just open the garage door.  So Plan B involved me buying concrete pavers and making a 8x5 patio just outside the door.  The plan is to set up my anvil in a permanent spot by the door and just wheel the forge outside.  What used to take 40 minutes will take 2 minutes to roll the forge out the door onto the patio.  Prevailing winds will take the heat and gases away from the open door.  Stepping in and out of the door will be a pain, but it's only temporary .  The dedicated shop will have to wait until next year.  That's ok, I want to do it right and not skimp just to get it built.

Now before anyone thinks Plan B was easy, well, it was 97 degrees Monday and I had to dig down 6 inches by hand removing the dirt for the 8 x5 area, level and slightly slope it away from the building, compact the compactable gravel, lay the sand and the pavers.  Finished it just before dinner.  I've never sweat so much in my life.  I spent this morning regrading the area by hand so that water would run away from the patio and cleaning things up.  Now onto setting up the basement smithy.....well, I'm beat so probably that will be for another day.

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Yeah, the humidity is what was bad here.  Our dew points are in the 70's.  We are used to a few days of weather like that, but we've had a lot of hot days for an extended period of time here in NY and we just aren't used to it.  

TP - I bet you get tired of hearing "Sure, it's hot but it's a dry heat".  

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26% isn't dry...I use a swamp cooler and they work less efficiently as the humidity goes up so about 30% they are pretty much just blowing hot air around the house.  Now in single digit humidities they work very well indeed!  Of course I get to walk across the border in 105 degF heat on a regular basis; New Mexico where blacksmiths put metal from the scrap pile in the forge to cool it off! (Arizona where they have to play the hose on the scrap pile to keep it from melting together...)

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It is funny when we discuss humidity.. LOL..    Here was 90F with 90% humidity. Sweat doesn't evaporate.  We had a real spring this year and a real summer, but with the combination of the heat and humidity the air is thick enough to cut with a knife into blocks and put them in the freezer for ice cubes.. 

Out working on the trailer the plates were to hot to handle by hand had to wear gloves and use the air hose to blow air over the arms, and back to keep things manageable.. 
 

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Seems much easier to get used to low humidity than high.  I lived in central Ohio for 15 years with reasonably high humidities in the summer and then spent 7 months in NM. When I went back to oversee the shipping of my shop, (and wife and kids to NM) It was July and I noticed that standing in the shade with my head bent over sweat was running off the end of my nose.  Not dripping, running...I expect Quad-State will be warm this year. (One year I had ice form on top of my water bucket!)  Oh well, most likely I will survive, especially as my wife is talking about a motel room this year.

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9 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

especially as my wife is talking about a motel room this year.

Funny how life gets easier when the missus goes too. Deb bought an RV last fall, now THAT's camping. :) 

I'd talk about temperatures but I don't want to jinx us, it FINALLY got down into decent range under 60 f.

Frosty The Lucky.

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Here's an update on the temporary set-up.  I got the paver job done first.  Nothing fancy, just the cheapest 1x1's I could get.  I invested the rest into the foundation material including compactable gravel, paver sand, drainage, and polymetric sand to finish and lock the pavers in place.  In the end, I just needed an easy place to roll the forge out of the building to keep things cool and safe.

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After a couple of days of shifting around my workshop in the basement I was able to settle into this new temporary set-up which I'm really starting to like a lot.

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In the next month or so I hope to build a tong rack and a hammer rack for the portable work stand in front of the forge.  I hope to be able to sheet metal the top and roll my tools to wherever I'm working.  I'll also build chisel and punch holders on it so everything is in one spot.   So far, so good.  Now I need to get busy as I'm behind on forging projects.  You should have seen the space prior to cleaning it out enough to work in.  

 

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