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Ceramic brick forge


Dani L.

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For starters, I'm relatively new to smithing. I took a class last year and have read books and forums on this site and finally decided to get my own setup.

My plan is to start small with horseshoe nails. On etsy I found this fire brick forge for knifemaking. I would like some personal thoughts if this would be a good starter forge or if making a box out of several bricks would be better. Any recommendations with brick brands? I would use a propane torch with it instead of a tank. 

Link to etsy listing

Any additional guidance to help a rookie would be appreciated. Thanks

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That forge is pretty much a joke.  Very inefficient and grossly underpowered.  You'd be lucky to do small nails with it..and even then, they'd take much too long to heat.  Calling it a forge for knife making is plain old bending the truth into a pretzel.

Rather than go into details, I suggest you do some reading on this site under gas forges.  It'll  Start to show you the differences between good and bad ideas and what you really should be looking for. Cheap forges are generally cheap for a reason--often being that you'll pay 10 times more than a good one would have cost in wasted gas due to inefficiency over its life.

And you can do a cheap small gas forge--usually you have to "roll your own" though because the commercial cheap one's I've seen are all poor designs.

And..just to add to the problem, do not believe what you see on most youtube videos on the subject.  There is a huge amount of bad advice on there, presented in ways that look legitimate.

Remember, you pay for a forge every single time you use it...in fuel and your own wait times for heating, as well as more subtle ways.  That initial price is small compared to the "use" costs so it's virtually always worth throwing a little more at the front end of the transaction to save bigger bucks at the back.

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Welcome aboard Mustang, glad to have you. There are a number of easy to make small forges that'll actually do the job. Don't be in a hurry to spend money based on marketing BS. (that's the BS that doesn't stand for Blacksmithing. ;))

When you search Iforge do NOT use the onboard search engine, it stinks big smelly ones. Use your usual search engine and add Iforgeiron to the search terms, works a treat. For terms try "Bean Can forge" or "2 brick forge" They're a good start and we'll help. 

We usually recommend some reading of known vetted material, IFI is a good place we tend to be a self correcting forum, bad information doesn't go unchallenged very long, sometimes minutes.  Reading up an a subject may not tell you what you need to know but it'll give you a handle on the jargon so we won't have to describe common (to us) terms or keep asking what the heck you just asked. Make sense? 

Once you know enough to ask good questions and understand the answers we'll have you up and smithing in no time. We're like that you know helping folk addict themselves to blacksmithing is sort of like a mission. :)

Frosty The Lucky.

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