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I Forge Iron

Portable kit


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Starting to assemble a small portable kit I could haul out to the woods or different areas to do some small blacksmithing with. It’s a pretty basic kit but hopefully should do the trick. I’ve bought some of the stuff but the large majority I’ve made myself. Anything obviously wrong/missing 

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Please double check the check valve, a bit of cold wood ash right in front of the nozzle will usually tell.  A lot of bellows don't have one; but when we are using it heavily right in the tue pipe inhaling a bit of hot charcoal makes for a nasty internal problem.  I've seen bellows yanked out of their mounting and jammed in the quench tank and inhaling water to put out an internal fire before. (Done it myself at least once...)

Funny that Theophilus doesn't use checkvalves in his metal working bellows but does in the portable organ bellows.  Of course the metalworking bellows were used in sets of two and so the alternation always has air going into the tue pipe and never just inhaling.

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Yea this bellows doesn’t suck anything in when I inflate it. Only from the center of the wood. I also planned on maybe a tool box with a smaller built in Japanese style box bellows. And I have a buffalo forge blower that’s 6” and pretty light so I could reasonably take it with if i could find a way to set it up and use that. It would probably be the. Best air supply. For the size. Besides electric that’s is. I’d rather keep it without electricity 

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Two of those single lung bellows with a “Y”  would be very similar to the Iron Age set up used for hundreds of years. Now a very serviceable double acting bellows is the double quick III by intex I don’t recommend  the double quick III s as the outlet is in the handle. This will get a 3/4” schedule 40 pipe tuyere up to welding heat with charcoal. Cheap, light and no building anything.  

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In one of my internal dialogue brainstorming sessions some time ago I sketched up a design for a tool box that carried my blacksmith kit and served as the bellows. I settled on a basic box bellows. One end of the tool box slides inside the rest of the box and is held in place when masquerading as a tool box by a few screws or maybe a catch. I didn't debug the fiddly bits I just sketched the basics. 

I also thought of making it so two halves were a telescoping pair with valves but it required more precision and wood expands and contracts with humidity so I just made a few concept sketches and tabled it.

My hinged version that behaved more like the bellows pictured above was a lot more complicated so I didn't do more than a couple concept sketches, problems included and tabled it. 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

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My hand cranked blower will blow the charcoal right out of the firepot if I crank it too fast. About 6 rpm's for forging and just a little faster for welding. I have one of the double action mattress  pumps also but it's the one with the hose in the handle. I used it with no problems except I had to put a few wraps of masking tape around the flange that the hose connects to so it would have a better friction fit. I had no problems out of it after that. 

Pnut

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But if you want to get real authentic just dig a hole about knee deep, then you can sit wile you work a ground forge. If you use the dirt from the hole to make adobe you can then stand in the hole, work the forge and have a short anvil stand. See our ancestors (and smiths in Asia, India and Africa) aren’t so dumb...

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I've done a lot of forging around a camp fire and a bag make a fine bellows. Using a piece of pipe from the bag to the fire you open the mouth of the bag to inflate it and close the bag around the pipe to blast the fire. It work amazingly well and you can improve it with a stick or two to press down on the bottom of the bag. OR you can tape a stone to the middle and let it provide a slow steady blast. By bottom I mean the end farthest from the opening. A pillow case makes a fine bellows.

Frosty The Lucky.

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If the intent is to haul all that out and set up a workshop, I'd suggest you include something to cut dead-fall for an anvil stump.  You'll also likely need a shovel that's big enough to dig what you need, but small enough to tend your fire.

You'll probably need a bucket for water to serve as a quench tank and as your fire extinguisher.  You don't wanna start any forest fires.

That's a fair bit of kit to haul into timber.  You might want to consider some kind of backpack.  I knew a guy who took old WW2 stretchers and put two bicycle wheels on an axle in the middle.  It made a dandy game hauling cart.

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Bag bellows are something I’m also looking at.
 

Half the year there is snow so I can use a sled and I’m not into camping like the kind where you hike a few miles into the woods I just drive to the Middle of the forest on our land and Setup a small camp there. So I wouldn’t need to carry that far. But I will find a saw and definitely a fire extinguisher. I always have a extinguisher in the car so that’s already covered. As for a quench tank I was thinking an ammo can 

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