Any chance someone may be able to identify original use or application for these?

[GonzoAcres]

A friend of mine recently gifted two of these assemblies to me upon recognizing they were some sort of high heat burner, he acquired them in a storage unit auction so no background on where they may have come from.  Our town is home to the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi, it's not uncommon to encounter some amazing pieces of equipment from days gone by collecting dust in barns or garages that were bought or salvaged and brought home by a steel-mill employee.

I'm just wondering what they would have been used to heat? The "chimney" shown was with them, and sort of fits on top of them but not very well, it is metal with glaze like smooth coating on its horizontal surfaces, similar to enamel on an old cast iron tub or sink almost.  Placing the chimney on top of them negates any access to the high heat of the interior so i'm guessing it was just an attempt by someone to find a chimney but is not actually associated directly with them.
   
The ring around the top has T&G sides case into each individual cast iron piece and a heavy band around the outside to keep the pieces locked together, each piece also has a foot tab that fits into a space and connects the pieces to the base of the body of the device, which has two air spaces in it, one which is in the center and is sized to hold a cast venturi burner ring similar to what you'd expect under a turkey fryer, but matching the diameter of the center of this pot just below the ring of cast pieces that sits on top, and the internal airspace which is fed by the two rectangular openings on the side of the pot and feeds air through the slots on the cast iron pieces just above the burner assembly.

I apologize if I'm posting this in wrong forum, New here, been a lurker for a couple years finally decided to pull the trigger on jump in to hobby smithin and really appreciate the experience and perspective you guys have made available here.. 

 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Welcome from the Ozark mountains.

If you put your general location in your profile it will show with every post. So many answers depend upon location for an accurate answer. As far as those items, I have no clue but they sure look like maybe part of a steel mill furnace. Would that have been Geneva Steel?

[Frosty]

Welcome aboard, glad to have you. I'm clueless about your burner thingies but I'm fascinated especially with their construction. 

What kind of things do you want to forge? What do you have for a kit?

Frosty The Lucky.

[George N. M.]

Welcome aboard from 7500' in SE Wyoming.  Glad to have you.

Although I worked for 3 summers in the steel mills in Indiana and Illinois when I was in college I do not recognize any of this.  For some reason it gives me a sense that it might have been used for either melting metal for casting or some sort of small batch refining of metal.  I can't quantify that but that is my sense.

Like Irondragon says please put your general location in your profile and we can give you better answers.  This is a worldwide forum and we don't know if you are in Lapland or Tasmania or the Dark side of the Moon.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[lary]

The first picture reminds me of the fire pot of a coal furnace.

 

 

[GonzoAcres]

I'm in Pueblo, CO, home of the former Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill, now an Evraz owned rail mill. In its day I'm told it produced every piece of rail west of the Mississippi. Pueblo still has a very rich culture and history created as a result of the Mills presence, as well as what I gather is a common story of the impact of mills closing down on communities, which is still quite evident everywhere you look in town. 

Lary that certainly looks like exactly the kind of set up that would mate up to the machined face on the outside! I will look into coal furnace construction but i'm almost positive that's what it is thanks! So would this have been placed under a boiler with some means of feeding coal into it? I'm imagining some sort of auger set up similar to the feed on a wood pellet stove maybe? Coal furnaces were long before my time, and I am only recently learning about how coal was actually utilized in industry, which is sort of interesting to me because my grandfather who passed before I was born owned a heating oil business in the Norfolk, VA area, no doubt having to work with coal furnaces as well... But having grown up in the "sustainability" era we were literally not taught anything about coal at all in any of our schooling, it was just demonized as "the old way of doing things"

 

[George N. M.]

In the early '50s my grandparents in Duluth, MN had a coal fired furnace which was fed by an "Iron Fireman" system which was a hopper into which you shoveled coal and an auger feed into the furnace.  As a little boy I was fascinated by the logo which was a robot (sort of like the Tim Woodsman in the Wizard of Oz) shovelling coal.

FYI, in modern coal fired power plants they use a "fluidized bed" combustion system where pulverized coal is blown into the combustion chamber and air is also blown in and the fire is sort of a hot ball suspended in the middle of the combution chamber.  Looking in through a viewing port is like looking into the center of Hell.  Impressive and scary.

GNM

[GonzoAcres]

Also thanks for all the warm welcomes, sorry for the absence of location info.  In terms of forging experience and interests, totally green, maybe not as much as some as much of my life has involved a pretty close relationship to older forms of blacksmithing and forging, I was involved with Rendezvous groups through boyscout's growing up in Northern Florida, Loved competing in throwing hawk competitions as a pre-teen and have always been a "maker" who loves creating things, leather work, bead work, wood work, growing up my parents traveled a bit with the crafts fair circuits, dad did the wood work and mom had a counted cross-stitch pattern book business,  to this day my best friends mother is a fairly world renowned jeweler specializing in teaching old somewhat lost techniques associated with working with the silver alloy argentium.

I went into the world of high end professional culinary arts in my young life profession, ultimately ending up in Denver/Boulder area of Colorado almost 20 years ago, where I trained as a Sushi Chef and took on the executive chef position of a Popular Sushi restaurant which operated out of the building that had been used as the Cafe set in Mork and Mindy. Being a sushi chef was my introduction to the true beauty of a well made, purpose built Japanese knives and the various benefits of the different steel alloys, before the recent popularity of Damascus which was certainly around but not nearly as over blown and watered down as it is now, of course we liked damascus knives for their beauty, but there are plenty of other combinations of steel alloys which when applied by a master knife maker look to be on their face "regular" knives, but upon using them their incredible properties become very apparent... Even in those years, while I loved my 300-400 dollar chefs knives, forging my own never really crossed my mind, and frankly still doesn't. Being a profession chef led me back to the roots of humanity, Agriculture... And in learning about "organic agriculture", which prior to basically 1920 was just called Agriculture by all humans, I began to read farming texts from 1800's and early 1900's, again, because prior to WWI and WWII all agriculture was organic, and that sent me down the path of gaining an appreciation for the ingenuity of which existed in humanity at the time, something that I certainly feel has largely been bred or beaten out of many Americans (likely other places to, but i can only speak to my experience here).. 

  Agriculture being the root of just about every other human endeavor, with blacksmithing being one of the few skills of humanity that predates agriculture, I gained an appreciation for all the ways humans have found to make farming easier, more efficient etc, and the immense amount of consideration that went into the invention and design of all the tools used in agriculture, and tools in general. Not to beat a dead horse, but as I'm sure most of you are aware of the trend away from tools made to last, made to do actual work, and made to make specific tasks able to be accomplished better.... so here I am in the infancy of learning to weld, and work with metal in a much more meaningful way, while enjoying not dealing with the low paying ratrace of the culinary world, as a chef at least and working on Family farms and with local food groups in an effort to learn and share my knowledge in hopes of fostering a sense in people that they can grow food, and that the food grown in their communities tastes better, is fresher, and doesn't support this shift towards the top caused by corporate control over everything in our supply chains ...

 

[GonzoAcres]

On 12/16/2022 at 4:01 AM, lary said:

The first picture reminds me of the fire pot of a coal furnace.

 

 

Thats gotta be what is! So based on a quick web search this is the tuyere/firepot of a "Underfeed Stoker" system, the area which mine had a propane burner inserted is actually were the auger from the coal bin forces new coal into the burn chamber, coal and air come in from the bottom and the raw coal is slowly forced up into the combustion zone above where the air is being mixed in by the interlocking pieces on the top, and all the clinker and ash by product just gathers around the edges of the burn pot to be scraped out at a later time.. its like a reverse system of a standard table forge with tuyere and ash dump which is fed by raw coal on the table around the fire pot....

more or less I guess it could be an auger fed smithing fire pot that didn't need to have raw coal and coke hanging out on it to be fed into the fire. maybe even place a couple fire bricks on each side  with openings in the middle for the ash and clinker to fall into a fire safe catchment of some sort, which would also serve as the area where a work piece was placed while heating? Maybe getting ahead of myself but i'll certainly hang on to them incase after learning my way around a traditional solid fuel setup ( i'm going with a design based entirely off the whitlock forge for a solid fuel set up, though I'm open to suggestions)

 

 

[George N. M.]

Gonzo, I very strongly suggest that you look up Rocky Mountain Smiths, join, and attend the various gatherings and functions.  You will learn a lot. Very good bunch of folks.  They are the local equivalent of the I Forge Iron crew.

Also, depending on how you define it, agriculture predates the use of metals by millenia.  The Native Americans were practicing agriculture with wooden and stone tools and various Old World cultures were agriculturalists long before even copper came into use.  And there were some pre-agricultural societies which were using metal, e.g. the OLd Copper Culture of Northern Wisconsin and MIchigan which was using the native copper from that area.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[anvil]

You are in my old neck of the woods. I had my full time 30+ year traditional blacksmithing business out of Woodland Park. My Dads side were middle European immigrants and worked the coal mines on the eastern slope and the steel mill in Pueblo. They ended up in the mines around the Springs and ranching out twards Calhan. The mill is still pretty vivid in my memory when it was in its hayday,,, nearly up to the time it cut down to a third or less of its working size. My Moms side were gold miners. My great Grandfather came to Colorado as a govt Assayer when it was a territory. He started in Leadville( In the daze of Molly Brown) and ended  up in Cripple Creek, then the Springs. Good memories of the mines in Cripple Creek and watched it boom again when they legalized gambling. Considering my family background, I guess you might say I followed their pathway with a twist. Spent my life learning how to work with coal and iron and turn it into gold.,,,,   

[ThomasPowers]

I've been watching a lot of master Japanese smiths lately using trench forges burning charcoal and "improvised" anvils looking like a chunk of fork lift tine steel.  They seem to be doing Ok and I like the design better than the   "whitlox".

[Frosty]

If you have some free reading time and an interest in early human civilizations check out "Gobekli Tepe," it's the earliest known masonry structures Cir, 12,000BPE. The evidence seems to say organized religion predated agriculture and grain was planted and harvested largely to make beer. They were WAY earlier than copper.

A JABOD forge is very versatile and can be made for next to nothing. I made one resembling a Whitlox early on and frankly couldn't afford to feed it for what I could get done with it. 

Frosty The Lucky.