Carcoal furnace on the cheap

[huntmaster99]

Good... whatever time it is (Midnight shift sucks)

Anyways, ive taken a keen interest into wootz steel and am trying to lay the groundwork for that future project. Ive seen people get a crucible up to temperature to melt steel in usually one of two ways: 1 using a diesel fuel burner and the other being solid fuel. I can accomplish both but its a lot easier to blow air into charcoal than to build a diesel burner then the refractory encasement to go with it. What ive seen people do (and by people I mean FZ making knives on youtube) I basically stack up some refractory bricks just to hold the coals, fill it full of charcoal and blow tons of air up the bottom.

This seems like an easy enough way to do it although I plan to do it with a side-blast design for ease. Without buying a forge blower I have an older blow dryer that could be used, people have been using those forever now. But my question is will that reasonably get up to temperature or am I going to need to do something crazy like hook my air compressor up and regulate the pressure so I dont blow the coals out.

Thoughts and recommendations?

[Goods]

You need a volume of air not pressure. See if you can find an electric blower on the cheap. The one I use on my forge is fresh air blower for a gas furnace. Got it for free from a buddy that runs a repair business. I hooked it up to a cheap riostat(sp?) from eBay and very rarely have it above half speed with coal. A hair dryer would work, but you’ll probably need to dump a lot of the flow. Lump charcoal doesn’t take much air to get screaming hot.

Keep it fun,

David

[ThomasPowers]

Compressors: expensive to buy, expensive to repair, hard on the ears, produce little and high pressure air.

Blowers: cheap to scrounge, cheap to replace, quieter on ears, sized right they produce a lot of air at a good pressure.

Yes you can use your $250K Purdey  shotgun as a canoe paddle; but WHY?