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I Forge Iron

Ribbon Burner Forge


mike-hr

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McraigL and I teamed up and built two new forges, I finished mine last week, and am really happy with it. The shell is 12-3/4 inch OD well casing by 18 inches long. We bedded boiler bricks in the bottom for a floor, grouted in with castable refractory cement. A piece of half inch thick kiln shelf sets on the boiler brick for a replacable floor. Inside wrapped with 1-1/2 inch Kaowool, coated with ITC100. The usable area came out to be 6-1/2 tall x 9 inch wide inside measurement. Propane is injected via a MIG tip drilled out to 1/16 inch, plumbed in by using a Thread-a-Let welded to the elbow. a 2 inch gate valve makes for excellent control of incoming air from the blower.
John at Gearhart Ironwerks turned us on the the ribbon burner. Glass blowers have been using them for some time. It uses Mizzou refractory cement poured around crayons for a lost wax technique to create the burner holes. John told me folks are getting approx. one third better 'mileage' on a tank of propane, I don't think he's far off. These burners are really efficient. We mounted the burners above the centre line of the forge area to get a swirl of flame inside. The typical 'hotspot' opposite the burner is greatly reduced, and I have been pulling out 18 inches of hot steel of consistent color. Great for pickets and railings. Some folks have complained that these forges will burn up steel, but with the fuel valve and the air valve right there, I can turn it down to a low blood red color real easy.
In conclusion, there's many ways to make forges, here's one more to help keep everybody confused..

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Scratch, the ceramic part of the burner measures 3 x 9-1/2 inches. Once the forge is at temperature, the heat distributes through the whole chamber.
WWW, I'd be happy to do a write-up on it, once the BP section here gets ironed out. I did two BP's over 6 months ago on a couple different projects. They aired on a Tuesday, but haven't seen any daylight since. It takes a bit of energy to write up a BP, I just want to make sure they didn't die first. There has been articles in the ABANA mags and the CBA(California) newsletter describing the burner.
RT, I don't know why it's called a ribbon burner. That's how it was presented to me...

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Scratch, the ceramic part of the burner measures 3 x 9-1/2 inches. Once the forge is at temperature, the heat distributes through the whole chamber.
WWW, I'd be happy to do a write-up on it, once the BP section here gets ironed out. I did two BP's over 6 months ago on a couple different projects. They aired on a Tuesday, but haven't seen any daylight since. It takes a bit of energy to write up a BP, I just want to make sure they didn't die first. There has been articles in the ABANA mags and the CBA(California) newsletter describing the burner.
RT, I don't know why it's called a ribbon burner. That's how it was presented to me...


I'm sure I'm not the only one interested in seeing a "how-to" on this. Even if the 1/3rd thing isn't quite accurate, it still looks like a good/different way to get a nice even heat!
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Roy, thanks for that link. I've experienced the pre-ignition situation when I was goofing around with how cool I could get the forge to run, but still run. Since it was new, I noticed my greasy fingerprint marks were smoking behind the burner, where it's usually cool to the touch. I shut the gas feed off for a few seconds, and then re-opened it. It started running good again. My low tech blacksmith indicator for if this happens again, is I put a dab of axle grease behind the burner on the air pipe. If the grease starts smoking, I know what to look for. It's a bad idea to leave any forge unattended.

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This style of burner was more common in the 50's and before.
There are a few older styles of gas forges and household boilers that used these.

My sister in law threw away a heater with 8+ of them in the bottom.
She thought we were kidding about driving up and taking care of it for her.

They had steam radiators throughout their house and the boiler had a large mica peek window.

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