blower or blowerless gas forges

L

Luke Smart

Joined
Aug 24, 2001
Messages
141
I have always used a coal forge, but I want to build or buy a gas forge. What do you iron bangers prefer? A gas forge with a blower or with a venturi burner? Is one better than the other? Thanks for the help!!

Luke
 
Luke: I wasn't smart enough to make my own gas forge. I bought a Mankel three burner with a blower and love it dearly.
 
I bought mine from Centaur Forge for about $600 It has 3 burners and a blower. It is what they call the knifemakers forge. Its very nice!
 
Luke: I have made two both with blowers. These babys crank up. The small one sound like a jet engine and get up to temp in a hurry had it up to 2600 deg.
 
The efficienct use of the gas seems to be much on the side of blower forge. Also the ease of building makes me wonder why anyone would buy a forge.
Cheaper, Lynn
 
I built my own forge, if you add up your time and materials etc'and time tuning to get it working properly ,it would be almost as cheap to buy new,but i did have the satisfaction of building it myself...
 
Roofers torch:$19.99(harborfreight.com)
20 firebricks:$30 (local brick co.)
Propane tank:$10 (flea market)
Propane:$12 (local gas co.)
Forging blades without spending big $$$: PRICELESS
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Now bear in mind that I did this just to whet my appetite to try my hand at forging(not to mention the fact that I am dirt poor),and I`m sure that a commercial forge or one made with more traditional designs would be much more efficient but my little experiment will show that with a little ingenuity and a little scrounging,one can try his hand at forging,with little $$ invested.I`ve tried it and like Mikey,I like it.
Scott
 
I have a Ron Riel (spelling?) burner design on my home-built forge. With two inches of ceramic wool and ITC coating, I can reheat a 5/8 inch square bar for about six inches of its length in a couple minutes with less than four psi of pressure. I can easily work at a good pace with less than 2 psi and the burner is so efficient, I can keep it running at less than one psi if I want to do some carefully controlled heat treating. I also think the mixture when you have an atmospheric (rather than forced air) burner, is more on the rich side which keeps the scale down.
Ed
:)
 
I want to thank all of you for the imformation. My little coal forge is alot fun to use, but my neighbors aren't so understanding!! A gas forge is the only answer. Although, I haven't decided whether or not to make or buy one. Again, thanks for the info.

Luke
 
Howdy,

just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents as well. I built a forge myself, and am very impressed with the results. They arn't alot of work, and it can be alot of fun. Mine is 12" long, 10" diameter steel tube, lined with Koa wool, cut up fire bricks and refractory cement sealing it all together. Common 1" pipe fittings do the trick for the burner, and I used an old tiger torch valve. My pyrometer says it gets up to 2450 degrees without a blower, and I've welded several damascus billets with it. Plans for similar forges are easy to obtain over the web. have a look in the Junkyard archive, most blacksmith pages, and Don Foggs web site. good luck.
 
Living close to Houston, I've thought about starting to use coal...

With all the new clean air regulations in effect, I might as well forge with coal in the mornings since I'm not supposed to start up my lawnmower until after midday! :)

C Wilkins
 
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