Coal Fired Forges; how many of us are there

Most of the coal in my area is bituminous. But it's not the best; it doesn't work well for forge welding, too many impurities. It's easy to make coke but I just like using coal. We had a gas forge in high school and that's where I did my first forging. Even now I'm building a portable forge with a hand crank blower, my portable anvil used to be train track, I added a press break die for the heal and some 1&1/2" hydraulic shaft for the horn.
We had a coal furnace growing up, it was my job to fill the stoker. The smell of burning coal is "home"
 
A family coal story:
My Grandfather left Germany during the European Depression in 1930. He arrived in New Jersey just in time for the US Great Depression. Our depression was a walk in the park compared to what happened in Europe, where whole governments went broke.
Anyway, He was a somewhat famous German Berg Arbiter ( open pit coal miner) in Germany sort of like a John Henry character. He had been the national weight lifting champion and a wrestling champ before WW1. At one time while recuperating from an accident while mining, he learned how to run and feed high pressure boilers at a brick factory.
When he immigrated, a friend who had encouraged him to come to America helped him immediately get a job running high pressure boilers at a large greenhouse complex. He didn't speak English, the owner didn't speak German, but 80° is 80° in both languages. Grandpa worked 7 days a week through the entire depression, earning a very good wage, and didn't learn English until four years later.
 
The first forge I used to try to make a titanium blade was a coal forge, because my farrier buddy said coal was "the best for forging." I made the forge out of a Datsun truck bumper, split in half and welded together into a rectangular firepot, mounted on a steel pedestal through which air was blown up and into the coal. The forge was loaded with coal bought from a farrier's shop and fired up, and soon people in the other workshop bays were coming out to see if the building was on fire. 😂

The titanium bar was destroyed, and I learned shortly after through research that heating in a coal bed is just about the worst thing you can do to a titanium alloy. Turns out propane is one of the best ways, even used for making forged aerospace parts which are obviously held to very high standards in manufacture.

I ended up buying my farrier friend's propane horseshoe forge soon after that little adventure. Wish I still had the Datsun bumper coal forge around, though. Would have been fun to have for other purposes like forging mild steel parts for weldments.
 
I missed the coal forge - He sure turned out a good war hammer. In this world we can't make polack jokes anymore - only redneck/hillbilly jokes.
 
Ken, That brings back a funny memory.
When I was in Jr. High back in the 1960's we wanted to hold a spring sock-hop. The school had no budget for it, so we proposed to raise the money selling a joke book for $1 a copy to the students and faculty. The principal was fine with that and offered to have the school provide the paper, do the duplication, and staple them together. They made 250 copies, and all sold immediately. We made another 100 copies and they sold out. $350 threw a big dance back then - DJ, food, and decorations.
To get the jokes for the book we put a box in front of the office and had people submit their best jokes. There were elephant jokes, and other ones, a few very ethnic/racial jokes which we quickly discarded, but by far the most were Polish jokes (which we did not think of as ethnic back then). The book had 100 jokes and was titled, "144 Polacks and 99 More." I won't tell the first joke , which was about about 144 Polacks, but I'm sure most of you can figure it out. Today, the entire faculty would be fired and the other class officers and I would be expelled. I still find some of those jokes funny, but others not so much.
Twenty years before our joke book, Al Capp had to change his ethnic/national/intellectual jokes after the war, so he invented the Lower Slobovians. If you are under fifty or sixty, you probably don't know those names - google them.
 
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