Fogg designed, Norris built forge at Ashokan 2006

[Chris Meyer]

The demonstrators at Ashokan this year were using a gas forge that Paul Norris built based on a design by Don Fogg. It’s a medium sized forced air forge with doors on both sides and a lid that come off. I thought I overheard Paul telling someone that it was made from an old Argon gas tank. I did hear Don say that the exterior shell could be made of almost anything, even a piece of stove pipe. I believe that the interior of the forge is lined with an inswool blanket, which is then coated with rigidizer. (You can see a bottle of Ins-Tuff in one of the pictures.) I thought that the coolest part was the little pancake fan just to the side of the front door of the forge. The fan is to blow the heat and flames to the side so that you don’t cook your hand when putting a piece of steel into the forge, or when taking it out. What a great idea! This forge worked great. It came up to welding heat quickly and appeared to be quite simple to adjust. I’m going to have to try to build one of these.

Don has a page on his website that explains how to build this forge in more detail.

The Paul Norris built, Don Fogg designed forge in action.

Forge, front view. Note the small “muffin” fan by the door opening.

Forge, rear view.

Rear view, with bottle of rigidizer.

Forge, side view.

Forge, top view.

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[Don Hanson III]

This is a great forge design, I made a large vertical forge like this around 6 years ago for damascus and blade forging :thumbup: After building and using many gas forges, I finally found the one for me. Thanks for the photos.

 

[John Frankl]

Awesome forge. I have a few in different sizes. All get screaming hot with minimal gas and air. I like the muffin fan and burner mounts on this one.

John

 

[Matthew Gregory]

I spoke with Don at some length about this forge... it is rarely used at over 1psi (I used it at less than 1psi later that night!) of propane with the air gate just barely open for forging work... obviously slightly higher for forge-welding, but Don said there's no need for use of gas pressures over 3psi in most cases, even with a reducing fire. It came up to temperature in no time, and because the top comes off you could open it to clean it out, or even speed up it's cool-down time in case you needed to move it or something. At some point in time I'll start on a larger version of this one... I just need to come up with some way to divert some of my blower air for use as a blast gate in place of the biscuit fan shown here.