Forge floor

Rick Lowe

Rick Lowe

Joined
Jan 6, 2005
Messages
1,331
I'm ready to line my forge and get it fired, but have a question about the floor. The plan is to use a hard fire brick as the floor. Should it rest on the Inswool or on the metal case? Do I coat over the brick with Satanite and Itc-100? Maybe this is answering the last question, but the bare fire brick is the ticket for forge welding and flux. I plan to use this one for forging and treat only, so maybe the brick is over kill. What do y'all think?
 
On mine I put cat litter over the insulwool and then a 1" furnace brick. The brick is disposable after it gets eaten by flux. The cat litter is a flux sponge and is easily replaced.
 
On the bottom of my forges I use hard firebricks resting on the Inswool and between the gap between firebricks and Inswool I fill up with Stanite mixed with Kitty-Litter. The flux will build up on the bricks and not eat through.:D
 
you will get better heat out of a soft brick. Since you are not welding in it anyway...

the hard ones take a lot of heat to come up to temp.
When the hard bricks are cold they will "suck" heat out of the work.
It's doable just takes longer for the forge to warm up
 
Sweany said:
you will get better heat out of a soft brick. Since you are not welding in it anyway...

the hard ones take a lot of heat to come up to temp.
When the hard bricks are cold they will "suck" heat out of the work.
It's doable just takes longer for the forge to warm up
Click to expand...
I never noticed it taking longer. I use the half bricks in the bottom. I can get up to welding temp on a warm day in 6 to 8 minutes.:D
 
Thanks for the ideas! I'm going with the brick on the wool and coat up to it with the top coats. On the bricks though, the soft ones do relect heat more, so for regular non welding applictions, wouldn't that be more effective?
 
I cut the hard bricks in half.They make great forge bed liners.The fact that they heat up slowly makes them good for stable temperature control once the forge is up to temp.
 
There is another refractory coating called bubble alumina that is supposed to be very resistant to flux. Ive never used it personally but some of my buddies have and they swear by it. Darren Ellis keeps it on hand....MIKE
 
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