Help building my first gas forge

C

cooper_luke_10

Joined
Dec 11, 2008
Messages
20
Hi how is it going. I've had the interest to do the knife making thing for a long time.
And I've recently had the chance to do a one on one course with a respected Australian knife maker and loved it. Back home now in Brisbane Australia I'm going about setting up a small home work shop (Its very slow).
I'm wondering if anyone could help with a little advice on my gas fan forced forge I'm building. It is only small, about 18inches long and has a 12 inch diametre.
The question is my burner. I'm planning to have a 2inch pipe reducing to a 1 1/4 inch pipe a couple of inches before it enters the forge, I'll have the gas line entering the 2 inch pipe from side on about 6 to 8 inches back from the 1 1/4 pipe.
the burner will enter the forge on a tangent to get the flame tunrning for an even heat.
If any one thinks this won't work out please give me a hand. any suggestions would be great, thanks for the help
Luke
 
As long as I'm picturing it correctly here, it should work just fine.

My forge is a fairly large vertical and for the burner it has is a 2" pipe from the blower, and it necks down with a 2:1 weld-on reducer. I have a stainless 1" pipe welded onto the 1" end of the reducer that is the actual end of the burner tip.
 
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where abouts in brissy mate? i'm down the south end of the gold coast. moving up soon to work on the airport link tunnel.:thumbup: By the way i made one of my burners as you r describing and it worked pretty good.
 
Use threaded fittings to start with (it makes changes in design easier). Try to get a stainless pipe for the burner nozzle (smaller piece of pipe). I would move the gas inlet back so it is about 12" from the forge ( the pipe can get hot). Make sure there is a needle valve in the gas line ( best place is where it enters the burner tube) and some sort of valve/choke/speed control on the air source. A 2" valve in the air line end of the burner will work fine.

If you want the burner to run a little better, add a mixing chamber to the burner tube. It is just after the place where the gas comes in. You use a bell fitting to take the pipe up to 3" ( use a 4" long piece of 3" pipe)and then back down to 1.25" .Kevin Cashen has a good setup like this on his site.
http://www.cashenblades.com/Info/Gas forges.html
He also has excellent info on forging and heat treatment that you may want to read
http://www.cashenblades.com/Info/Info.html

Take care,
Stacy
 
I followed Indian George's web site. Great tutorial on building a forge. Easy to follow and not very expensive. Built mine under $100.00 US. Been useing it over a year. No problems.
 
Thanks for the info. I am going to use all threaded fittings but at the moment none of it is stainless and don't have the mixing chamber but I'll definately look at adding those when I got a bit of extra time on my hands.
 
bladsmth said:
http://www.cashenblades.com/Info/Gas forges.html

Take care,
Stacy
Click to expand...

I wish I had come across that page when I was planning my forge. Simply for the fact that every other page was saying that you'll never run a forge on 20 Lb tanks and that you need to run 7-8 Lbs pressure to run the forge.

Hah! hogwash. My forge runs just fine on a 20 Lb tank and I can forge all day long at 3 - 4 Lbs propane pressure.

I nearly lost sleep over the thought of having to buy 100 Lb propane tanks and the fuel consumption...
 
69_knives said:
Simply for the fact that every other page was saying that you'll never run a forge on 20 Lb tanks and that you need to run 7-8 Lbs pressure to run the forge.

Hah! hogwash. My forge runs just fine on a 20 Lb tank and I can forge all day long at 3 - 4 Lbs propane pressure.
Click to expand...

I was told by many sources that you could not use natural gas at household pressure (less than 1 psi) to run a forge. Well I can tell you my forge can get to 2500F in 20 minutes running off of less than 1 psi natural gas. Can also adjust it to run down at the 1500F range quite easily as well. Don't let someone tell you it cannot be done if they have not tried it first hand.
 
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