Ribbon burner forge or blown vertical forge

Knife freaky

Knife freaky

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Dec 1, 2016
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I am really torn between a blown vertical forge or a ribbon burner horizontal forge. I'm still light years away from Damascus so that's not a big concern right now. Which would you choose and why?

Thanks!
 
If your not doing Damascus with flux then I would not consider a vertical Forge. I have a horizontal and vertical and I use the vertical for flux but man I do love having a floor the set things on. This is why I am switching to a horizontal ribbon burner with the burner coming in through the side.
 
Having the floor to set things on is exactly why I was thinking of the ribbon burner. Would it make much difference if it was coming in from the side as opposed to the top? From what I have seen those things have a very even heat and the flames don't come directly onto your work. It's more of a indirect heat. I could be completely wrong.
 
I built a vertical and it's great for damascus. I have a little Atlas for general forging. But I'll eventually build a ribbon with a floor because the vertical sucks for everything else, and not all my general forging will fit in the Atlas.
 
Build a horizontal blown or venturi forge.

Ribbon burners are advanced, require very specific characteristics to make, and tricky tuning. They're also, much less convenient for short forging sessions, but shine when run for 8 hours a day.


They require lots of tuning for different temps, and can be dangerous if you don't have all the right considerations in the design. Most of the people building off the plans available on the internet get backfiring, either because of too many jets, and not enough blower pressure.

It's the "cool" thing these days (I started using one full time 5 or 6 years ago), but there's very little advantage to one unless you're using it for production damascus or high volume forging that requires a very large (by knifemaker standards) forge.



I'm not sure why none of you guys don't just build "blown" horizontals, using the same type of burner that everyone uses on verticals. There's absolutely no reason that won't work, and it's quick and easy.
 
javand said:
I'm not sure why none of you guys don't just build "blown" horizontals, using the same type of burner that everyone uses on verticals. There's absolutely no reason that won't work, and it's quick and easy.
Click to expand...

I guess the main reason I didn't really consider that was the perception I have from venturi fired horizontal forges, that the heating just isn't going to be very even with a single burner. Sure, angle, swirl, all that, but the verticals develop a nice even heat zone because they're vertical, and horizontals tend to have hot spots. And supposedly, a ribbon burner helps reduce that.
 
I built a big horizontal blown forge. It is correct that the heating isn't perfectly even across the full length. It never will be. But then if you aren't using it for HT, this isn't really a problem. If you are, then you have the same issues you always have heat treating from a forge. The blown burner still beats the venturi. I can push probably 2-4 million BTU from the burner (850CFM blower if I remember correctly), overkill sure, but there is no kill like overkill.

If you want to have a (more) even heat, do 2-3 smaller burners and "Y" off air from your blower. This route will require a bit more care as you want to get an even air flow to each burner. I tried this and found it effective but unnecessary (and like I said, you have to adjust each burner independently).
 
kuraki said:
I guess the main reason I didn't really consider that was the perception I have from venturi fired horizontal forges, that the heating just isn't going to be very even with a single burner. Sure, angle, swirl, all that, but the verticals develop a nice even heat zone because they're vertical, and horizontals tend to have hot spots. And supposedly, a ribbon burner helps reduce that.
Click to expand...

They can, certainly, but it's not the horizontal forge that's the issue, it's the venturis.


Although spot heat for general forging, I consider advantageous. I think there's a big misconception that you should have your entire work piece heated every time you come out of the forge, but in reality, that's not really ideal at all. For general forging, I personally much prefer a single venturi in a 2 brick type forge.


Problem with a ribbon burner, besides what I mentioned earlier, is that they really don't respond well to tune adjustment. You can't easily "crank it up", or "crank it down" to get up to temp real fast, or idle. You can with a standard blown burner, and all you need is a ball valve, and a semi decent blower with a damper. It's pretty quickly apparent when you're out of reasonable range, but nothing too dramatic happens.

With a ribbon burner, a tiny tweak of any input variable can cause your temp to go nuts, the forge to start making the absolute worst, window shaking sound you've ever heard (this is very common btw, they're whisper quiet when at heat and properly tuned, but the same tuning, heating up, below 1800 degrees with sound like a freight train horn blowing in your shop), or, cause the burner to start backfiring inside the manifold, which is potentially very dangerous. I know of a couple of people that have had their burners explode and almost catch the shop on fire.

Even with perfect tuning, if a chunk breaks off of the burner casting, all hell can break loose.


If I didn't have the rolling mill that necessitates, fully evenly heated work pieces (what else requires this other than HT?), I'd still be using a vertical for making steel.

A big enough horizontal blown (non ribbon), might necessitate two burners, that could easily be run off the same tank/blower/valving, just to spread the heat, but it would be very simple to make, and much more forgiving than the ribbon.
 
joedhiggins said:
I built a big horizontal blown forge. It is correct that the heating isn't perfectly even across the full length. It never will be. But then if you aren't using it for HT, this isn't really a problem. If you are, then you have the same issues you always have heat treating from a forge. The blown burner still beats the venturi. I can push probably 2-4 million BTU from the burner (850CFM blower if I remember correctly), overkill sure, but there is no kill like overkill.

If you want to have a (more) even heat, do 2-3 smaller burners and "Y" off air from your blower. This route will require a bit more care as you want to get an even air flow to each burner. I tried this and found it effective but unnecessary (and like I said, you have to adjust each burner independently).
Click to expand...


To be clear, heating isn't perfectly even across any ribbon burner forge I've ever seen either. There are *always* cold spots in the corners, and if you don't have exactly the same sized openings on either end, you'll have different rates of heat loss and expansion of gasses, etc, causing minor variations.

If you put a burner pipe at the front and the rear coming in at the top shooting horizontally around an arched roof however, I have zero doubt it'd be every bit as even as a ribbon or slot burner. There's no magic voodoo going on with the ribbons, you're just spreading out a lot of little burner jets. However, consider most of us are running 8-14" long burners, in forges twice the length, and you get the same results.
 
All fair points I hadn't really considered.

So, one of the current challenges I have is twists. It really sucks to do twists in my vertical. I can heat them evenly enough, but with rebar welded to them because I can't use tongs, I'm really limited to how I can twist them, and it's impossible to water quench the end with the rebar. So that's really the one thing that was forefront in my mind about needing even heat over a longer length.

Now I do realize I could twist shorter lengths etc. I was just kind of tunnel visioned on a ribbon burner being the solution to that problem. But I can think of a few ways to resolve it with a blown horizontal or multiple burner blown horizontal.

Thanks.
 
kuraki said:
All fair points I hadn't really considered.

So, one of the current challenges I have is twists. It really sucks to do twists in my vertical. I can heat them evenly enough, but with rebar welded to them because I can't use tongs, I'm really limited to how I can twist them, and it's impossible to water quench the end with the rebar. So that's really the one thing that was forefront in my mind about needing even heat over a longer length.

Now I do realize I could twist shorter lengths etc. I was just kind of tunnel visioned on a ribbon burner being the solution to that problem. But I can think of a few ways to resolve it with a blown horizontal or multiple burner blown horizontal.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Yeah I understand, which is why I've been trying to provide some more critical feedback about these burners lately, they've become quite "popular" lately (I'm the first person I'm aware of using them, Zoe Crist and I both decided to make them, after I told him about some old post by John Emmerling years ago on the NWBA forums). There had been a lot of chat and a couple of people supposedly built them, but nobody I knew of that was actively making steel or doing real forging was actually using one.

We made the first ones based off his somewhat vague design info, but both of us had to make a few burners before we got them running right.

Since then, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon, because of the proliferation of information about efficiency (which is relative, there's not much "objective" fuel efficiency difference between burner designs, just implementation and forge design variables) and even heating, but much of that information was propagated without any of the caveats, or information about failures, and hurdles that had to be overcome. I know of at least a dozen ribbon burner forges that have either been finished, but aren't run because they haven't figured out how to tune them properly, or were finished, and set aside, because they didn't work correctly and were more difficult to use than whatever forges were already on hand.





FWIW, I spent most of last year making pretty large twists for one of my customers that makes high end flashlights. I twisted almost all of them by hand, usually at around 20" x 1.80-2" or so when I twist them. I don't bother quenching the ends, I just use a big pipe wrench with 3' cheater bars welded to both sides, and leave the ends a little more square (I twist with it roughly octagonal), I pre-set the wrench to pretty tight, and the way the wrench "hinges" open for pipe work, it'll expand enough to get on the end pretty quick, and grip it, even if it slips a little on the hot metal. I do this with a 2" long nub of 5/8" or so round bar welded to the end as a "handle" that I hold with large round bit tongs. This is necessary for the rolling mill with any billets I"m running through, although in the case of these twists, I don't but I've gotten used to it, and stick with it.

It's nice to be able to flip the billet around and stick it in the forge backwards if necessary, because, even with perfectly even heat, you'll twist more at the powered end than the vise end, even with machines, which is why a lot of times you'll see people using torches for spot heat when doing precision twists.
 
I have built several blown vertical and horizontal forges and use a big oval vertical now. It gives me a fairly even 14" heat. I use it for both welding and forging.
Blown is the easiest and most foolproof way to make a burner for me.
Pretty easy on gas consumption.
 
I like the ribbon burners but that and a venturi are what I learned on my teacher usually just left the ribbon burner set at about welding temperature it would sputter a little but not to bad and be up to welding heat within 10 minutes. My forge takes 5 minutes to get to 1500 then about 10 or so more minutes to welding heat . I think mine is slower because I used cast o lite on this one. I have marks on my gate valve it's true they are a bit tricky but if I don't go lower than my low mark (1150`) I won't get a backfire unless I really crank the gas down. On the high side gas is my variable and when up to heat I can lower the gas and the blower (I have the small grey blower from Blacksmith depot) . By the way it's PID controlled also.
Gilbert
 
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