So after my first blacksmithing experience with Crooked Path Forge I became obsessed. I joined the blacksmithing club that Jordan Borstelmann helped found, the Bearded Brotherhood of Blacksmiths, and I began consuming information like a hungry lion. I first found Youtubers like Alec Steele, Torbjörn Åhman, Roy Adams, and Black Bear Forge. Soon after that I began searching for blacksmithing podcasts. There were very few that interested me at the time, but the one I started listening to was exactly what I needed; The ForgeCast.
These sources, along with my comrades in the Bearded brotherhood kept my initial spark going as I tried to figure out what to do next. I knew I wanted to do more forging, but I had no anvil, not even my own hammer! I knew that I wanted eventually to have my own forge, but it seemed like such a daunting task with the resources I had at my personal disposal. I had very little money, no tools of any kind, and precious little free time.
Well, after a few weeks of thinking (and reeling over the prices of anvils online...) I decided to ask the Bearded Brotherhood if they would help me make a hammer... See my thinking was at least that way I would have one tool of my own when I went to other people's forges. Chris Maybury at Maybury Mill and Forge opened his forge to me and offered to give me a chunk of steel to build the hammer with. I felt humbled and honored at his generosity, and I have found this to be the case with most everyone in the blacksmithing community I have had the pleasure of meeting.
Well, We scheduled a day and I drove out to Chris' forge. 4 hours later I had a very sore shoulder, a partially made hammer, and an addiction to blacksmithing that had gone from a spark to a roaring flame. We started by cutting off a piece of steel that was just over 3 pounds.
I learned a lot that day, most importantly a three pound hammer is too heavy for me to use for a long time. I have decided that this hammer will be a show piece, something that I work to make as beautiful and ornate as possible. I would highly highly recommend starting out with a light hammer. You can go as low as 1.5 pounds and still move steel effectively, and having a bigger hammer doesn't make you any tougher, it just wears you out and makes injury more likely. I want to make my own daily use hammer, a cross peen hammer in a Scandinavian pattern about 1.75-2 pounds. I will also make a post soon here about different types of hammer and their uses.
So starting the hammer with my friend Chris was amazing, and now I was well and truly addicted. I wanted very badly to have my own forge and workshop. I started drawing various plans for making a small forge in the back yard. The whole not having an anvil part ended up not being as big a deal as I thought. Many beginner smiths start forging with something they call an "Anvil Shaped Object" This can be anything from a large flat stone to a block of scrap steel. I was sure I could come across something that would work for an anvil until one found me... That was something I heard on the ForgeCast Podcast. If you go looking for an anvil you will likely have a hard time finding one in your price range, but if you just start forging an anvil would find you. This turned out to be true in my case.
So how does one build a forge? Many of the forges I saw online were something like this:
There was no way I could afford to buy a nice forge like this, nor did I think I could build one. Eventually I began finding other types of forges with tutorial videos on how to build them. Unfortunately not many of the videos helped me because they fell into one of two categories:
1) Hey welcome to the workshop. Today I am going to teach you how to make a quick and easy forge. Here is what you need; A broken air compressor, an angle grinder, a drill press, a plasma cutter, an arc welder, a sand blaster, and six other complicated tools you surly have because why wouldn't you?
2) Hey welcome to the workshop. Today I am going to teach you how to make a quick and easy forge. All we need is DIRT!
There had to be a middle ground, and after more research I found one in what they call a "Brake drum forge."
These are simple to build and the materials to make them are easy to get from scrap yards. I was all set to visit a local scrap yard and scavenge parts for this, when I decided to pitch my idea to the Bearded Brotherhood first.
The advice I got from them was unexpected, but when they said it, it made sense. A brake drum forge would work fine, but because the drum is so bug you will waste coal heating the drum. It turns out you don't need that big of a fire to forge steel. One of the brothers even said he had toyed with the idea of just forging in a pile of coal sitting atop a steel table with no ash dump or other parts that make up a forge. He would just put a steel pipe to the side connected to a hair dryer for the air blast. They suggested that rather than go with the bigger brake drum I should go with a brake rotor instead. As you can see from the picture below, the brake rotor has a much more shallow bowl that would have to be heated. I had a plan, and it was time to go scavenging.
I went to a local scrap yard to find a brake rotor and came away with two rotors and a coil spring that we pulled off the axel of a wrecked car. The scrap yard didn't even charge me for the stuff because there were other guys there taking transmissions and engine blocks out of cars, my little $20 haul was not worth their time that day.
So I had my fire pot, but I was not sure what to put it on. should I try making a table from wood and fill it with sand or cat litter? Try and fabricate a tripod stand with metal and tools I do not have? Once again the Brotherhood came to the rescue. They recommended I buy a $40 steel cart from Harbor Freight and cut a hole in it for the rotor to sit. All it would need after that was some pipe to be an ash dump and air blast, and I would have a working forge.
In retrospect, things were going too smoothly. I should have seen a setback coming, but when it came I was not ready and I almost gave up on having my own forge. It turned out that I would not be able to build a forge in the back yard. I won't get into the specifics but I will just say that sometimes your living situation does not allow for something like a forge, and plans have to change.
Well, in this case my friends again came to my aid. A friend was horrified that I was denied my own forge, and so she offered to open her back yard to me. I was immensely grateful and honestly had to pinch myself. But finally I had a space to build my forge, and two good friends who wanted to help me do it.
The first picture above shows the pipe assembly attached to the brake rotor. We had to drill holes in the rotor, which was a lot of work with the tools we had. At the base of the rotor is a 2 inch floor flange with washers and bolts. A short length of 2 inch pipe leads to a "T-junction" where the air comes in from the pipe shooting off to the side. ash from above falls straight down the pipe. The second picture shows the whole forge assembly as it is used. You can see the red flaps of the table we cut and hammered down to make room for the rotor. You will notice that in the first picture the pipes are silver and in the second they are rusty brown. This is because we bought galvanized pipe... The thing is, when you heat galvanized pipe it released very toxic fumes that can make you sick or even kill you. We had to deal with that, and if you are a baby-smith or thinking of building your own forge please listen very carefully.
Removing galvanization from pipes is a massive pain, and disgusting!
Let me say that again, because it will save you a huge headache and possibly the guilt of having broken the Geneva Conventions in your own back yard.
Removing galvanization from pipes is a massive pain, and disgusting!
What we did was soak the pipe in Muriatic Acid for about a half hour, and that sounds simple, but the fumes coming from that bucket of acid were dangerous and disgusting. It worked, and the pipes are fine, but save yourself the headache and just buy or order black pipe from the hardware store.
So with the table cut open to accommodate the rotor, and the piped de-galvanized and assembled, we had a working forge... And it was awesome!
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