A very productive weekend.
Finished up welding together the big forge vent hood. Cut the holes for the exhaust ducting installed & sealed the duct piping. Fired it up and made a set of tongs. Mommy and baby Alexis came to watch the final assembly of the tongs – baby was very curious what was going on and didn’t seem phased by the hammer blows. Proud of that girl.
As expected the big forge produced a tremendous amount of heat over a long area and once the duct heated up the draft suction was impressive to say the least. You can literally hear the air being sucked out of the room up the pipe. 15 feet of hot air rising is much more powerful than I thought it would be.
I plan on making 4 more pairs of tongs and a couple more punches before i move on to fun stuff.
-
- Big forge smoke stack
-
- Vent hood welded up and installed
-
- Full blast break in testing
-
- She walked into the room with these on and said “Hi” Daddy’s blacksmith glasses.
-
- Big forge with “anvil” – 230lbs hardened 4340 alloy steel on 500 pound concrete pillar. The anvil has rebar welded to the bottom of it embedded a couple feet into the concrete and the pillar itself is reinforced with rebar.
-
- First attempt at tongs, functional but messy. I didn’t bother to draw the reigns out figuring they were worth the effort. I’ll do that on the next set and use these to handle the metal. I made the rivet myself & hot cut it a bit too long, but it worked.. kinda.
-
- The small forge
-
- Hot cut gone wrong! Watch your feet!
-
- Big forge fired up
-
- The glow from below, love this pic.
-
- Punch used to make the tongs – Top
-
- Punch used to make the tongs – Bottom
-
- Punch used to make the tongs
David P. Roberts 