So yea, I want to build a little forge & smelter to have at my disposal out of hopefully cheap-to-free, old used scrap bricks & quick-crete.

The basic idea is to build it over a small ash pit & have a fan blowing into the ash pit, up & into the fuel source (charcoal, wood, w/e) for the basic heating of metal stuffs. The smelter (in this revision) is designed for the basic extraction of metals from metal ore, and hopefully be able to add some amount of carbon to iron in the process. It would be nice if it were capable of smelting good enough to make some nice way too high carbon content cast iron, at least I could then have room to work with if I wanted to try to make a batch of 1% carbon steel.

The smelter has a cone drip at the base & a vent blower at the base of the pillar. There is a space for a crucible under it to collect molten metal.

The space directly above the heat forging chamber is just for quick & easy storage of items in & out of the fire so that they are kept safe away from peoples & objects that you don’t necessarily want bursting into quick fiery destruction.

Pretty simple design, don’t want to get too fancy just yet. If I find a good source of high iron content sand I may make a Tatara some day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatara_(furnace)).

Click for full size.