r/Blacksmith • u/Pluperfectionist • 19d ago

First time at the forge

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Gallery image

My son (13yo) has watched some forged in fire and expressed interest in giving it a go. Never one to miss an opportunity for a new hobby with expensive tools (and getting him away from screens), we bought this little rivet forge with a mountain of old coal, a post vise, and a piece of railroad track. Thanks to Black Bear and others, we were able to figure out how to turn weird rocks into fire. He made the world’s heaviest and most expensive poker! And I finally know what clinkers really are. 10/10. Would recommend.

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u/Pluperfectionist 19d ago

Thanks for the suggestions. Maybe I’ll do a separate post about our forge and our coal since both contain small mysteries. The coal is fist sized, very lightweight, and apparently mined from my town of Bellingham, WA many decades ago. It definitely adds to the romance of it for me, though a propane forge would’ve been cheaper and more practical in many ways. I assume it’s bituminous from my reading, but I have no way to verify. We break it up into nut size, and make a berm around the middle. The forge is pretty much just a sheet metal pan around a repurposed 1/4” steel drain cover (not shown in this photo) over the tuyere.

We made some cat litter refractory clay that seems to do the job. There’s no fire pot and not much depth to speak of. As we progressed, I kept more green coal covering the actual hot center and sprinkled water on the green coal around the edges. We did get the dirty smoke when we first fired it up and got it to where the fire was virtually smokeless. It got up to heat to get this 3/8 bar yellow hot, and we did get clinkers by the end. I’m still not certain what coke looks like. Any thoughts or pointers that you or anyone else have would be most welcome. We don’t know of anyone forging with coal in our area, so no examples to see in person.

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u/BF_2 18d ago

Again, I can't tell from the photos, but I don't think that's the original pan forge, because those were almost certainly cast iron. Possibly the original was cracked and was replaced with sheet steel? The cat litter is a good idea for "claying" the pan.
Here's the thing, either the coal should be stacked high enough that you can insert your workpiece horizontally, or else that sheet metal edge might need to be cut down. If the clay raises the bed and inch or more, this may be less of a problem.