New Propane Forge

Back in May it was time to build a new gas forge. The old one I bought in the 90’s for horse shoeing was still working fine but not suited for everyday production work.
I use the gas forge on a daily basis for production work as I am generally working on 5-10 items at a time. I have a coke forge and it is probably my favorite but it is difficult to manage when working on multiple items or small items like knobs.

The forge is sized around standard size heavy refractory brick. Refractory board and soft refractory brick are much better insulators but I needed the heavy brick to stand up to the day to day wear.

After fitting and laying the brick, I built the steel shell around it. The lid was built as a shell and then filled with refractory cement.

After the cement cured, the forge had to be fired to bring the temperature up slowly to about 1500 deg to cure the mortar and cement. I set the new forge inside my big coke forge to do the fireing.

The lid is upside down for firing. I spaced it up with some bricks to make room for a decent fire. This picture is about midway through as I started in the morning and kept feeding the fire slowly for 5-6 hours until it was completely full of coals.

When it was full of coals, I let it cool down over night. The next day I flipped the lid and attached the burners. The burners are made with purchased venturi. I have tried over the years on a couple different forges (including this one) to build my own but they never seem to work just right. I used these venturi on my big gas forge with great success.

Well…

Its been about a year since I started writing this post. I was poking around on the website when I discovered that I never published it. The forge is working better than expected. I use it every day.