Blacksmith lessons – The bucket forge part two

Hello again all, and welcome to part two of the bucket forge lesson. In this lesson we will get some air into your bucket forge. If you happened upon this document, the first part can be found at http://ironangelforge.blogspot.com/ and the audio version can be found at http://alonetone.com/ironangel/playlists/blacksmith-lessons

The bucket forge is a very primitive little bugger, so no sense in cluttering it up with a good quality air source. We will cover those later in more appropriate sections. For this project quick and dirty is the best route.

Any item that moves air will work here, but first a quick concept must be explained to better help you choose which item you will use. For a forge, high pressure flow is not needed, and in many ways is more of a problem than you might expect. High pressure air can blow the lit coals right out of the forge, and this makes working far more challenging. High volume at low pressure is more useful, which a proper set of large and heavy blacksmith's bellows will produce. But for our small bucket forge, low pressure and low volume are probably enough to allow you to get going and start making needed equipment.

There are a number of quick and dirty ways to get low pressure, low volume air into your forge. A very common one is to put a hairdryer at the end of the inlet pipe, laying on it's side on a brick or stack of boards, and this can be quite effective. To vary the amount of air it pushes into the forge, move the end of the hairdryer closer or further away from the end of the inlet pipe. Closer will focus more air into the pipe. If you go this route, get a cheap hair dryer from either a yard sale or the salvation army. It is even better if it doesn't have a working heat system, or has a “no heat” setting. The problem with the heat system is this; the coils will draw more current, making your set up less efficient, and can overheat causing the hairdryer to shut off on its own, or if you are very unlucky, melt down and fail entirely. If it is a particularly weak hair dryer, you could tape the end of the dryer to the inlet pipe on your bucket forge.

Another option is a desk fan and a cone made of cardboard or the like. This is very primitive, but it can work fairly well considering what it is. Here, the end of the cardboard cone is simply taped over the end of the inlet pipe and the fan is set before it blowing into the pipe. Shoving the end of the cone into the pipe will restrict airflow quite a bit, and may block it off completely. Make sure your fan is set to not oscillate back and forth as well. It can easily knock your cone off, and wont funnel as much air where you want it. Also be careful to not set your cone on fire with falling bits of metal or the like.

There are as many other options as you have creativity to find or build; the cone system could even be used to catch the prevailing winds, but this will be harder to control and somewhat inconsistent, and doesn't work well on a calm day.

There are a couple things I can definitely suggest NOT using, including air compressors (high pressure, and they can be high flow – they tend to blow the fire out of the bucket all over you and the local area), leaf blowers (same problem, perhaps even worse than air compressors) and many large shop vacuums. Though a shop vac can be made to work by restricting how much air it is allowed to intake, but that is another project for another day. They also tend to be very noisy.

That covers this short section on getting air into your bucket forge, next is the larger colonial forge. Stay tuned!

(note, the reference to the rocks mentioned in the previous post has been omitted and will be covered in the next post - it applies to both forges)