[TheForge] Johnson Forge-Clamshell forge

[Ries Niemi]

i used a johnson forge for years, because it was all I had. I got it 
from an insurance salesman in Beverly Hills along with a calking vise, 
5 pairs of tongs, and a few hundred pounds of steel, for 65 bucks, 
coincidentally. He had been a farrier in a former life, and one day got 
kicked hard by a horse in his hammer arm. Went to the chiropractor for 
a year or so, didnt get better, so he went to the orthopedic surgeon, 
who told him "we could have fixed this if we operated a year ago, but 
its fused now, so youre stuck this way for life". So he became an 
insurance salesman. After almost 10 years, he finally decided to get 
rid of some of the blacksmithing stuff that was cluttering up his 
garage, keeping him from getting the mercedes 450sl convertible in.

Anyway, its true- the johnson forge does scale things up pretty quick. 
It also takes a little while to get hot, but boy howdy does it get hot. 
Holds a lot of stuff, and with the swing away lid, it will hold all 
kinds of wierd sized stuff. Can you put a 16" circle of 1/8" plate in 
your forge? 2 heats, but even still, they have their place. Nowadays I 
have the Urban Assault Forge, which is a nifty little atmospheric 
designed by Phillip Baldwin, and I havent fired up the old johnson in 
years. But I had a few jobs where it was perfect- like when I needed to 
forge a tapered point on a couple hundred pieces of rebar for fence 
pickets for a nasty looking anti personnel fence in a bad neighborhood 
of LA.

James Viste, of Detroit, who demoed at LaCrosse, has a homebuilt 
clamshell, with, I think, a foot pedal operated top. He does a lot of 
forgewelding of surface decoration in it, mostly plate, so he likes the 
big surface area of a johnson style, and he often surface forge welds 
little bitty ball bearings to plate or bar. So when you take em out of 
the forge, right before you weld em, you need to be extra careful not 
to knock em off the base plate- so he really likes the extra large 
opening of a clamshell. I think the clamshell takes care of some of the 
design problems of an open top forge.

But for 65 bucks, or even 165, the johnson forge would make a good 
second forge for oddball problems.

ries