[TheForge] Re: Forge firepot.

[Mike Spencer]

schade at acegroup.cc quoth:

> ...if I was making a firepot for a coal forge I would make the air
> inlet higher that the lowest point of the pot so that clinker wouldn't
> block the flow of air.

Yes, indeed.  And just to make that a little clearer,  Imagine it this way:

    The bowl-shaped pot has sloped walls and a flat bottom.

    Make a boss on the flat bottom, rather as if you sawed the bottom
    off of a smallish tea cup and inverted the sawn-off piece on the
    floor of the firepot.

    Now make a hole in the apex of the inverted cup.  Or several holes
    around the apex.  This leaves the lowest part of the pot as a
    more or less annular groove that, as Bob says, is lower than the
    air inlet.

I did a demo in Ontario where the host has such a forge.  The clinker
dribbled down around the bump in the middle of the pot and could be
hooked out periodically with a thin poker as a doughnut of crud while
the fire is still quite hot.  In the ordinary firepot with the air
inlet at the lowest point, the clinker blocks the hole and often you
have to let the fire die way down to get it out without breaking it up
into numerous unmanageable little pieces.  If I were building a
firepot I would try to duplicate what I saw in Ontario.

Extra work if you're fabricating a firepot but saves lots and lots of
time in use.

On thickness, for a portable forge, I'd use 1/4" plate and make it
easy to remove from the framework.  For a stationary forge -- I'm
never going to have to pick it up and put it in a truck -- I'd use the
heaviest stuff I could manage, 1/2" or even thicker if I had some
heavier scrap to work with.

There was a guy who took a course at the art school here, then did a
brief apprenticeship with a local smith where he learned about some of
the traditional tricks used in (formerly impoverished) Nova Scotia.
When he got a job in a shop in Newport, RI, there was no forge for
him.  So he built a Nova Scotia *wooden* forge.  Everybody in the shop
sneered until he used it without burning it down.  Then they
gawked. :-)

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^