[TheForge] Re: Interesting add for a Buffalo Forge Blower

[Mike]

> ...with the mad panic for fallout shelters in the 50's.. there must
> be millions of old blowers buried in unused shelters around the
> country!!

I dunno about shelter ventilation blowers but I was recently
enlightened on siren blowers.  I had a notion that I might convert an
old vacuum cleaner into a siren so I googled around a bit.  Old air
raid sirens are now hot collector's items.  They tend to have been
left un-maintained for decades or to have been dismantled and tossed
to a heap somewhere.  The siren wonks spend hours and hours doing all
the same kind of stuff that fanatical people do with, say, old cars or
old air hammers. :-)

Having a forge that will cause strangers two miles away to duck and
take cover when you fire it up *does* sound kind cool but I don't
think a siren blower is the optimal resource for a forge.

BTW, my (electric) forge blower is a cooling-air unit from a Canadian
military radar rig, probably late 50s, with the 1/2 HP 3450 RPM motor
replaced by a 1/5 HP AC/DC and a dimmer switch.  So you might try
places that have piles of totally obsolete, pre-digital surplus
electronics piled around.  (The place I got my blower from has turned
into Nova Scotia's second most notorious environmental diaster area.
The guy was scrapping out mil-surplus electronics for 30 years before
anybody noticed that the transformer oil, capacitor oil, lubricants
etc. that he was just dumping on the ground were turning up in lakes
and wells.)


- Mike

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