[TheForge] Chip Forge (Round 2?) (was: Forge Design)

[jerry Frost]

Bood luck with that Bruce: The thermally released carbon gasses from super
heating coke are indeed highly flammable once they reach sufficient oxy.
Open air is more than enough. Coke may sound like a useable media for a chip
bed forge but even graphite will burn, it's an ablative addition on shuttle
tiles, it's the zirconium silicate ingredient in the silicate "air" tiles
that keep the shuttles from becoming a vapor trail.

Naturally aspirated burners are pretty sensitive to back pressure, it'd take
some fancy dancing and refining to get a NA burner to work for a chip bed
forge. You could ask Ron Reil but you'd better darned well READ what ever he
has posted on his site or he'll not only refuse to reply he might put you on
his ignore list. People just bombing him with questions he'd already
answered in his illustrated instructions and FAQs convinced him to ignore
the lazy.

I haven't looked, I'm happy enough with how my gassers work and haven't kept
up with Ron's work or site but it's there though, archived and linked to/@
ABANA.

As I recall chip bed chips are high alumina and pyramidal shapes designed to
key only slightly but I don't remember the reasoning. I "thought" more
rounded shapes similar to a marble would work well but the European chip
forge makers and users disagree and they make and use the things. 

A little web searching will put a person in contact with folk who sell both
chip forges and chips. I'd build the forge and just buy chips were I
interested enough to mess with the things.

Pete: The burner you're referring to is a "Ribbon" burner. They're available
commercially and easily built with a little tinkering or following some of
the other guy's experimenting/tinkering rules. I believe there are how/tos
online. exercising one's Googlefu should yield many hits. There are a lot of
threads on Iforgeiron.com in the gas forge section

Jer AKA Frosty The Lucky on Iforgeiron.

-----Original Message-----
From: TheForge [mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Peter
Fels & Phoebe Palmer
Sent: Saturday, April 11, 2015 8:39 AM
To: Blacksmithing List Sponsored by ABANA
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Chip Forge (Round 2?) (was: Forge Design)

The burner i saw on John Fick's forge was a cast oversized brick with lots
of small perforations on top, and the air inlet underneath.Been many years
and the memory is a little fuzzy..
Very even heat and impressively little oxidation on yellowhot work left in
the forge for a long period.

On Apr 11, 2015, at 4:02 AM, Bruce . <freemab222 at gmail.com> wrote:

Yeah, that's what I'm remembering.  I guess I was under the impression that
the chip forge was an established reality (in Europe) and let it go at that.

It seems to me that if the "chips" were the size of marbles (~9/16" dia.)
there wouldn't be much backpressure -- there's lots of space around spheres
that size.  Of course, real, random chips WOULD pack together and create
backpressure, a good reason to use spheroids.

Next, it seems to me that you wouldn't need a sophisticated burner for a
chip forge because you could design it such that, once the fire was lit,the
burn occurred near the base of the pile of chips itself.  (The chips would
have to be hot to allow this, as cold chips would suck way the heat of the
flame and extinguish it.)

So the issue is to come up with appropriate chips.  I wonder whether (hard,
firm) coke would do.  If there's no excess air, it wouldn't burn, and carbon
is an excellent refractory.

Bruce
NJ