[TheForge] forging questions

[jerry Frost]

Alternate forge fuels have been a topic of discussion on online groups for
years Terry. Corn is an excellent solid forge fuel and in fact cokes up much
like metallurgical coal but actually makes charcoal. The fire tending
technique is much like coal and it will dome up nicely. Smells decent tool

The coal power plant near Fairbanks burns coal in powder form like it was a
gas using gun burners.

I don't know how well burning coffee grounds in a gun burner would work in a
forge. It'd probably work a treat in a heat or boiler furnace though.
Keeping it in a small chamber with a large opening would I THINK be a
serious problem, burning grounds might be blown right out the forge door.

The guys trying to get a blue flame oil forge burner are using some pretty
half assed lashups and those are the ones that work. . . sort of. About the
most successful are guys who convert oil furnace burners and fire large
forges with them. Fuels like old motor oil have too many dangerous
contaminants some in near colloidal sizes to be used safely. 

Used cooking oil, typically peanut or canola has the problem of dissolved
fats which makes them hard to meter consistently so the forge temp wants to
go up and down. This isn't so difficult to compensate for in a modern engine
as the computer reads the output and exhaust and makes adjustments as
necessary.

Fuel oil can be VERY dangerous in an enclosed shop because it's saturation
level in air is smack in the center of it's combustion ratio. Meaning you
could spill a gallon on the shop floor and it'd stop evaporating right in
it's explosive air fuel ratio only needing a spark to turn the entire room
into a FAE. . . Boom.

All that's just from reading messages and posts over the last, however many
years since the web went public. There used to be a lot of threads on
Theforge.list of guys trying to get liquid fuel forge burners working. Some
guys in Europe were using the things but I've never seen or even heard good
descriptions of how they're doing it. Recently a rather Trollish guy on
Iforge was bragging up his "babington" IIRC burner but the lashup was
frightening just to look at in operation. He's the kind of guy nobody wants
as a neighbor for safety reasons.

Okay, I gotta stop now or I'll ramble off into the distance.

Frosty

-----Original Message-----
From: TheForge [mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of terry
l. ridder
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2015 8:04 AM
To: theforge e-mail list
Subject: [TheForge] forging questions

hello

benn chatting with various hobby blacksmiths and the subjest came upon
alternate fuels for the forge.

coal or charcoal are the preferred choice for fuel.
propane has become on the expensive side in the last year or two.

several have been using and testing out corn. corn is used in corn stoves
for heating so why not use it in a forge.

one has taken an older torpedo heater and modified it to use spent oil from
small internal combustion engines and vehicle engines. The probelm is with
the noise.

another is using spent cooking oil and is used to make bio-diesel.
he is trying both ways. just as the spent oil and as bio-diesel.

I was looking for a common item that is readily available for free or
minimal cost and that would provide a controlable combustion.

i have been experiementing with coffee grounds.
with all the coffee shops around there are a lot of coffee grounds.
several shops give away the grounds for use in the garden and flower beds. I
have done this for several years.

there are several coal fired power plants still in Illinois and Wisconsin.
There is one in Wisconsin that I am familar with that crushes the coal into
"fines", basically to me it looks like coal dust.

they use blowers to inject the coal "fines" into the boilers to generate the
steam for the turbines.

why not do the same with coffee ground to fire a forge?

the difficult part is keeping the firebox hrout enough to ignite the
injected coffee grounds without having to use an external ignition source.

the coffee grounds air dry on baking sheets in the oven. the oven has a
pilot light which provides just enough heat to dry the coffee grounds in a
day.

I have been toying with the idea of using waste heat from the forge to dry
the coffee grounds while in the hopper. this is not working the way i
envisioned it. air drying is perhaps the best way to go.


--
terry l. ridder ><>
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