After last weekends abysmal effort, I’m scaling back my plans for what I intend to do with the forge on the weekend.
My overall plans have not changed, just the speed that I expect that I’ll be able to do it.
I’m getting another 3 bags of cheap clay this week, along with another 25kg bag of fire-clay. So my main goals for this weekend are to cut a hole in the front of the body of the forge and roll the edge. This will be the front access to the forge where I will be working, so the hole needs to be at least big enough for me to feed the fuel and work pieces into the forge. Next, I will be trying to finish the tuyere and weld it to the base of the forge body.
I need to weld the hinge on to the bottom of the tuyere and make the counter-weighted flap. The flap and hinge will be made from a flattened out piece of tube steel while the counter weighting lever and pivot will be made from some old reinforcing steel rod that I got from the tip-shop last weekend.
When the lever is raised, the flap opens and the spent fuel waste is dropped out onto the concrete floor ready to be swept up.
When these two jobs are done, I will be lining the base of the forge body with the clay to make a thermally protective bowl in the bottom of the forge.
The bowl shape in the base will direct the fuel down toward the tuyere and provide a point where the forge will be the hottest.
As the fuel burns, the idea is that the ash will fall down the tuyere and be let out using the counter-weighted flap on the bottom of the tuyere. This is going to be interesting because the ash will also be being blown by the air pump blowing up into the forge, so I am guessing that it will only be the heavier bits of waste that go down the throat of the tuyere rather than the fine ash. The fine ash should be blown out of the forge through the flue.
Anyway, that’s still plenty to do.
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