Well, today I made some more progress on the tuyere. I’ve made the hinged, counterweighted waste trap for the bottom and fitted it to the bottom of the tuyere.
I did this in pretty low light as I didn’t get around to do anything until late in the afternoon. I’ll have to have a look at the welds again tomorrow to make sure that they are OK and maybe redo some of the welding. It looked OK, hopefully I won’t have to do any rewelding.
To make the hinge, I took a piece of steel pipe, cut it lengthwise and then spread the pipe out and hammered it flat. Then I cut the flattened steel and drilled a hole in it for the pivot. I’ll be cutting the hinge piece to shape so that it doesn’t interfere with the opening of the waste door.
You can see from the picture above that the weld isn’t the neatest … I can clean this up with the angle grinder, but then again, it isn’t supposed to be a thing of beauty.
The waste door was cut from a piece of 18mm steel plate. Again, it isn’t perfect or pretty, but it does the job.
Above is a view of the hinge showing the pivot and the waste door. When I was drilling the hole, I managed to break a 13mm drill bit … damn rubbish drill bits.
Tomorrow I will be welding the tuyere into the base of the forge, cutting the forge opening, rolling the forge opening and then lining the base of the forge with the clay/fire clay mix. When that’s done, I need to leave the clay to cure for a week and then I can fire the forge up … woohoo … it’s getting closer.
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