Forging ahead.

Yesterday I spent time re-organising the workshop to give me more space. This meant I didn't do any work on the bike. However I did play with my shed-built forge a bit.

I connected the blow side of my shop vac to the forge and checked that that worked.

Even if it's a rubbish forge at least I'll have a ping pong ball levitator...

We'd given a lift to the workshop to some of my OH's friends who were visiting the pottery a couple of units down. They brought some coal with them which I used to build a small fire on the grid of the forge. It took a while to get burning (and a shed load of BBQ fluid) but eventually it lit, switching the shop-vac on made the coals glow nicely...

And allowed me to heat some bar up to red hot.



At this point I was a bit limited by the lack of a suitable anvil, even red hot the breeze block gave way before the rod but I did manage to bend it.

Here is a shot of me being all blacksmithy..

As a proof of concept I think it worked pretty good, but I think there were problems with the choice of fuel. The donated coal was smokeless which I think may have contributed to it being hard to light. I've got some charcoal lying about the place somewhere so I'll try with that at some point.