Our Forge Arrives

So not a lot of activity recently on our blog with both MC and myself hard at work at our real jobs. This past weekend though we did acquire the final piece for our smithy. The forge! I returned from a week away to find a nice 100 pound box waiting in the garage.

Our forge in all it's tiny glory.

We purchased a propane run atmospheric forge since it provides sufficient heat for our purposes and also it is pretty simple to operate. There is no external blower so it doesn't require electricity. Really all it needs is a propane tank and an ignition source.

Since we expected our forge any day, MC also went to our local metal store and picked up some stock. We got some basic 1/4" and 1/2" round and square stock as well as some 1/4"x 1" flat bar to play with. MC also found a nice "mixer" pack that contained a whole bunch of different pieces.

Our metal stock. It doesn't look like a whole lot, but we should be able to make a lot out of these little bundles.

With this new and lovely forge in our possession, we thought that our open concept smithy really didn't do it justice. We therefore spent most of our weekend adding some lower walls to the structure we'd already built. We also added a plywood roof to prevent our roof from being a fire hazard. We setup our forge on a table made out of some concrete blocks as well as the box it had originally come in. We also added a layer of fire bricks underneath the forge since it throws out a fair amount of heat. To complete our primitive setup we also scrounged an old laundry sink to hold some water.

Our simple setup. Notice our "door-wall" in the background. It's amazing what you can find lying around and how it can make a pretty useful and I daresay fetching wall. The extra old doors on the left will eventually be made into a work table for blocking out designs.

Here's a quick pick of the forge with it's walls up and a nice sunset. Since this pic was taken we've added the tarp onto to the roof for water proofing and rearranged our forge-anvil setup. More pics to come. 

So after all the woodworking we did this weekend there wasn't a lot of time to work with metal. Hopefully we can remedy this soon and start posting some pics of what we're making! In the meantime here is our first piece of hot metal coming out of the forge!

It works!

Other Equipment

A little while back we were very lucky and came across an add on Kijiji about some blacksmithing tools that were for sale. The smith selling the tools was downsizing and she was very helpful and supportive of our plans.

A collection of hammers that we managed to acquire. Lots of different sizes and weights for us to play with.

We picked up two post-vices, they are missing mounting brackets but that is top on our list of things to make once the forge arrives. These vices can hold hot metal and also take a good hammering!