The Forge

So this is the short story of the forge.  I'm not sure when I got interested in forges and blacksmithing, but it's been a couple years.  I approached it in quite a desultory manner; so much so that its very existence on my property is remarkable.  Anyway, one evening last fall I was standing around a friend's hunting camp mostly nervous drinking due to the social nature of the evening when the conversation happened to turn to forging and I expressed an interest.  

Frank.  The builder of the camp and owner of the forge.  "I got a forge ya can have.  It's in the barn, though, you'll have ta wait til it dries out a bit."
 The forge was, of course in the back corner of the barn behind a bunch of maple shack equipment, a couple lawn mowers frozen in place with locked up wheels, a pile of tetanus and some other odds and ends related to farming and personal injury.  Anyway, we extricated it, got it in my truck somehow, and I drove it home.




It belonged to Frank's grandfather originally.

She was well rusted out and the blower was seized up and filled with the hopes and dreams of some long dead chipmunk.  The hood is in pretty poor condition, and the rust is pretty extensive.  So it sat for a good time under the roof of the shed.

Until Nathan brought over his anvil and rehung a straight peen hammer to get me unstuck from my indifference.

As usual, I had some help.  Some of it was even helpful, but that particular variety is not pictured here.

I heated up the nuts and bolts with a torch and was amazed when almost all of them came apart.  A few broke, but none created any real problems.  Here you see the blower removed from the body of the forge.  It cleaned out pretty easily and with a couple screw tightenings it spun freely again.

Here you're looking at the bottom of the firepot and the clinker breaker, which... wait for it... breaks the clinkers.

The tools and supervision of the trade.

Firepot removed from the hearth and belts removed from the flywheel... perhaps a little prematurely, but it gave Nathan and I some brain games to play.  #staving off the Alzheimers!

Gratuitous shot of the flywheel.

In need of having the rust burned off 'em.  The pot, clinker breaker, and blower.

Nathan came down the weekend before last and we did some thrift store shopping.  Popped some tags as the kids like to say.  Nathan was excited about the sparkly belts and plans to make his Halloween outfit out of the buckles and a few leather scraps.  The rest of the belts we cut up and used to attach the hand lever to the counterweight and the counterweight to the flywheel (main band) shaft.

Nathan brought his angle grinder and attention to detail and spent a better part of Saturday cleaning the forge and cutting the belts.

He had better luck with the belts than with the rust.

This past week I finally got the main belt assembled and run around the main band wheel and the blower shaft.  I couldn't help but try it out.  We had collected some charcoal from the fire the previous weekend, and I'd been collecting charcoal from the other campfires.  The forge roared to life for the first time since before WWII!  Everything held together and worked as it should.  I couldn't have been more pleased.

The current, less than ideal setup.  We'll have to carry Nathan's anvil around whenever we want to use it, which is troublesome.  It weighs several pounds or more, and really begs to be attached to something sturdy for hammering.  Also, there's not a tonne of room to work under the roof, which, besides all the firewood, is also flammable... or inflammable.

Haven't done much yet, just tested it out by heating up an old horseshoe.  I hammered on it for awhile and made a paper weight that was the butt of many a joke.  Hope everyone wants paper weights for christmas this year!

The catalog for Buffalo Forges can be found here.  Mine is a pretty similar to Model No. 0 on page 245.  It retailed for $54.00 (with the water tank attachment) in 1891, and was to be appreciated by all smiths for it's cranked blower rather than a fan or bellows.