Blacksmithing Part 6 Common Man Tools and lighting the Forge

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bushcraft

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hi guys Dave camera at the Pathfinder school pad here at the Forge again today and what I wanted to do today was first of all understand that I'm fairly new to blacksmithing I've done a lot of stuff you know around fires with metal you know using my axe head on rocks and railroad ties and things like that but as far as actually using a forge with coal things like that to do actual forging work I'm fairly new I've got a railroad tie type of anvil here that was made for a farrier I'm sure because of the size but because it's so small maybe 15 pounds it's very light and portable which is good in something that I will consider I would want in my longer term sustainability type equipment because it's portable now because I've got it nailed to a stump for knee forging by a fire it is not really conducive for the best for what I'm doing here it's a little higher a little low depending on where I put it right now it's a little high being up on this picnic table bench but that's okay I've got a hundred pound anvil I'm gonna pick up later next week that I'll mount permanently on something here out of my permanent forging area underneath this overhang and then I'll carry this back down to my hunters camp where I'm going to use it other equipment you're going to need a couple different sets of tongs and I've actually got commercially purchased tongs right here these are farrier type tongs and they work okay but you know I found this $2 pair of pliers out of flea market I paid two bucks for him and it looks to me like someone has already used these for forging they have good flat jaws on if someone has bent two handles out on them and made them very comfortable to grip so they work really good for holding on to your metal they need to be greased a little bit but they're not too bad off you know any sledge hammer will the work that you can buy you can buy them very cheap and place like track supply or you can go all out like I did and buy this Swedish forging hammer and I can't pronounce the name of this thing pending cost I think is the name of it and I just bought this because I wanted you know I'm sorry made in France excuse me not Sweden and I just wanted one piece of equipment you know that was very traditional and you know a little bit more high-end that I could use to do some forging with I also use just regular sledge hammers of ball-peen hammers as well and I also use my axe head when I'm out you know by the hunters can't doing this by fire so you don't have to have a bunch of fancy equipment necessarily that's forged in a reason I made this video this morning which kind of walk you through this Forge I've got a Buffalo blower right here now I actually got for $100 with the forge now this blower that sense the bearings up a little bit on its lips right there so I'm gonna put some new bearings on it but you just attach a hose to the outlet and you bring that into your foot and that's what blows air into the bottom of your Forge and your force just as they place a sturdy place to hold hold your coals I'll hold your fire that's got a pot in it or you build your forging fire and you can use wood you can use charcoal you can use forging coal you can use a lot of things to forge with but I've just been using charcoal for my experiments lately that I bought from an Amish blacksmith so let's talk about getting this forest fired up first of all because I don't have the blower what I've gone to for the time being is just a ten dollar hairdryer and I got this suggested from a guy on the web I get all I learn a lot of things off my youtube videos a lot of people send me suggestions and comments and PMS on how to do things easier how to do things better and this is just plugged into electrical socket on this overhang and it blows constant air so that makes it number one a lot easier because you don't stand in a crank or have someone to crank if you have the luxury of electricity and it also gives you that constant air while you're working at the forge so what I do with that is I just took a piece of metal tubing same piece of metal tubing that I had used with this hand blower and I connected it to the front of this opening all this is a piece of flexible hose from a shop back and then I just plug that into the bottom of the pool edge and there's a hole down here on the bottom of that forge safe try to zoom in on for you then I plug that into you're right there at the bottom you've got a dump port at the bottom of that it's like a t-intersection there and then you've got an inlet for your air and then you dump your clinkers or your hard coal and things like that pieces of chunks of metal and things like that fall off into the pot go down into that and you dump it at the end of the day all right the next time you Forge so let's talk about heating this thing up

the first thing I'm going to do with this is I'm going to get this camera set for you guys you can see that open pot in there very similar to a brake drum where you'd make a simple brake drum type forge the Folgers coffee can how's my : I generally start with about a coffee can of coal for the projects that I'm working with and this is what I use to dump it in there with so what I generally do is I'll take four or five sheets of just newspaper and this is just some ass magazine for like RV and an ATV sales things like that something you pick up three at the gas station so it didn't cost anything now I'll rip up four or five sheets of this and they say you can use four or five sheets of newspaper or anything like that and this basically is free newspaper and I put that in the bottom down there crumpled up get a couple more sheets of it here and what I'm going to do is crumple that up and then I'm gonna light it on fire now I'm gonna put this down in here but I'm gonna light it on fire with my lighter over here first and then I'm gonna turn it on itself so the fire is rising up just like that okay then what I generally will do is I'll go ahead and start my air flow if I plug it in my hairdryer or turn it on line

turning on my baloney you see what that's doing it down I'll take some of this old coal that I've got from the last time I Forge and I'll put it on top of that just like that don't think people just pretty cool at home it's gonna take this thing a little while now and I'm kind of trying to make a little volcano there with an air hole in the middle because basically I am suffocating out of oxygen right now that's gonna take a little while for that to heat up but now I just have to sit and wait till smoke clears and it becomes flame okay so now we got flames coming out of our forage and this is kind of where we need to get to before we can start now we can kind of look and we can kind of storm our hole in here what we're going to stick our metal into and start to get our pot set up right before G and it's just going to take a little time to get that cold burn nice and hot bread I think that's just something that you have to get used to playing with a little bit time now without there we do is all trying to build up around that I left it here from a passport you keep it opened up so the flames rising through it and then about another ten minutes we'll be ready to start working okay so real quick let's talk about some of the equipment that we're using in this common man type Ford's okay and again I don't have a lot of money in this thing this anvil came off v bay that was $80 but it's a really really nice portable anvil again that's why I like it nice and portable I have a small 4 inch bench vise here that just screws on like a c-clamp again very portable in a permanent forging situation when I set this thing up permanent I'm going to want something bigger than this a trooper two-pound cross peen hammer from Jack's supply probably cost $8 then I've got this $2 set of tongs here and that's really the majority of what I need other than a couple files and things to really start doing some work now I've got a couple other pairs of tongs here that costs considerably more money than a $2 but you don't have to have these I have this more expensive forging type hammer again not a necessity one of the great things about forging is that you learn to make your own tools and one of the things that we're going to work on soon is I've got this old ball heads this trailer hitch I picked up at the same flea market for a dollar and unlike the newer trailer hitches it doesn't have a flat on the top it's completely round and I'm going to try to pound this heat it up and paring it down so that fits in my hearty hole and that will give me a rounding device so that I can't make spoons lead ladles and things of that nature by forming them around this it gives me a form to use for making concavities in metal okay so I'm gonna make my own tool out of that instead of spending 280 dollars it would cost to buy a premade hardy tool for that purpose

again you know forge materials rebar rebar old files all of this kind of stuff to want high carbon steel for knives old files if you want medium carbon stuff to use for small projects rebar is really good I got these files for fifty cents apiece at a flea market I bought about 40 of them and I got the rebar for 99 cents a piece at a lumberyard so the stuff is not expensive to buy to work on projects a blacksmithing is a very very good suffering lion skill blacksmiths were some of the most sought-after people as far as tradesmen all on the frontier because they did everything from fix people's gun locks and gun mechanisms to making the tools that they used to farm with to making the hinges on their front doors of their cabins so blacksmiths did all that stuff but blacksmithing is an age old artesian type craft that everyone should know okay guys so that was just a quick overview of the Forge how it works how I've gotten set up here temporarily and some of the tools that I'm using is that a common man to affect my forging other things that you're going to need are some 20 Mule Team borax or Forge welding we'll talk about that in the video some type of a brush a metal brush and I'll show you one of those on another video as well again not expensive you can buy them for three or four bucks about a hardware store a lot of times you can find me use that flea markets for a dollar 20 Mule Team borax isn't very expensive for a big giant box of it it will last you a long time and it's multifunctional around the camp or a lot of things other than just for as long so I appreciate you joining for this video I thank you for all your views all your support everything you do for me for my school and for my family I'll be back to another video in this series as soon as I can you