New forge design

Hey GA,

I have a piece of pipe that is 6" ID and about 24 inches long and was thinking of cutting that length down to about 8 inches and then lining the inside with 1" durablanket. That would give me about 4" ID and 8" long. You mentioned that it took a while for yours to get hot at 12" long. Have you packed the inside your your little one with the extra wool to get your length down from 12". Just wonder how long it needs need to be able to heat quickly and evenly for knifeblades?

Walker

Haven't played with it again. Been trying to get an even heat source going for a small-sword that needs to be heat treated. What your talking about doing should work ok. If I can get mine hot enough to heat treat smaller stuff then reducing the volume will make it that much easier. Just a note though - I've learned that long and narrow won't get good results. Tends to heat up more near the flame and leaves the farther area cooler. Reduce the length and leave the diameter alone for radiant reflection. Sealing it up as much as practical is a good idea too. My new larger forge is capped at both ends and coated with Satanite with just the torch port and a sqare opening in the working end and it holds the heat pretty well. Still had too much varience from end to end though so since I had the large burner near the back end I tried making a small port hole near the front and just adding the mapp gas torch at that end and it worked pretty well. What threw me was that between the two torches it was impossible to keep the temperature down where I wanted it. Not really a problem but the overall temperature was a bit past the upper phase change and in order to treat my long blade I'm gonna need to just heat it up and quench instead of soaking it at the lower temperature range like I would prefer.

GA