Managing the fire?

on the subject .. and everywhere i find something "coal is now how do i manage the fire in the right way? ..
Assuming you have a coal forge, you want use damp, soft (bituminous) coal, not hard (anthracite) coal. If you don't have a sprinkler can, make one, you'll need it. Start by filling the fire pot with several pieces of wadded up paper, followed by some wood scraps (2" x 4" lumber work great), followed by a thin covering of damp, green coal. (After the initial fire, you will use coke in this step).
Mound a good bit of coal around your firepot, keep it damp, you'll use it later.
Light the paper and turn the air blast on low if you have a blower, crank the blower slowly if by hand, or pump the billows lightly. When the fire spreads to the wood, you'll need a bit more air. As the coal catches fire it will smoke like hell! Add more coal, more air, and make more smoke. The coal should be flaming now. Add more coal until you have a mound of flaming, smoking coal in your firepot.
Turn off the air, quit cranking, stop pumping the billows - it's lit.
As the impurities are burned out of the coal in your firepot, coke is formed (the coal "cokes up"). Coke burns hotter than coal, but it burns to ash. As a consequence, you must constantly tend the fire by maintaining a supply of burning coke, coal in the process of forming coke around the coke, and green coal around the coal in the process of coking. This is done by constantly moving the green coal from around your firepot to the edge of the firepot, then to the fire. Use your air blast to maintain your fire as the work requires.
Managing a coal fire is an art unto itself. I've purposely left out the tricky stuff and I've failed to mention the dreaded clinker, but this'll get you started. Please see and for much better descriptions of the process.

Tom Stovall wrote: (clip) Turn off the air, quit cranking, stop pumping the billows - it's lit. (clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^^ Tom's description sounds like it ought to help, but I would like to add one little thing. In order to picture the process, you have to know that the damp coal, as it heats up and catches fire, forms a crust--the chunks stick together. This is going to form an "igloo," with hot burning coal on the inside, with air flowing through it, and damp coal on the outside, waiting its turn to get to the inside.

Some good suggestion to which I can add nothing but you might want to try posting on alt.crafts.blacksmith as it is a much better newsgroup to ask these sorts of questions. Ken

as far as i can see there is only alt.crafts.plastic-canvas and alt.crafts.professional :> .. no blacksmith there :P

Sorry I forgot the "ing" on the end rec.crafts.blacksmithing, and yes it exists as I was reading a post on it today (not all servers carry all groups). If you still can't find it on your server look it up on Google. Ken

Tomas Wilhelmsson wrote: .(clip). no blacksmith there ^^^^^^^^^^^ It's alt.crafts.blacksmithing (Add "ing.")

It really helps to work with someone, even to just watch someone else. Where are you? Have you tried looking for a local group through ABANA?:
Steve Smith
Tomas Wilhelmss>Does anyone have any real info on this? .. A page that illustrates stuff

If you don't have that newsgroup then you may have to use one of the web based access points for the access to that NG. I do have access to it myself on my newsgroup server.
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