Well, men like to play with fire...and I'm no exception. Here's my various furnaces. These range from a small coal forge powered by a hair dryer...to a steel melting crucible furnace using a pair of propane burners. I have several other forge/furnace projects in the works as well. I have alrady built anothe rcouple one not pictured here and will be making a couple more this month. These are all specialized to specific tasks such as one for axes(different sized openings), one for small blades, one for forge welding and one for heat treating long blades.

Theoretically, I could make one forge that does most everything...but building these is fun! Besides, using one specifically designed for a task is much more efficient and makes for lots of neat how-to pics/articles for y'all.

A popular question is "Where do we get supplies?". I get tubes from the scrap yard and just about anywhere else I can find them. If you need a tube and are local, shoot me an email. I give these away...kind of. You need two 4" cut-off wheels for a makita angle grinder and the elbow grease to come over and cut one. Otherwise, I can do it for you for $20.(Yes, that's a high price for just a steel tube section.) For brass parts, Lowes is about 2/3's the price of Home Depot. 1/4" ball valves are $3.85, matching pipe nipples and such are $1-2. For the black-iron parts, I get them at a plumbing store. they are a little cheaper than the hardware stores and are the only ones who stock 2" x 3/4" bell reducers!

For refractories, I got all my cer-woolfrom a guy on ebay who was going out of business. Sometimes you can get deals on this stuff on ebay...sometimes not. For castable stuff, Satanite and ITC-100 I highly recommend Darren Ellis. I will pretty much exclusively use him from now on for these items. His website is: