North Forge

Letter Opener, originally uploaded by Dar Moorhouse.

My forge is finally done. Well, mostly. Now I'm finding it needs a whole redesign but I'll worry about that later. At this point it's functional and I don't get totally smoked out when I light it up. The last hurdle I had to get past was some form of fume hood to keep the nasty, thick smoke under control. Initially, I cut and riveted some ridiculous monstrosity which I figured would both control the smoke and the sparks which shoot out at all angles. That was a failure. It caused the smoke to fire directly into my face so badly the shop was uninhabitable. Next, I measured the diameter of the forge and added a few more centimeters then cut some more tin into the form of a large circle which I planned to make into a large hood to catch the smoke. That was a lot of work. In preparation for the fitting of this new, fancy hood I extended the chimney pipe down lower to just above the hearth only to notice that the smoke and sparks flew up the pipe just as it was. It wasn't quite good enough to keep the shop clear but it was close. I scaled back the circle and used only a much smaller square of tin which I slit and made into a rough cone, cut a hole in the center and fitted a coffee can through to be the sleeve to fit over the stove pipe. Yay. It works. It's not perfect but it was enough to allow me to leave the shop door closed for the duration while I finished up the letter opener I was working on.

So I've dubbed it North Forge because it's in the north and it's a forge.