The Armour Archive

Hello.
The reason I have not been getting much of anything armourish done in the past year or so is because firstly I have been in school, secondly because I have been doing more with art blacksmithing recently, I thought I'd just share my setup with you lot.
Just finished moving my forge-area from the entire 400 square foot area under the deck to the corner area of maybe 30 square feet and raking the gravel and tidying up and scrubbing the concrete floored part and making it in my mum's words "a bit less of a deathtrap" I took the opportunity to revamp my blower system and add an oil line to the forge so it can run on charcoal/wood, waste vegetable oil or both. Running it on only oil means I need to build a good removable refractory top, which I haven't done yet.

Here are a few pics:
1) post anvil with my coldwork gloves, welding gloves and matching hearing protection (the latter 2 I bought at Penland School of Crafts NC when I was there for 2 weeks recently) and protective goggles.
2) the revamped blower with "camouflaged" pipe, it matches the gravel in the picture and you can see the oil feed (the brass bits), though it's not hooked up to the oil tank right now.
3) the whole setup in place. (I have several more buckets of wood chunks inside the house)

so there you have it! I'll post some work when I get some done. (salet or armet, and a forged tree guard possibly for my school, we say we're an artsy school, but we don't have any art around, so I'm making some! Now Penland, Penland is a different matter! It is full of art done by teachers and students alike, beautiful permenant instalations. I want Waring to have some permenant art by jimminy jackrabbit!

So, how are you going to forge with WVO? How are you building your burner?

I've heard of it being used for foundry work, but I'm a little confused as to how it would work for forging. Does it burn cleanly enough so that it doesn't sputter oil on whatever is getting hot? I kind of assumed that for foundry there's a crucible between your burner and your metal, and that it didn't matter too much.

Looking good, and I'm really interested in hearing about the WVO.

Ever tried propane? The main reason why I haven't looked too closely into WVO is that $13.50 of propane to work for 4-5 hours is close enough to free for my tastes.

The way WVO works is that I open the oil valve into the airflow (which tilts slightly downwards) and gets sprayed into the charcoal fire along with a enough air to burn both the charcoal and the oil. The oil vaporizes in the red hot tuyere end, and is blown into the charcoal, where both burn and create a lot of heat in the firepot. To run it on just oil I let the charcoal burn away with the oil on. By this time the fairly compact refractory firepot is glowing (charcoal alone gets firebricks glowing orange) and the oil combusts when it enters as a vapor. The firepot is fairly tall, and I can put atop on it so that it is more like a vertical Donn Fogg forge. The oil combusts at the bottom in a vapor, so only the heat from the flame, and the heat reflected by the refractory cement gets to the steel. The burner and the furnace/forge are one piece, and every bit of energy from the combustion of the oil is used to heat the forge.