New grill = new forge

jonathan creason

Well-Known Member
A buddy of mine dropped a new gas/charcoal combo grill on my back porch a few months ago, so the old one had to go. I just hate to throw stuff away though, so I hid it beside the house until I got the bright idea to turn it into a forge for some big stuff. After a couple of hours worth of work I came up with this:

forge1.jpg


forge2.jpg


I mixed the clay with some river sand, charcoal, ash, and grass clippings for binder this time, hoping to keep the cracking to a minimum. We've got some pretty heavy bucktallow soils where I live, with a lot of shrink/swell, so stuff cracks a lot. I hope to have it ready to fire up by this weekend. I saved the grates off of it, too so I'll have somewhere to set my coffee can forge when I'm working on normal sized stuff.
 
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let's see how it works when you fire it up. That is a perfect use for an old gas grill.
 
That's going to take a very long time to cure especially this time of year. It should work fine. Are you planing on using coal, charcoal, or just scrape wood for fuel? I was over to Tai's a couple years ago. He had a similar forge except he just used wood ash instead of clay. I'd never seen that done before. The wood ash looked just like concrete after he mixed in water. I think it had more insulation properties than clay. Anyway let us know how it works when you get it fired up.
 
Yeah, it might take a while Raymond, there's quite a bit of mud in there. The humidity usually drops pretty low here during the winter (well, low for the SE anyway), and we're supposed to be fairly warm this week so I'm hoping that helps some. I've got the coffee can forge though, so I can still make ugly knives while this forge cures out.

I plan on using charcoal and scrap wood for fuel. I usually have plenty of it around.
 
Clever idea! Tim Lively has a recipe that he uses for his forges. It is a 1:1 mix of adobe and sand with a "couple of handfulls of wood ashes" thrown in. I don't have ready access to adobe clay in these here parts so I used earthenware clay (I bought it at Continental Clay), sand and wood ashes for my forge. So far I only have had a few cracks which were easy to fix. On Tim's website he also states that the forge should be "bone dry" before firing it up. Good Luck and well done.
 
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