Phinally Phinishing the Phorge

Drill a couple of holes for the back legs.

Attach some carriage bolts.

Now it sits level!

Cut out a hole for the Burner.


This is where the images of making a support bracket for the burner would go. I cut off the end of a pipe nipple and the secured it with two threaded rings. I also drilled and tapped three holes for some set screws. You'll be able to see all this in later pictures. Plus it was getting a bit scraped up with all the cutting and grinding, so I decided to throw on some paint. Of course I lost all of these pictures when I was trying to back them up from my phone.

Tracing out the shapes I'll need for the insulation. This is two inch Kaowool, ceramic fiber insulation. Turns out I only needed about half of this. Which is too bad, cause this was the most expensive part, about $60.

Cutting out the shapes. That knife definitely needs sharpening now.

Lined the inside. Only needed one circle and about two thirds of the rectangle. I also had to cut the rectangle into a couple of pieces because I couldn't roll it up enough to get it in through the hole. The floor of the forge is made up of one and a half fire bricks.

Oh, yeah. Did I mention that when I painted it, I painted it with hot rod flames? Yeeaaaaah, I went there.

Time to get dirty. Lined the inside with a mixture of furnace cement and perlite. Did you know that perlite is the exact same stuff as obsidian? It's just crushed up pumice, which is obsidian that cooled slower, and then popped like popcorn.

The burner slipped down a little. Better tighten up those set screws.

I allowed the first coat to dry for 24 hours and then applied a second coat. This time it was just thinned down cement without perlite.

Side view #1

Side view #2

The whole kit and kaboodle. I present you with,

The Black Fire Forge!

I'll let this dry a few days and maybe give it a try out this weekend. Now I can finally move on to heat-treating and making some knives!

The start of the forge!

 The parts

  Holes drilled into the sides for the set screws. You can see where I ground down the sides to make them flat.

  Tapped the holes with a 1/4" 28 NPF tap.

 Set screws are in and ready to go!

  Drilled a 1.1 mm hole for the gas orifice.

About a mile of Teflon tape later all of the parts are assembled. Later I took off the needle valve because I couldn't get it to sit right and it kept leaking gas. But there is one on the regulator, so no problem.

The Results!!!

BRRRRR!!

Someone I used to know.

Letsa GO!

Really cool Thing #982: Funky Austrian Accordian Musik

Heard these guys on NPR and had to check them out. Awesome.

Really Cool Thing #983: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels

So I came across NPR's list of the 100 top Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels (here). It got me wondering how many of them I had read. I also wondered how my list would match up against my family and friends, seeing as how I've tended to surround myself with those of similar literary tastes. So I devised a scoring system and created a spreadsheet. Basically you get 5 points for reading the book and then 1 or 0.5 points for additional levels of geekness (such as reading the book multiple times.) In the spirit of Charlotte's mid winter musical madness you can also argue for new point categories, but keep in mind that will open up those scoring possibilities for other players. The theoretical maximum is something like 1,550 points, but I think anything above 300 would be really impressive. The winner will receive a pulled pork dinner from Crazy Nate's backyard barbecue (note: only redeemable at the Vernal, UT location i.e. my house)
Some of you might notice some some similarities to the Geek Test. Yes, that did play a role in this test. But mine is limited to works of literature. As long as you're surfing the web, check out this hilarious flowchart someone made of the list.
I sent out an email letting people in on the test document. If I missed you, leave a comment here our email me and I'll let you compete.