There are a number of choices of fuel for your forge. In this video, Caleb goes over the various fuel types and explains the advantages and disadvantages of each.
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I want to go over the different types of fuel for blacksmithing. As far as coal, we’ll be talking about different types of coal and the process of burning that.
What we use is bituminous coal. There are basically three grades of coal. There’s lignite– which is what’s mined here in Texas– bituminous, and anthracite.
Bituminous, it’s probably the most prevalent coal in the United States. It’s mined in many different places. We get our coal from Birmingham, Alabama. It’s probably the best coal being mined at this point.
Anthracite is mined in Pennsylvania and a little bit in Washington. It’s a hard coal. You can use any grade of coal, really, for blacksmithing. But bituminous is really the best. It’s a lot cleaner than lignite, but it also burns more purely than the anthracite for our purposes.
This is green coal. That’s just ripe from the mine. And we get it crushed like this. I think they call this number four crushed.
You can use different sizes. This is probably the best for the blacksmithing. So this is the green coal that’s ripe from the mine. We’ll put that on the sides of the fire wet.
And we’ll start the fire with dry coal. Once we get it going, we’ll wet the coal down in a bucket and put that on the sides of the fire wet. That makes a burn slowly.
And as it burns slowly, it purifies and becomes what we call coke. And you can see here the difference between the green coal and the coke. The coke actually starts to lump up.
The coke is very porous. It will actually float in water. And it’s pretty much pure carbon at that point. Very similar to charcoal. You can actually use charcoal. It just burns up much faster. It doesn’t have as much heat energy in it.
When the coke is completely burned, what we have left is clicker. That’s just minerals that are in the coal that don’t burn. And it’s waste. It’s kinda like ashes.
Once we get coke and we have air going to it, it’ll burn around 3,000 degrees. Iron melts at 2,850 degrees. And steel, more carbon that’s in it it will melt at a lower temperature.
So we can melt steel very easily in this forge. So that’s something we have to watch for, being that you can melt the steel it means you can get it very close to melting if you keep an eye on it.
And you can get it heated very quickly. And it’ll be very soft, much easier work at that temperature.
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