Chris,
If you would have come out, I would have been more than happy to give you a wonderful Springer Spaniel! In fact, I just might drive over and tie him to a tree at your house.
hah! Seriously, though, I hope your puppy is doing better!
We built three forges...well...2 and a half I guess. Although, John's can be used on it's side for knives, or upright for crucibles so it kinda counts as two!
We learned a couple things about reducer bells and MIG tips. Many of the current MIG tips have a bevel just behind the threads before you step up to the main body of the tip. These bevels are wide enough that they can leak, even with teflon tape. This cause really odd effects with a burner! Similarily, the reducing bells now have a very sharp edge where it transitions from the bell to the section that threads onto the pipe. this interferes with the propane and is causing eddie currents as opposed to funneling and accellerating the gas like it should. This results in a rich/slow flame. (Wade, I'll send you an email regarding this.)
Now, the fun part..the crucible melt. I made a smaller version of my big crucible furnace. Unfortunately, my hair dryer maxes out at about 12 psig propane through a 0.030" MIG tip. This results in ~2600-2700*F. This was just shy of enough heat to melt everything in the crucible. Everything in contact with the lower walls of the crucible failed to melt. The cast iron was more than fluid, the 1095 was molten except for the strips along the walls. The M2 seems to have melted in as well. I needed about 100 more degrees. Part of the problem was the lack of ITC-100 coating in the furnace. I'm not sure where that got put when I moved. If I had about another 20 cfm of blower, I could have bumped up the gas to about 15-20 psi and been fine as well. Unfortunately, the only thing with more output than my mighty hair dryer was a leaf blower. I did manage to get the gas/air mix balanced with 47 psi. However, with that much fuel-air combustion trying to happen in a 2 gallon confined space...something has to give. When we finally got all the blower hose connections sealed, the gas line instantly blew off the burner. I didn't know I could still move that fast! Needless to say, I'll wait until I get a ~150 cfm blower before I try the wootz issue again in that furnace. I guess it would be easier to just get my big one and bring down.
Other than that, the only "excitement was the wind trying to blow the pavillion up on top of my garage!
I wnder if we could have taken the leafblower, 100lb cylinder and the pavillion and made a rocket powered ultralight!?
Glad everyone could make it out!
And don't forget....the end results don't really matter too much because, well, it's just fun to melt s**t, regardless!