Lighting a Coal Fire

TO LIGHT A FIRE

BY JACK LONDON PATTERN(STEWARTTHESMITH)

The first impediment that the novice faces is starting and maintaining a coal fire in a forge. In order to forge anything with any level of efficiency and competancy, a suitable fire for the project to be forged must be started and maintained. Although other blacksmiths may make fires differently from the way I was taught, perhaps this article can help some incipient blacksmiths to heat steel easily, using these methods.

I recently attended a forge-in in which the demonstrators took a lunch break. They let the fire go out. When it was time for the next smith to give his lecture, he had a hard time lighting up the coal for the next demo. I know there are different kinds of coal, and different qualities. However, the method for fire starting that I learned will hopefully enable smiths to light up easiy, with a minimum of work to do so.

After cleaning out the ash basin below the fire pot, remove all the ash, coal, and clinker out of the fire pot. Ball up about five pieces of newspaper, and place them in the fire pot. The next step is to tear up corregated cardboard into four inch by four inch pieces and place them over the balled up newspaper in a pile of cardboard. Take a piece of newspaper and roll it up like a fuse, then light one end of it. That rolled up, lit-at-one- end newspaper then gets used like an igniter to light up the balled-up newspaper under the stack of cardboard pieces. As soon as the balled up newpaper catches fire, quickly hand-crank your hand cranked blower with your left hand, while shovelling coal onto the cardboard with your right hand. You know you will be successful in starting your coal fire if you see yellow smoke coming out of the coal with the burning, fanned cardboard below it. If you have a rheostat-controlled forge blower, perform the previous steps using the electric blower to fan the cardboard with coal piled atop that.

After a short while, if you used enough cardboard pieces lit up under the coal, that coal will turn to coke…….very hot coke. To make more coke for your fire, surround the ignited coke with more coal; the hot burning coke at the center of the fire in the fire pot will burn off the water and sulfur in the coal to form more coke. In this way, your fire is an organic thing, needing to be fed while you use the center of the fire to heat steel or iron.

After awhile, depending upon the quality of your coal, a clinker will form in your fire pot after a number of heats. Clinker is a combination of rock, slag, and impurities in your coal, along with scale that came off the steel and iron which you have been forging. Due to gravity, it sinks to the bottom of your firepot, and impedes the flow of air which stokes your burning coke at the heart of your fire. Clinker is an impediment to heating your steel evenly. To get rid of it, quickly rake all of the hot coke towards your cowl or exhaust in your chimney, shovel out all the clinker down in the firepot, then turn on the fan as you scoop the still-hot coke back into the firepot, FANNING it. Then, as your hot fire is restored, rake more fresh coal surrounding the sides of the hot coke, which will in turn replenish the coke around the sides needed to keep your fire contantly running. To control the growth of coke from coal around the sides of the fire, you can use a sprinkler can dousing the edges with water to slow down the coking process on the edges of your forge fire. I have had very poor results with clinker breakers on standard firepots. They generally do not work well. The way I just outlined cleaning a clinkered fire is far more reliable. The master who taught me did his fires in this manner, and it is how his dad did it, and his dad’s dad.

If you are going to take a lunch break and want your fire still smouldering when you return, you can do what is called “banking your fire”. Instead of putting a small amount of coal around the edges of your fires in order to coke it, make a large pile of coal at the edge of the fire away from the cowl. Then turn up the fan four about two minutes, then turn it off. That big pile of coal at the edge of your fire acts as insulation, which holds in the heat at the center of your firepot. When you return, and turn on the fan again, or crank your hand cranked fan, your fire will restore to its former glory!

I sincerely hope that these firemaking tips will help novices to start and maintain a coal fire. Future articles of mine will cover the different types of fire for different types of forging operations. Good luck!

Stewartthesmith