What's the Best Material for a Blacksmith Forge?

I use a truck rim with a similar set up Iris in reply 8. It is lined with fire bricks and I used clay with about 30% horse manure mixed into it as the mortar for the joints. The air supply is supplied from the exhaust of a vacuum cleaner that has a speed controller on it.

Welded to the side of the rim are 3 sockets that are a neat fit on 3 legs. This way they can be pulled out and the whole thing loaded into the boot (Trunk) of the car for those occasions when you need to get mobile.

I have used the same setup on a 44 Gallon Drum (205 Litres) split in half vertically. This is perfect for swords so long as they are not Claymores or Bastards. (Are we allowed to say that here?)

One of the first rules of blacksmithing is "Use the right tool for the job" and if it isn't available improvise or make the right tool.

I like to use good quality fine crushed coal but this is a little hard to get lately and I have been using coke. This works well for heat but you have to spend a bit more time controlling the fire.

There is lots of fun to be had and a few burnt fingers.

One other quick tip. Wear stout foot wear with thick soles. Boots are good but make sure that mill scale and other hot bits can't fall in the top of the boot. The amusement this causes onlookers may result in them an injury.

This is a good site to have a look at. http://www.anvilfire.com/

BAB

There is little that I can add to the links you already have received about blacksmithing as a hobby. It is fairly straightforward. The best forge I ever saw was made out of earth in a wooden box at an 1812 re-enactment settlement. The earth was returned to its hole after the battles were over, and the forge packed up. Smart man-dumb machine concept.

As a blacksmith by trade myself, I make my living pounding on steel, so I have a little bit of experience (27 years), and these white hairs allow me to get all philosophical on you. First...what you do for a hobby is COMPLETELY different to what you would do as a tradesman, even "back in the day". This distinction is more important than you might think. For instance, my trade might be metalwork, but my hobby is tying trout flies. It takes me more than 22 hours to tie a trout fly. Do you think I would be able to sell one? I doubt it...they are too expensive. But they are the best trout flies in the world, and they WILL catch a trout on the second "wet" cast. I can devote all this attention to detail because of course, it is my hobby, not my source of rent money. The products I make as a tradesman are not like that...in fact, I rarely ever see them finished...well, except for the thirty seconds or so it takes to get it out of the spray booth and into the shipping box. If you want to get into blacksmithing as a hobby, you really must devote prodigious amounts of time, money and effort into learning and doing. If you don't have the "passion" to do that, then you will be merely a duffer, and will forever fail to perform to any meaningful level.

The field you might want to get into would be known as "artist-blacksmith". Note that the word artist comes first. That reflects the point that you need to be an artist before you can be an artist-blacksmith. Some artists work in the medium of oil paint, some work in the medium of clay, and some work in the medium of hot steel.

This can be a stumbling point when people call me up and ask me what courses they should take and are often disconcerted, perhaps even upset when I suggest an attempt to get a certificate or even a degree in fine arts before even purchasing your first hammer. A degree in fine arts is often looked down upon as somehow less prestigious than a degree in, say, physics or engineering, but it is essential if you wish to enter a field such as artisan blacksmithing.

Blacksmithing as a trade...well, now that is a different forge entirely. Your education is in draughting, welding, and Computer Aided Design. You no longer do the work with your good right arm, you use a power hammer. You no longer have a small smokey coal (actually "coke") forge with a dozen knife blades soaking up the heat. You have industrial machinery, Miller welders, power bending tools like Ironworkers...in short you create a machine shop. Such machine shops might include serious power machinery, much of it run with three phase power. A lot of hand work is still done in such shops....airplanes for instance are often still made largely "by hand" instead of being stamped out in like fenders in Detroit. The skill sets are different, you become a "machine operator" and you will likely never even pick up a hammer, except to free up the chuck in a turret lathe. You will likely never actually make a knife blade in the old way because it really IS too darned hard to hammer weld a piece of high carbon steel into a groove in your low carbon steel....why bother when you can purchase a factory made "damascus" steel blade for twenty bucks? A tradesman blacksmith even back in the day would not bother to make a knife blade, factories in Boston, Pittsburgh, Leeds and such places made those items, the tradesman blacksmith would make hinges both fancy and plain, buggy hardware, unusual tools (rock chisels for instance) and a thousand other things....but probably not knife blades.

Cutlery. There is so much more to making a knife than pounding out the blade...sanders, grinders and sharpening stones to do wet work, selection of bone, antler, hardwoods for handles, and more than a passing familiarity with leather for scabbards. Lots of people still do that...and some even make money doing it. You might want to chat with them. But in my humble opinion, this can easily get into a situation where you can easily price yourself out of the market. A search on "deviant art" for artist blacksmith knives would pay REAL dividends. If we wanted to get technical, the field of knife making is "cutler". An ancient and worthy trade indeed. And one in which I urge you to practice a bit first and ask for tips on how to "improve" your railway spike hatchet rather than expect a cutler to give you a crash course in a trade which he may have spent a lifetime learning.

Personally, I went into a sort of composite field...I do my own development in my small shop, and employees do all the heavy lifting as they churn out the designs I come up with.

So, this gives you three major directions to go. If you just want it to be a hobby (like most people who get into this field do), then be prepared to become an expert, study the "art" in recognized schools, then be prepared to practice, practice, practice. If you want to be a tradesman, get into a machine, welding or body working shop. If you want to be a cutler, learn metallurgy....steels nowadays are not like they were two centuries ago.

No matter which route you choose to take, you will NEVER regret a moment of it.