There are so many things you can do with iron when you have a hot fire. You can heat it up until it turns a nice yellow-orange and then move it around with your hammer. One of the best fuels to do this with is coal. With the addition of some forced air blowing on it, that fire can reach 3000 degrees.
If you are new to this whole business of blacksmithing there are many challenges that you need to overcome. One of the first is getting that coal fire going. If you have never done it before, it can be very frustrating.
To help out the beginner, I have put together a short video to show you one way of doing it. Every smith has their own favorite way of doing it, so there is no right way other than the one that works for you. Some people use paper (my favorite), others use wood shavings and one person I know uses “magic pine cones” (pine cones soaked in turpentine). I will show you my way and you can build from there.
As I said earlier, I like to use paper to get things started. Even in the paper community there are different approaches. Some people like to make a ball of the paper and give it a tail for lighting. Another approach is to twist the paper into doughnut rings. In any case, you want to get a good mass of paper so the fire can last long enough to get the coal lit. But you need to avoid packing the paper so tight there are no air spaces in the mass. I demonstrate how this is done in the video. Click the link below to view it.
Some other things noted in the video are the preparation of your fire-pot and the life cycle of coal as it burns.
Coal goes through some interesting transformations as it burns. I show you in the video how it starts as a dense black chunk. At this point it is a combination of carbon, various volatiles and other minerals. It is also in the form that is easiest to light.
As it burns, the volatiles cook away and we are left with the carbon and other minerals. At this stage it is called coke. This is the part that gives us the intense heat and is what you want the heart of your fire to contain.
In its final stage, all the carbon is burned away and we are left with the trace of other minerals that were bound up with the coal. This collects in the bottom of your fire-pot forming hard metallic like lumps that we call clinkers. These are good for nothing and rob the fire of heat as they build up in the bottom of the pot. If you ever lived in a part of the country where households used coal for heat in the winter you may have seen the one use for clinkers that I know about. They would line the driveways with the clinkers pulled out of the furnace as a substitute for gravel.
Since the coke is what we as smiths value in the fire, we will always save and reuse the coke left from the last fire in the forge. But before lighting a new fire we will go through and pull out all of the clinkers so we can start with a fresh, clean fire.
Take a look at the video above and please feel free to make comments or ask questions in the comment section below.