That is pretty awesome, and all home-made. The charcoal in the trashcan is great, I think a 55 gallon drum works well too. We use those as burn barrels, but we vent them.
It would be sweet if you had two helpers and a rather large billows, that way someone could video and someone could run the billows,(and switch out, it's a lot of work)
Removing the earthen door everytime would suck though. Is there something else you could do there as well?
In terms of the earthen door question, I could 'theoretically' remove the bloom from the top but that is borderline impossible and then I would have no good way to clean the furnace. It honestly isn't too bad because I basically just shove a bunch of mud and rock in the hole until its good and insulated.
As for the bellows, I may try that once I get decent amounts of iron using the current setup. Once I get it down I can switch to the more challenging manual billows and see how much of a challenge that is!
So how are you going to regulate the airflow with the air-mattress inflator? You could make a variable plugin with an old style dimmer switch, that could help to regulate the airflow.
The air turbulent (in terms of flow properties) when it comes out of the nozzle which gives it a cone like spread. I can simply move the compressor away from the air inlet to lower the air inflow. Additionally, I can simply shift it left or right so some of the air just misses the tuyere.
Ok, I could see that, I've piddled around a couple blacksmith's forges. They seem to prefer swells in temp to a completely constant flow.
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Thank you, I've been scoping out utopian a little trying to figure out how to participate. I'm kind of a nerd, so it seems right up my alley but I haven't worked any open source projects before.