What We've Got To Work With

 This is the coal forge and the smoke hood.

 Coal forge and ash can

 View of the coal forge and hood from outside the gate

Better shot of the smoke hood

 Bucket where we keep our coal

Oooo the bucket is open...
On a seperate note, this is the wrong coal.  When we went to purchase coal we didn't specify what type we needed and ended up with 160lbs of anthracite coal.  What we really wanted was 160lbs of stoker coal.  Oh well, just means Monte got free coal.

This is what you get to do when you buy the wrong coal.  Anthracite coal comes in HUGE chunks that we spent 3 hours hammering into usable sized pieces.

 This is the right type of coal.  Both times the coal was purchased from Sunnyside Ice & Fuel Co. Inc.

 This is the metal garbage can where we put the ash after we're done forging for the day.  Once it cools we can put it in the dumpster.

 Oooo shot of coal ash and clinkers.

This is the metal pail of coke.  The definition of coke from the World English dictionary is: a solid-fuel product containing about 80 per cent of carbon produced by distillation of coal to drive off its volatile constituents: used as a fuel and in metallurgy as a reducing agent for converting metal oxides into metals.  
When we're done forging for the day, we save the coke in a bucket to help get the fire started more easily next time.

 This is our 5 gallon bucket that we use for water.

This is our handy dandy rusty water ladle.

 This is a shot of our new anvil with the base we constructed.

 Shot of our old anvil with it's post base.

 This is our leg vise.  Convenient for making twists and fixing kinks.

 This is our little gas forge.  Quick and convenient, but doesn't get things hot enough for certain tasks and it's small.

 Side shot of the gas forge.

 Oooo it's open

 Open gas forge

 Fired up gas forge

 Fuel source for the gas forge.

This is our coal forge.  We made a few modifications to it this year, but other than that she's a sturdy little beast.

 Probably the most crucial modification we made to the coal forge was adding a larger air pipe and an electric blower.  First I plasma cut the original pipe off of the forge.

 The new pipe that we welded.

 Front of the blower attachment plate

Close up of the back of the blower plate

 We then welded on a new pipe and attached the blower to it.

 New air flow pipe

 New blower

 Ooo blower

 We added mesh to keep junk out of the blower fan.

 The plate is getting nice and rusty

 This is our sad makeshift damper for the blower.  Real low tech and flammable. 

 The other crucial modification we made was to give the grating better spacing.  The bars were far too close together before.

 Close up shot of the fire box on the coal forge.

 Close up shot of the open ash dump on the coal forge.