This Forge Changes Everything

@CoalIronWorks

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[leospitz]

One of the interesting things you can do with an induction furnace is place a high temp non conductive sleeve inside it and run argon or helium to prevent any oxidation on the metal.

[roodvleven]

If you want to make your own coils, use salt instead of sand. Especially with smaller coils sand is difficult to remove. Salt will desolve in water. Just force water under pressure through the salt and it will come out.

[mikedowd]

Electrician here who works with magnetics and induction heating:

If you are going to bend your own elements, keep this in mind: You want all of your coils to go in the same direction., reversing the direction will only weaken the magnetic field, as reversed fields will cancel each other out and nullify your heating capability. a 'C' shaped element is possible, but would be grossly inefficient as you couldn't get many turns of conductor on your work without doubling back on itself and killing your field.

[Dustins_Woodworking]

We have an Ajax Toccotron 25 Kw machine at my work. We use it to heat treat and temper 4130 steel and 440 sst parts. The nice thing about the Toccotron is you can make programs with three different power levels and times for each. Cool machines.

[justinbanks]

5:58 😂 I now humbly request Will explain all electronics like this.

I would pay for videos like that i could send to family when I'm tired of explaining something sinple for the upteenth time 😂

[JamesYoung]

I think that the most exciting thing about an induction forge is that you can melt metal in an oxygen free environment, either in an inert gas or a vacuum, I used to run an 11kw induction evaporator that evaporated molybdenum at about 1, 600 C and 10-7 vacuum. I can see going forward you making all sorts of special tools and guides to compliment this awesome addition to the shop. If you are really interested in making alloys let the channel know and I am sure any of us who have some experience will give you some things to look out for.

[DrewProductions]

I love how confident Will is with a power hammer. The Little Giant put in some work!

[SeanUnkempt]

An induction forge is such an interesting piece of equipment. it won't replace a gas or coal forge entirely, but rather another helpful tool in your arsenal

[wallyschmidt]

I appreciate that you honor the old technologies and embrace the new.

[TwinShards]

2:41 correction, and ferro magnetic. Yes you can heat up copper using induction heating however the efficiency drop significantly compared to ferro magnetic metals. Induction heating work best on ferro metal because when the magnetic field colapse in the metal, it create magnetic friction while in copper, the magnetic field colapse without friction, only edy current will heat up the copper.

[Tsl]

The 1/4" rod still heats up pretty quickly at first, because it acts like a pole piece, focusing the magnetic field into its length. In addition, as long as steel is magnetic (below Curie temperature), it has double losses from magnetic hysteresis as well as the induced current. Above Tc, the hysteresis and magnetic focusing effects go away, and it's like heating any other nonferrous metal -- you need much more voltage on the coil now to keep it heating up, it's harder to heat past orange-hot.

EE here -- have designed and built several induction power supplies. It's fascinating tech, just a bit hard to use: the coil shape matters so much. To help with that, you can get or make a quick-change adapter (to mate electrical and water connections in one motion), and with some limitations, you can get/make flexible coils by stuffing chonky ground braid (the tubular-weave kind) inside a hose (make sure it's got good enough water flow to keep cool all the way along it!!).

The tuning settings are also critical. Not clear if that unit is fixed or what, but tuning determines how much power you can get into a coil of given design (size and number of turns), and what frequency it runs at. Typically, there's a number of capacitors inside that tune the frequency, and a transformer with selectable taps that matches the high-frequency inverter to the coil. Frequency won't be important for forging application, but in precision applications like case hardening, it's critical for the case depth (you can heat the outer layer, 1/16", 1/4", whatever, just over austenizing temperature, then quench with water spray, to get a much deeper case than chemical treatment can do; power supplies for this application, have replaceable capacitors and adjustable tap settings to enable this). If you don't have tuning options, the range of coils you can use will be quite limited; generally speaking, you will have fewer turns as diameter goes up, but also the range of diameter ratios (coil to work) that you can deliver full power into is limited, and somewhat dependent on the coil design (size and turns -- inductance, overall).

[RayTheMickey]

One of my customers made precision forged connecting rods. The near net connecting rod forms were reheated with an induction furnace and smacked by a forginging press to make the connecting rod. I had other customers that used induction hardening machines and we used induction heaters to preheat our steel strip on our galvanizing line. We use an induction welder to weld the seam on our steel tube at our tube mill. That is the seam on the square tube you use.

[checoleman]

Watched the video of them using this to make crucible steel. Was freakin nuts

[CMFoodFun]

I feel like you're going to want thong clips and tool rests because holding bars that long will get annoying fast. Feels like an amazing machine with endless possibilities.

[patricken]

Yeah, this was the only way I could keep making knives. No workshop so i had to set my forge up in the backyard, harvested for parts within a day. So induction inside was the name of the game. Great for just heat treating too

[marton_horvath]

A power button that works both ways! What a time to be alive!

[Tinker_it]

Another tool too add to my "massive amounts of money" list of tools to get in the future. Along with a milling machine, power hammer, metal lathe, cpu/gpu manufacturing plant, and F22.

[Zach-kueu]

For knife makers in garages, or larger production handmade shops, I would hope this becomes prevalent!

[FXDE]

Very cool. I always thought these seemed like they might be kind of a gimmick, but not being a blacksmith I hadn't realized how slow the gas forge was. I imagine it's probably more efficient energy cost wise since you don't have to leave it burning in between heats.

[d.r.bladeworks]

I’ve wanted one of these for a while that would make everything so much quicker