I have had enough of firebricks

Chris Railey

Well-Known Member
I have broken so many fire bricks that I have started to research variations. I use them to block off sections of my big forge and for sacrificial floor liners when forge welding but they are so thick/heavy and awkward to move around when hot that I have broken enough to build a small house. My new plan is to create some forge "doors" and furniture using one inch inswool and a castable refractory. Simple plan; cut wool to size and coat both sides with layers of refractory to make it rigid. It will be much lighter and easier to move around when hot. I can buy blanket inswool much cheaper than board inswool so do you guys think the blanket will harden enough to handle light moving around or should I buy the board. My thought is that the board is quite brittle and prone to breaking in the first place. Hopefully the blanket would not break if dropped and then I could just repair the cracked refractory if needed. Thoughts or experiences please.
 
We have a couple forges that just use wool with ITC100 coating. They work just fine.
 
You could also try the lightweight refractory bricks. They are delicate but they are no where near as heavy as the hard fire brick. Problem with them is flux will eat them up.
 
I think I am just gonna take one for the team here and experiment to see what I can make. That, or I need to find a good use for broken fire brick...
 
There are more then a few plans around here to make your own forge. I put mine on a metal cart so I can move it around.
 
On my forge I went with 2 layers of k-wool and top coated with ITC100 coating. Actually two coats to work out the highs and lows. Thoroughly dried, hen a coat of a bubble alumina castable refractory to resist borax!

When you first fire, do it in stages! In other words bring it to a low to medium temp and hold for a 30min., next firing bring it halfway to forging temp, hold for and hour. Let is cool again and bring it up to forging temp and hold for an hour! This helps to cure the layers of refractory material through thoroughly. So when you finally fire-up to go to work it won't crack the material!!

If fire bricks are being used they are sacrificial!!! Borax will eventually eat them up, heat will cause them to crack, (cracks are not the end of the world) but eventually they will crumble apart. When folk use them as a temporary wall they will crack but, unless they are falling apart you are using little heat thru the cracks.

The only place I used fire brick was on the floor of my forge! Here is a pic of the forge before it was fired the first time, with the front door open! my forge.jpg Here is the same view with front door closed and adjustable gate open!!forge.jpg
 
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