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Vent: spent 45 minutes chasing a cold shut before figuring out my rivet forge was the problem
Was working on a batch of 6 bottle openers for a market in Tulsa and kept getting these ugly cold shuts right at the bend, no matter how long I soaked the steel. Tried fluxing more, tried hotter heats, tried cleaning the anvil face, nothing helped. Then my buddy pointed out my old rivet forge has a dead spot in the firepot about the size of a silver dollar, so half my heat was actually just warm air. I started rotating the piece every 20 seconds in the fire and pushing the coals around with a poker and the cold shuts vanished. Anyone else deal with dead spots in an old forge, or am I the only one who took this long to notice?
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charlesanderson19d ago
Dead spots in an old firepot are pretty normal and yeah they can mess with your heat, but blaming the forge for cold shuts at the bend is a stretch in my book. Cold shuts usually come from the steel dropping below welding temp before you strike, or from a fold that traps scale, not from a warm spot in the fire. Rotating the piece and poking the coals probably helped because you got a more even soak, sure, but the real fix was moving faster from fire to anvil and hitting it while it was still hot. Half your heat being warm air sounds like a nice story your buddy told you, but I have run forges with way worse dead spots than a silver dollar and never got shuts because of it. And if you were soaking longer thinking that fixes it, you were just burning up your steel and losing carbon on the surface, which makes it tear instead of weld. My take is the forge was a small part of it, and you would have hit the same wall with a brand new firepot if your heat to hammer timing was off.
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