Ever want to try your hand at black smithing? Building a forge is expensive and tricky — especially if you live in an apartment! But we’re all tech nerds here — it’s way cooler to use induction heating to heat up your metal for forging. Fire is for cavemen! [Josh Campbell] is working on a kit to bring induction heating to the masses — he calls it the Reactor Forge.
The kit hasn’t launched yet, but you can follow his progress on his GitHub. Induction heating works by magnetically inducing current into the metal, where resistance turns the current into heat without physical contact. The Reactor Forge [Josh] has built runs off of a 220V circuit, and in the following demonstration, heats up a 6″ section of 1/2″ steel bar.
When the bar is cold, the induction heater draws about 1500 W — but once it starts to heat up, it draws more and more, topping out at a whopping 6500 W once heated up.
As far as induction heaters go, this project looks pretty slick. But we love this old induction heater we covered a few years back. It uses a KFC chicken bucket as the concrete mold for the furnace chamber!
[Thanks for the tip Mark!]
Filed under: tool hacks
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