A buddy of mine dropped a new gas/charcoal combo grill on my back porch a few months ago, so the old one had to go. I just hate to throw stuff away though, so I hid it beside the house until I got the bright idea to turn it into a forge for some big stuff. After a couple of hours worth of work I came up with this:
I mixed the clay with some river sand, charcoal, ash, and grass clippings for binder this time, hoping to keep the cracking to a minimum. We've got some pretty heavy bucktallow soils where I live, with a lot of shrink/swell, so stuff cracks a lot. I hope to have it ready to fire up by this weekend. I saved the grates off of it, too so I'll have somewhere to set my coffee can forge when I'm working on normal sized stuff.
I just got some .25"x1.5" 1084 from Aldo, so I'm hoping to knock out a big blade or 2 in the near future.