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After building the Gingery Furnace, it was finally time to start making stuff out of metal!

11/20/2000 – An 8×10 flask

I made a flask out of scrap wood. A big problem is to get both halfes to match well at the parting. My scrap wood was a bit warped, and there was about 1/8″ of play between the halfes. I sanded that down by taping some 100 grit sandpaper gritty side up on my workbench, and sanding the parting for both halves on that.Even though Dave mentions it’s not really necessary, I made a groove in both halfes about 1/2″ back from the parting to hold the sand in.Of course I remembered about the locating pins only after I had varnished the thing, and so they are “natural” These days it seems that nobody varnishes their flasks, is it not necessary? I would think they would warp from being in contact with wet sand, so at least varnishing the interior would be a good idea.

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The late, great Dave Gingery wrote a wonderful of books that describe how to build some pretty decent metalworking tools from scrap. If you are interested in metalworking, but don’t want to spend a lot of money, get these books! They are available from Lindsay Books.

The first book describes the construction of a small charcoal fired blast furnace, which is then subsequently used to make the castings to build the machines.

The best thing about this furnace is that it is incredibly cheap to build. And pretty easy too.

I build a “by the book” Gingery furnace (charcoal fired, with the standard Gingery lining) and I’m really happy with it.

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This content is a little bit old – I will have some updates before too long – but it is still valid, and in particular, the furnace has stood the test of time!

I’d always be tempted to try my hand at a bit of metalworking, but the equipment requirements seemed so daunting. And expensive. It looked like doing anything even remotely useful required a slew of very expensive tools.

And then one day, I was building a wood rack (being an occasional
woodworker, I ended up quite logically with a lot of wood. Wood
everywhere) using a plan from an old Popular Mechanics, when I
saw an ad for Lindsay. “Build a metal shop from scrap”. It sounded worth
spending a few bucks on, see what it was all about.

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