First thing’s first. Go ahead and watch the above video. That explains everything I did for my 6 nights of camping. Honestly, I should have done that for every one of my goals this year, it’s way easier than typing up these posts!

Once you’ve watched it, then continue below to see what happened AFTER I completed this goal…

In Maryland, as I’m sure you’ve started to gather, it rains. A LOT. The tiny sprinkling that we got that first night was NOTHING compared to the monsoon that happened for the next week after I finished this goal. This caused two things to happen:

1. The giant tarp I put above the tent turned into a giant bucket, happily collecting enough water to crush the canopy under it, and the tent under that.  Fortunately, the canopy bore the brunt of the damage, and although we had to throw that away, we only had to replace two poles on the tent.
2. My homemade bridge ended up being way too low for that kind of water throughput.  Several branches and limbs collected, and rerouted the creek around it.  Man, I couldn’t believe the power that our little tiny creek has!  It completely washed away both sides of the land the poor bridge used to be attached to.  All that was left behind were the biggest rocks.  Sadly, my poor steps are now a huge hole that you have to jump over.

My second goal, build a treehouse, turned out to be a dud.   With these goals that Mindy and I set each year, I have learned that I really have to be selective about what I try and set as a goal.  In January, something may sound like exciting and lots of fun, but come July or August, it looks daunting.

That’s what happened with this goal.  I just kept putting off planning it, until I finally realized it just wasn’t going to be happening.  The boys will just have to wait a little bit longer for that treehouse!

Oh dear, just look at that picture of me.  Sweet, innocent me before I took on the Forge Blower project.  Just spend a few seconds admiring the naivety of poor Rob before he realized just what it was he was getting into.

To start, I was inspired by this video:

When I saw this, I was completely blown away with what you could do using only dirt found on a creek bed.  And guess who has two thumbs and just so happens to have a creek bed going right plum through their property?  That’s, right, THIS guy!

So I thought that this would be a fun little project

The first thing I did was build the fan that would act as a bellows so I could estimate how much clay I would need.  After that, Lincoln and I went down to the creek and mushed up a bunch of dirt.  If you followed my instructions and watched the opening video, you’ll see our piles on the bridge.

I came back the next day and even saw some critter’s footprints in it!  It looks like 2 different animals walked through it.  I have no idea what they are, but if any of you are good trackers, by all means put your thoughts in the comments!

And as you’ll recall, it then rained straight for the next 7 days and washed everything away, including the footprints.  So we had to start again.  This time, I got the mud and brought it all right back up to the house in a wheelbarrow where I worked it with a shovel.  It wasn’t nearly as fun as mushing it between your toes, but at least it was near the house.

It was at this time that I noticed my clay didn’t really look or mold like the clay in the video that inspired this project.  So I did a bunch of research and discovered that we have very sandy dirt near our house, and what I was mushing up was a very low percentage clay.  If I wanted to be able to bake this and have it keep its shape, I needed a much higher percentage of clay.

The process is very time-consuming and only results in a small amount of clay, so I thought it would be a good idea to fool the kids into doing my work for me get some help from my children and nieces and nephews.

The idea behind the clay extraction is to water down the clay until its very soupy.  From there, mix and mix until there are no chunks left, and it’s all one very thin consistency.  After that, let is sit for several hours until it is seperated into three layers: water, clay, and dirt/sand.  Suck the water off, pour the clay layer into a container, and then dump the sandy stuff out.  Now that you have much higher concentrated clay, you have to remove all of the excess water you added to get it to separate from the sand.  Put it into a towel, tie it up, and let is drip until almost all of the water is gone.  About a day.  Once that’s done, you got yourself a little ball of clay!

Er, a VERY little ball of clay.  Like, after the 7 of us spent an hour, the combined total clay was that little ball I showed above.

I decided to modify this process and use most of the soupy solution, instead of only the clay layer.  The reason I decided that is because I’m stupid and don’t know anything about clay.  But I was about to learn…

Even cheating and making faux-clay, the process was still long, and I wasn’t making very much, so I decided that I was going to make a smaller forge and readjust my fan size.

My base was sculpted into place, and then each layer was rolled out into a snake and molded on top of the layer below it.  When it got too tall, it started looking a little wobbly, so I changed my mind and decided to shorten it a bit and instead make the sides thicker.

I loved the look of the forge at this point, and I really wish that I could say that because of all my due diligence and hard work, this was indeed what ended up a beautiful forge blower that I could use to make infernos with.  But alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

If making your own forge blower were that easy, then we’d all have one in our backyard!

Although up until this point I had made many small mistakes, it was at this point that I made my first doozy. My sister-in-law, a graduate with a degree in fine arts, told me that at this point in the clay process, you should let your wet piece dry from between 3 to 7 days, depending on its thickness. This is vitally import to prevent cracking as you fire your piece.

But that discussion wasn’t going to be had for another week!  For now, I was way too excited with the thought of having my very own homemade pottery, so I fired up Eggbert to 600 degrees (F) and put that bad boy in there for about 4 hours.  At this point, I saw the tiny crack near the top of the piece, but figured it was just a little thing, no problemo.

After the forge was ‘dried’, I decided to pit fire it.  This is where you use a fire pit to get your pottery up to temperature, instead of a controlled kiln.  Although it was super duper fun to build a huge bonfire using our new big fire pit, this was definitely where I made big mistake number 2 – I didn’t cover my forge with enough small kindling to ensure that it would be buried in a bed of coals.  Since it wasn’t buried, different parts of it cooled off at different times.  Remember that small crack near the top of the forge?

If you’ve never heard of the “sunk-cost fallacy”, then right now is a great time for you to rent the move “Uncorked” and watch it all the way through, and then watch it again because it’s such a great show, and then love it forever because it’s really SUCH A GREAT SHOW!

Wait, where was I?  

Ah, yes, the sunk-cost fallacy.  At this point, any sane person would have just thrown in the towel and tried something else, or moved on to another goal item.   But I am not a sane person, and I had invested way too much time on this to give up now (at this point in the year, it’s October and I’ve now been working on this for 4 months.

Looking at the dates of these pictures, I tried salvaging my poor poor forge for 4 weeks before finally calling it a bust.  You can see my attempts above.

Finally, after way too much time and way too much fun, I decided I had to try a completely different approach.  I did some more research online, and actually discovered that the person who inspired me to make my first version actually created a follow-up video on how to make a much simpler forge blower that doesn’t take as much finesse.  Sounds perfect!

For this forge, the idea is similar, you’ll have a hand-powered fan act as the bellows.  But this time, it’s built straight into the ground using unrefined mud that doesn’t need to be fired.

I built my fan using the straightest stick I could find, and conscripted Kai and Lincoln as my official mud mushers to help me make my building material.

Above, you can see how I cleared and prepped the area, and then started the first layer of the forge.

After the base was built, it was a simple matter of shaping the rest of it so that the fan would fit and spin freely, and blow air into the second chamber.

My second layer was supported by sticks, which really ended up giving it a lot of strength.  Unfortunately, when you later realize your dimensions were off, they are a real booger to dig out and they poke your hands when you’re reshaping your forge!

Also, I had to take a 2 day break for the rains.  You can see where I had to cover my masterpiece with a tarp to keep the rains off of it while it dried.

My final challenge was figuring out a base for my blower to spin on.  The dirt was too soft – the blower would just drill a hole in it.  And the rocks wouldn’t stay in place.  Fortunately, I have very clever kids, and between Jonah, Kai, Lincoln, and I, we figure out that if we just got a log and hollowed out a hole in it to place the fan in, it would work fine.

We got the log in place and started our very first fire.  It worked like a charm!  The final product is a completely man-powered forge blower!

Go ahead and watch the video below to see me at the proudest I’ve been all year.  I forgot to remind Mindy to turn the phone sideways when taking a vido, so you may want to watch it in a different tab to really see the sparkle of success in my eyes.