Rant: I sunk $600 into a forge blower that never worked right

Bought a used Champion 400 blower at an auction last spring. Looked solid, guy said it just needed a little cleaning. I spent three weekends taking it apart, replacing bearings, painting it up nice. Thing never pushed enough air for my forge. Ended up buying a cheap Amazon blower for $90 that works better than that old hunk of iron. Lost the $600 plus my time. Has anyone else had bad luck with those old cast iron blowers?

3 comments

3 Comments

simons281mo ago

Bet the auction guy was laughing all the way to the bank.

hugo_schmidt1mo ago

Fisher.Adam makes a solid point about those old blowers needing back pressure. I had a similar headache with an old Buffalo forge blower a few years back. What finally worked for me was putting a simple gate valve right on the outlet before the pipe to the forge. By choking it down to about half open, the blower started pushing air like it was supposed to. Made a world of difference for maybe $15 in parts. Still ended up switching to a modern fan later, but that old cast iron beauty sat on my shelf for a long time as a reminder not to trust auction sales.

fisher.adam1mo ago

Man, what a bummer! I actually wonder if that old blower was meant for a different setup entirely. A lot of those Champion 400s were designed for cupola furnaces in foundries, not blacksmith forges. They need a lot of back pressure to run right, so with a forge that's open and loose they just spin fast but don't push air where it needs to go. You probably would've needed to choke down the outlet or run it through a smaller pipe to get any real velocity. And yeah, those cheap Amazon blowers are usually just repurposed bathroom fans or whatever, but they're actually made for low pressure high volume flow which works great for a forge. Lesson learned the hard way, but at least you got a nice piece of wall art out of it!