The blacksmith forge medieval smiths would recognize, and what to buy

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The phrase people type into a search bar is blacksmith forge medieval, and what they usually want is one of two things: to understand what a medieval smith actually heated iron in, or to put together a solid-fuel forge that would look and work the way one did five hundred years ago. This guide is for the second crowd, with enough of the first mixed in to keep you honest. If you want the short version: a medieval-style forge is a solid-fuel forge, a firepot burning charcoal or coal, fed air by hand instead of by a gas jet. The closest thing you can buy today without fabricating your own is a welded steel firepot and a hand-crank blower, and my working pick for a home shop is the SIMOND STORE welded coal firepot paired with an 8 inch hand-crank blower.

I need to say this plainly before you read another word. I run a coal forge and a propane forge in my own shop, and I have twenty-five years on solid fuel, so the guidance on how a coal fire behaves is mine. But I have not run every product below on my own bench. Where I am leaning on published specs and what owners report on the forums, I say so. That is the difference between a guide you can trust and a sales page.

What a medieval forge actually was

Strip away the romance and a medieval forge is simple. It is a hearth that holds a bed of burning fuel, a way to force air through that fuel to drive the heat up past forging temperature, and a smith standing over it with tongs. The heat came from charcoal for most of the medieval period, with coal creeping in from roughly the fifteenth century onward as the forests thinned. The air came from bellows, usually a great double-chamber bellows worked by hand or by an apprentice, and in water-powered shops by a wheel.

That is the whole machine. There is no burner, no regulator, no forced-air fan on a dimmer. The skill lived in fire management: banking the fire, feeding green fuel around the edges, keeping the heart of the fire clean and reducing so the steel did not scale away to nothing. If you want the historical detail on the fuels themselves, the long-running thread on medieval fuel over at I Forge Iron is worth an evening, and the old Beautiful Iron write-up on the forge and fire covers the setup well. For the day-to-day work a period smith actually did, we have a whole piece on that: what a medieval blacksmith actually did all day.

None of that has changed for a modern home smith who wants the same experience. You are buying a firepot, an air source, and fuel. Everything else is the same anvil and hammer work smiths have always done.

The gear at a glance

Here is the field I would actually shop, with published specs only. Where a maker does not publish a figure, it says so.

Firepot specifications are from the SIMOND STORE product page. The blower casings and materials come from the makers' listings. Hardness on the budget cast anvil is not published, which tells you something on its own.

The firepot: the heart of a solid-fuel forge

If you buy one part first, buy the firepot. This is the bowl the fire lives in and the single component that decides whether you can hold a clean, deep fire. A medieval hearth was often just a shallow depression in a brick or stone table with a clay tuyere feeding air. You can build that, and plenty of people do, but a welded steel firepot gets you there faster and lasts longer than a cast one.

My pick here is the SIMOND STORE welded coal firepot. It is 10 by 12 inches inside with a firepot depth around 4.5 inches, made from half-inch steel plate and welded inside and out. That depth matters more than beginners expect. A deep pot lets you build a proper fire ball with the hot heart down in the center, which is exactly what you want for even heat and for forge welding. The air comes in through a 3 inch round inlet at the bottom, which is where your blower connects. The company rates the pot to 2600 F, which is comfortably above the temperatures you will run.

The reason I steer people to a welded pot over a cast iron one is thermal shock. Cast iron cracks when it heats and cools hard, and a firepot lives its whole life doing exactly that. A welded steel pot flexes and lives. That is not a knock on every cast firepot ever made, it is just the tradeoff, and for a fire that gets lit and killed hundreds of times it favors welded steel.

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If you would rather see how a solid-fuel forge comes together as a whole build before you spend, we walk through it in the coal forge buying guide and the blacksmith charcoal forge guide. Both cover the table, the tuyere, and the ash dump you will want under that firepot.

The air source: hand crank instead of bellows

The medieval air source was the bellows, and if you want the full period experience there are still people who build big double-chamber bellows and hang them beside the forge. They are beautiful and they are a lot of work to make and to keep sealed. For a working home shop, the honest modern stand-in is a hand-crank blower. It is period-adjacent, it forces air the same way, and it gives you a control the bellows smith would have envied: crank fast for a hot welding heat, crank slow to hold a piece at a working orange.

The hand-crank blower I would start a home smith on is the SIMOND STORE 8 inch model. It is a cast aluminum casing with a geared crank, and 8 inches of casing moves plenty of air for a single firepot. Cranking a blower instead of flipping a switch also teaches you fire control faster than an electric fan ever will, because your hand is directly on the throttle and you feel the fire respond.

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If you are running a larger fire or you want more air with less effort, step up to an 11 inch cast aluminum casing. The bigger gear reduction and larger fan move more air per turn, which matters if you are heating long stock or forge welding regularly.

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One caution that is mine, not the forum's: a hand-crank blower has an open gear train and a crank arm that spins. Keep loose sleeves, gloves, and long hair clear of it, and mount it solid so it does not walk while you crank. For the wider field of blowers, including the vintage Champion and Buffalo units people hunt for, see the hand crank forge blower guide.

The anvil and the rest of the medieval kit

A forge is half a shop. The medieval smith worked over an anvil, and you will too. You do not need a period wrought-iron anvil with a chunk of hardened steel forge-welded to the face, which is what many of them actually were. You need mass, a flat face, and decent rebound. A budget cast-steel single-horn anvil in the 66 pound class will get a new smith started on light work, and it is honest about what it is: a starter tool, not a lifetime anvil.

I will tell you straight that I would rather see you on a heavier used anvil if you can find one, because mass is the thing you cannot fake and the thing that returns your hammer energy into the steel. My own anvil is a 148 pound Trenton I call Bessie, and I measure everything against her. If you are weighing weight classes, the anvil weight guide lays out what each class actually does, and the best anvils for beginners roundup covers the field across budgets. Round the kit out with tongs and a cross-pein hammer and you are forging.

Fuel: charcoal first, then coal

This is where the medieval question gets practical. For most of the medieval period the fuel was charcoal, real lump charcoal made by charring wood, not the pillow-shaped briquettes from the grocery store. Charcoal lights easy, burns clean, and runs a little cooler and faster than coal. It is the most authentic fuel you can burn and it is forgiving for a beginner learning fire management. The catch is that it burns fast, so you go through a lot of it, and the good hardwood lump is not cheap by the volume a forge eats.

Coal came later and burns hotter and slower for the money, which is why smiths moved to it as it became available. Good smithing coal, meaning low-sulfur bituminous, cokes up around your fire and forms a cave of heat that is excellent for forge welding. If you want to run your medieval-style forge the way most working smiths run solid fuel today, coal is the practical answer once you can source it. We cover the differences in blacksmith charcoal explained and blacksmith coal explained, and the coal or propane piece is worth reading before you commit, because solid fuel is dirtier and needs more ventilation than a gas forge.

That ventilation point is not optional. Solid fuel produces carbon monoxide, and coal in particular puts off sulfur dioxide that will find your lungs. Run a solid-fuel forge outdoors or under a hood that actually pulls the smoke, and wear ANSI Z87.1 eye protection at the forge and the grinder. Natural fibers, cotton or wool or leather, over synthetics near the fire. I lost my eyebrows early to a quench-oil flare-up because I stood too close in a cotton shirt with no face shield, and the cotton is the only reason that story is funny now instead of a skin graft. Take the fire seriously.

What owners say

For the SIMOND STORE firepot, owner signal on the forums leans positive on the build. Smiths on I Forge Iron and general solid-fuel threads consistently favor welded steel firepots over cast for exactly the thermal-shock reason above, and the common note on the SIMOND pot is that the half-inch plate and depth are genuinely useful, with the usual caveat that you still supply your own table, tuyere clean-out, and ash dump. It is a firepot, not a finished forge.

On the hand-crank blowers, the consensus is more mixed and I will not dress it up. The cast-aluminum imported blowers move air fine when new, and for a hobby fire they do the job. The recurring complaint across owner reports is the gears: they are not the hardened steel of a vintage Champion or Buffalo, and hard daily use wears them faster. Several owners add oil to the gear case on arrival and report smoother, quieter running for it. If you forge every day and can find a good vintage blower, the old ones are better tools. For a weekend home shop, a new cast blower is a reasonable buy and it is available now, which the vintage market often is not.

Owner signal on the budget cast anvil is thin and I will treat it as thin: it is a starter, people report soft faces and modest rebound, and nobody who forges seriously keeps one long. Buy it to start, not to finish.

What I would tell a friend

If a buddy called and said he wanted a blacksmith forge medieval smiths would recognize, here is the short version. Buy the welded steel firepot first, because that is the part that decides your fire. Feed it with a hand-crank blower, the 8 inch for a starter and the 11 inch if you are running bigger heats, and crank it yourself so your hand learns the fire. Burn charcoal while you learn because it is forgiving and authentic, then move to good low-sulfur coal once you can source it and want more heat for the money. Put it all over the heaviest anvil you can afford, ideally a used one with real mass.

The one thing I would not let him skip is ventilation and eye protection. A solid-fuel forge is the most satisfying way to heat steel and it is also the one that fills a closed shop with carbon monoxide. Run it outside or under a real hood, wear your Z87.1, and keep the loose clothing off. Do that and you have a forge that would have made sense to a smith five hundred years ago, working steel the same way, in your own backyard. Start from the forges topic hub if you want to compare it against a gas setup before you commit.