The porta-pit of Hell.

I was going to save this post until I had nice scans of my design, cost, instructions and notes on making a knife for a file, and some classy pictures.  However, the cost/awesome ratio of the paint-can forge caught me off guard.

While my total cost for the forge itself was about $50, it could be brought down to maybe $30 by being slightly smarter than I was, and not buying a giant, expensive torch to light the charcoal.

Here is another post-inferno picture:

My setup for annealing

Here is a wider-view of the porta-pit.  The box of dirt is for insulating a file I am annealing, and the hose is cooling off the forge.  The small box of dirt is full of wood ash, dirt, and the file that I heated up to orange.

This thing is pretty awesome.  Details on building will come soon.