Bought a $60 fire brick set for my forge floor last month

Best money I spent after cracking my third cheap brick in a row, anyone else use the hard fire clay kind instead of regular?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade_hernandez21d ago

Honestly I gotta push back on this one. I've been running my forge for about 2 years now and I've tried the hard fire clay bricks twice and both times they just spalled like crazy after a few hot-cold cycles. Maybe my forge gets hotter than yours but those $60 bricks cracked up worse than the cheap ones for me. I ended up going back to the regular cheap firebrick and just replacing them every 3 months for like $15 a pop. Ngl the hard clay ones felt nice and dense but they just didn't hold up to the thermal shock in my experience.

danielwhite21d ago

Jumping off what Jade said about spalling, I think a lot depends on how you treat those hard bricks when they're new. I learned the hard way that you gotta heat them up real slow the first few times to let the moisture bake out. If you just crank it to forging temp right away, they'll crack every time. Also keeping them off the ground on a thin layer of sand helps with the thermal shock, at least in my shop.