Update: My coal forge ran 14 hours straight on Saturday and the clinker almost killed the fire
I was working through a batch of 12 railroad spike knives at my shop in Abilene and the fire kept choking out around hour 9. Turned out I was running too much air from my old hand crank blower and it pushed all the ash into one big clinker right under the hot spot. I finally broke it up with my poker and the fire came right back, but I lost almost 40 minutes on it. Anyone got a trick for keeping clinker from building up that fast, or am I just running my blower wrong?