Here is a simple tool for the brick forge. It's a piece of re-bar that has been forged on both ends and maintained the re-bar pattern on it for the handle portion. Its' purpose is to rake coal/coke closer to the fire or farther from it if need be. It is also good for packing the sides up so that the coal fire is a nice dome-like oven of heat.

I kept the rebar pattern in the piece because not only is it okay for grip, but it also properly makes any overly uptight smith who denounces re-bar as good source of material to work with other than practice pieces.

Seriously, if you are new to smithing and want cheap to basically free metal to work with and don't care what alloy it is, go for rebar. It's borderline mild steel to medium carbon type stuff. The pattern on the bars and the colour coding usually tell you what the stuff actually is, but there is no problem with doing a little bit of testing with the steel to figure out what it is.
For this case, I don't even care if it is medium carbon or mild steel.