Dan P., on 08 September 2010 - 12:33 PM, said:
Yes, UK. London, in fact, the capital city!
In this country I have only ever seen people do the elaborate hammer signals as a "demonstration", never as something that working people actually do.
Re; eye contact- your striker should be watching, should he not, and waiting?
This is possibly getting a little pedantic now, but how often have you been in the working environment when strikers were a normal feature? I know of no forges now where they are working full time strikers,indeed personally I can't think of many forges in the last thirty years that had the luxury of employing full time strikers, Powerhammers and other methods have made them redundant by and large which is why you get the "elaborate" (exaggerated) demo's, that is usually the performance put on for the public, not necessarily how it was.
As for eye contact, yes they were watching, and they knew what was required of them, the eye contact was with the tools and metal, not each other. And as for waiting, they were usually preparing for what they new was coming, getting tooling ready etc
When regular strikers were used, the rapport was uncanny, there was almost a feeling of telepathy between strikers and Master, pure magic.
To go back to your previous post, apologies, re vocal commands, occasionally they would be used, usually when punching or chasing or other processes where the master had both hands in use to position tool and workpiece in relation to each other, but even then nods were used mainly. In my experience it was rare to hear spoken commands/indicators.
Probably showing my age now.
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