Ross Dickens

Wow. Amazing information. Thank you all for responding. First and foremost, I agree that safety is ones number one concern. Personally I would much rather hurt myself than anyone around me, but with safe planning and safety equipment I wont have to choose the lesser of two evils. Thomas, thanks for the website and book information! I read a little of "The complete bladesmith" By: Jim Hrisoulas. I will definitely look into that book you suggest. I do understand that weapon smithing and armour smithing are shooting pretty high, but I do plan to work my way to that point. I get butterflies just thinking about working my way there. Thank you all for all the info, its just what I needed to get started, save my passion. I will also look into ABANA, I didn't know that this organization existed. Tons of great info here guys, i'm so ready to begin my dreams....thank you all again.

Hello everyone, My Name is Ross. I have been collecting scrap metal for the past year. mostly aluminum , copper, and iron. I have been wanting to melt all of it down into ingots for later use. I need a forge of course to get this all done. I live on a small vegetable farm in a small town in Texas. I have a spring about half a mile in the woods behind my house. Along the edge of this spring there is a ton of clay. I plan to gather a lot of this clay to form bricks for my forges. To make a long story short I want to build everything from the ground up. including tools, forge, anvil.... the works. I plan to make my forge a coal burning forge (I like the idea of forging in the days of old). I want to be able to forge all different types of things, such as weapons of different types and armour. I try to make it to Ren Fest at least twice a year. Does anyone have any input for a newbie like myself, who wants to start from scratch? Any good resource site i should check into? Any info would be amazing, and input is fantastic as well. Thanks for reading my dreams, i could go way more into detail but my wife is ready to sleep so i must rush. =D Thanks for reading my dreams!