matthewj

I joined up here at the end of last month when I was over on the Armour Archive forum, had some smithing related question, and was directed here by Thomas Powers. A bit about me I guess... I started playing around with metal when I was in high school twenty years ago. I started out making chainmail, then found out about the Society for Creative Anachronism. Through the SCA I met a smith, Adam Gregory Williams, who was local to me, he took me under his wing and taught me about his specialty in smithing, which was making hilts for swords, and taught me a lot about other metal working, art, craft, work, people, life, etc... Through the SCA I was apprenticed to Adam for 16 years. Aside from chainmail I have worked on hilt furniture for countless swords, a bit of armor, and an occasional decoratively forged doodad, thingamawatzit, or widget. I'm mostly a dabbler in making things, but I try to dabble as best as I can. So, I've dabbled in various forms of metalwork, stained glass, painting, traditional printmaking, historical costuming, and experimental archeology. A couple years ago my wife and I bought a house with a huge garage to use as shop and studio space (we both focused/majored in art in college) and since then I've been slowly gathering tools to do everything I would like to do. Last summer I finally bought a venturi style forge burner and set up a simple "brick pile" forge. In december I got a great deal on a 350 pound Fisher anvil and feel like i can finally start pounding on some metal again. In the last year also gotten together a nice little collection of tinsmith stakes, a couple mildly crappy leg vises, and a very inadequate selection of hammers (a few other basic power tools too, but nothing exciting). I'm currently having a very hard time with the fact that I know of a nice step/caulking vice available for $50 but am having trouble making time to drive a few hours to pick it up. I'll stop rambling on as I tend to do and post a few pics of metal stuff I've made over the years...

thanks for the replies, I should be getting both books in the mail soon.

Hello all, I'm looking for a copy of a book that my late mentor had. Its been at least five or so years since I last looked at this book and I no longer remember the title, author, or even what the cover looked like. The book was sort of a survey of sculptural and artistic metal work, probably 200 to 300 pages. It had lots of nice pictures (black & white, but I remember a lot of color pictures too). It was the work of various people rather than that of one artist. It seems like there was some "how-to" stuff, but mostly pictures. Adam let me borrow a lot of his books over the years (his living room and some hallways in his house had floor to ceiling bookshelves) but he would never let me take this book out of his library. I remember him saying that it was out of print, that was probably around 2003. I can only remember a few sculptural pieces that were in this book, but I'll try to describe them in hopes that they will be enough clues to help me figure out what book it was. In the first third of the book there were some stylized human figures made out of roughly shaped sheet metal. I remember some pictures of stuff by Albert Paley. It seems like there was a section with little box/container like things of various fanciful designs. The thing I remember most was the textured back on a lizard or dragon or something... it was covered with rows off little spines which alternated pointing right/left. There was a diagram or something showing how the spines were made by chiseling columns of lines down the metal, then using a chisel to break each column up into spikes by setting the chisel perpendicular to the column and driving it in diagonaly to lift out each little spike. The spiked were then gently knocked to one side or the other. That section seemed like it also had examples of various sorts of animal/beast heads, with a little bit of technique to make them. Does this book sound familiar to anyone here? I've searched through the book threads here, but have had no luck since I don't even remember the title I'm looking for. I've searched through a lot of books on Amazon, and a couple look promising but I don't have money to start buying random books in hopes that it is what I am looking for. Is anyone familiar with this book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0764312545/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&condition=new That is the only one I could find that looked promising. Thanks all, Matthew