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Hello. And a merry christmas from Germany! Yesterday I was in my forge again :) - finally after two weeks of no forging :( - and completed my pair of tongs and a bottom swage with help of the new tongs. The tongs are based on Toby Hickman´s way of making them, that was adopted by TechnicusJoe for hand hammering and welding on the rains in this video of him. The jaws, the arch and the boss are forged out of 20x10mm (0,8"x0,4") flat bar mild steel and the rains are forgewelded on 10mm (0,4") round mild steel. The bottom swage is forged out of 40mm (1 1/2") cold rolled 1045 tool steel quare stock. You all have a good day! Yours - Daniel

Hey fellows! Last weekend I visited Joe to pick up a new military style portable forge I bought from him. We took this occasion to also work together for one day. Matt charged us to forge a rounding hammer for him and that fit very well because Joe wanted me to show him how to forge one anyway. I myself was taught by Alec how to forge them and he learned it from Brian... so it was basically forged with the techniques Brian Brazeal teaches at the moment. The hammer was forged out of 40mm car axle steel, the billet was 8cm long. After grinding it weighs 790g (1,75lbs) and is now ready for heat treatment. After that and a final polish it will be shipped to the US where Matt will hopefully have a lot of fun with it :). Right side with my initials (Daniel Lea): Left side with Joe´s initials (TechnicusJoe): Bottom side with shoe shining: top side Unfortunatly there is no video of the entire process :(, although there might be some shreds of video coming up soon ;). Yours - Daniel

Hey fellow blacksmiths, some of you might allready have seen my YouTube-Video "Forging with TechnicusJoe July & August 2012." If not you may check it out because it shows some excerps on how the following project was put into practice: As a project to make during Joe´s visit at my shop I had the idea to make a wine bottle holder as a present for my father. So after some sketches and discussions we decided to make the holder like it eventually turned out. At that moment the only source of steel I had available was simple rebar, so most of the work simply was drawing out material to the right shape. The whole holder with a sample bottle: The top ring was forge welded and rivited, the lower ring was also forge weldet and fixed with a tennon joint. The holding beam is decorated with a fishtale-scroll at the end: The v-shaped base plate has curly cues at the tips on the one hand for decoration, on the other hand for safety and stability reasons: The holding beam starts of sqare and then converts into flat bar... ...and is fixed to the base plate via tennon joint. We both were very sattisfied and my father was very happy about his present. I hope you enjoyed the post about my little project. I appreciate any tips and critique on how to improve my workflow and the way I report about it in this forum. Regards - Daniel