why i started blacksmithing

[eggwelder]

carving tools. they are expensive, and then you come across Alexander Weygers "the Complete Modern Blacksmith"

well, thats pretty easy to set up and make a few gouges and chisels. shows you all about it. then you look around, piles of blacksmith related stuff, probably more money and time spent than just buying the good chisels. and you`ve only made 3 chisels/gouges that actually turned out. but you have absolutely no regrets…...lol

finally got back to the carving with this winter/start of the next ice age. 

 

this unfinished rendition of st george and the dragon is from another long winter.

 

and some odds and ends

[ThomasPowers]

That's a rather common way to fall into the pit of blacksmithing.  I know a professional swordmaker that started by making wood carving tools and I had a fellow come to me who wanted to make some specialized bowl turning tools so I heated a length of steel in the forge and told him to grab the cold end and bend it as he wanted it.  I then showed that he could re-heat and bend it back to where he wanted it---hot steel bends much more easily than people would think! 

 

Did that a couple more times for different bends, normalized them, (they were to hold carbide metal lathe inserts and so did not need "cutting edge" heat treat.)

 

Next weekend he bought an anvil from me and started setting up his own forge...

[Steve Sells]

nice work, I can not do that carving stuff, never tried very seriously to be honest actually, but I love it.

[Frosty]

Nice carving. Wood carvers and finish carpenters seem to be a pretty large demographic of folk who're smithing. Pretty much the same story, why spend LOTS when I can do a little hammering, grinding and heat treat and just make . . .It. Next thing you know they're trying to remember what all that expensive wood was for.

 

Ain't it great?

 

Frosty The Lucky.

[eggwelder]

steve, i have looked at the work you do, i say you would be very good at it. making damascus and carving are both painstaking and labour intensive, and i hope equally enjoyable. i hope to be able to make my own damascus by the end of the summer, even if i just get better at cable. i must work on my welding, as carving will be mostly set aside till next winter or really rainy days.

gerald, thanks, but in the way of carving tools, i only ended up forging about 4 gouges, 2 chisels, and a few decorative background punches. i gave two away to some very close friends of mine when i left Alberta, one is very large that i made for carving spoon bladed oars for my boat, the two chisels have been awol for awhile, and the rest are in my tool roll. i think i may experiment with a few different shapes of gouge shafts, like knuckle bent and back bent. nobody really makes these anymore, but were extensively used by my great grandfather's family back in germany before 1900

thomas and frosty, i`ve read that elsewhere as well. few people start smithing to be a smith, they start because they needed a tool or a hinge or something else they could`t find or afford elsewhere.

 

how did you start?

[EtownAndrew]

I got into blacksmithing through making knives. I had heard that a knife could be forged and so I gave it a try. I don't make knives very often now but have moved on and forge other things.

[ThomasPowers]

Back in the '70's  I fell in love with the pattern welded blades coming out of the renaissance of pattern welding in the USA. Being a poor college student I was not able to afford knives that started at US$100 per inch of blade and after coveting them awhile I got a great idea---I could learn to smith and make my own!  (cue maniacal laughter; cue *more*  maniacal laughter; cue arrival of villagers with pitchforks and torches, men with straightjackets, Godzilla and Frankenstein's Monster...)

 

So I had picked up a copy of "The Modern Blacksmith" and in 1981 I built my first forge from scrap finds. As a single "logging geologist" working crazy hours (84 hours a week was standard) in a lot of little towns in OK I started buying old smithing tools and using them. In 1983 there was an oilfield crash and I took my savings and convinced a friend who was a professional swordmaker to let me spend a year as his apprentice, (no pay, 6 days a week in the shop, 2 meals a day with his family...).  At the end of that time I had learned I prefer the craft as a Hobby than a job and I had gotten married and had to support a family. 

 

However I have been working in the smithy fairly steadily ever since that fateful day in 1981 and I do do my own patternwelding and have learned that I could have mowed lawns and bought the fanciest pattern welded blades out there far faster and cheaper than "making my own"---but would never have had the joy and satisfaction of creation that blacksmithing has brought me over the years.

 

Truly "I've created a monster!"   (cue villagers asking for improvements to their pitchforks and torches, the men in the white coats wanting to discuss forging knives, Godzilla wanting to experiment with using his radioactive breath to heat metal for forging and Frankenstein's monster is a *great* striker with a 32# sledge!)

[Steve Sells]

ok  I may as well admit the embarrassing stuff.... I wanted to make a sord :( there I said it.  I had already purchased a few wall hangers, and was not happy with them. I remember one bent badly when trying to cut something (tho that was a safer accident than when the blade went flying out from the handle and across a camp ground like the another one I owned did)

 

But when I was told it could take years to be able to learn enough before I could be able to make them,  I was willing to work and learn how, and I stuck with it.  By the time I found out my new teacher didn't do many blades at all, I was hooked.   Also I must admit that my early days in the forge opened up a wide world of smithing that I still enjoy today.  Later on I was lucky enough to get Bill Wyant to take me on as a blade apprentice.

[Frosty]

Okay, why not. My Father was a metal spinner and machinist, some of my earliest memories are of him babysitting me by sitting my on the ways of his spinning lathe behind the tail stock. He'd loosen the nut on the adjustment wheel a little so I could play with the free play, it'd been drummed in I couldn't move the wheel past free play or BAD things happened. Anyway I sat there driving my race cars, each one had a different sound and feel, gold, silver red, gray, white, etc. etc. Spinning at Dad's level really pushed the metals to the limit of movement in the shortest possible time so you get to feel the sound and vibration while watching the tool move the blank over the die. We moved out of that house when I was almost 4 and that was the last time we had a shop in the basement. Years later we had a garage in Southern Cal. where I spent a LOT of time.

 

Working in Dad's shop was teaching me more than I wanted to know, made me my allowance and walking around money but the precision he bid to was no fun at all, every move was darned near exact. So, after watching an episode of "Bat Masterson" where he'd been robbed and left to die in the desert and instead made everything he needed to survive and kill the bad guys from an indian destroyed Conestoga wagon I was hooked. He made all sorts of important thing, clothes from the canvas cover, atlatl and darts from a spoke, etc. What got my attention was how he forged dart points and a knife in the coals of a fire using a broken hatchet as a hammer and a big rock for an anvil.

 

That was it, I NEVER wanted to not be able to make what I needed so I wanted to blacksmith. Father on the other hand discouraged me actively. He was a depression era kid and seriously pragmatic, no sense in earning a trade that didn't pay. Mother was on the same side of course so there I was, I had the urge but no help at all.

 

Not that my rebelliousness was kicked into high gear, well not till I hit maybe 12 or so but that's it. I taught myself blacksmithing because I never wanted to have to do without or be at the mercy of whatever. Then there's the playing with fire and beating things part I really enjoy too.

 

It wasn't till just before the internet went public I discovered there were books about blacksmithing and then I discovered ABANA. I had a huge amount of bad habits and wierdness I'd taught myself to unlearn. There was one thing above many others I got from early days in Dad's shop, I learned a feel for all kinds of metal moving that's close to unrivaled except maybe by other metal spinners.

 

Uh that's about it, my folks said NO and I get to play with fire and hit things. What more could a boy want?

 

You asked.

 

Frosty The Lucky.

[eggwelder]

ok  I may as well admit the embarrassing stuff.... I wanted to make a sord :( there I said it. 

 

 

i made one, still have it, still not done. stock removal, hilt is welded up square stock(arc). not heat treated, never will be. about 5 lbs of arm exhausting rustiness. maybe i`ll post a pic after i grind the negect from its blade.

[EricJergensen]

I got into blacksmithing because of a campout at historic Pawnee Bill ranch (in Oklahoma). My younger son, Elliot, (about 8yo then) was really interested in the smithy and we found out that they occasionally had classes. We got on the mailing list and about a year later took a class together. We liked it. I tracked down a forge, blower, anvil and 300# of coal and hid it in the basement without getting "caught". Santa set up the kit on Christmas Eve and stuck coal in Elliot's stocking. He thought is was just a joke until I said "go look in the basement"...

 

What keeps me in blacksmithing - other than the great company of other smiths - is the visceral physicality of it. For a living, I'm a computer programmer. Pretty much everything there is very abstract and non-physical. I like the creativity of it, but I can do hundreds of hours of work and have nothing visible to show for it. It's head and heart but not body.

 

Smithing brings all three together.

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

I like fire, metal, and knives. :)

 

Dad and I started when I was around 14, or so.  Dad was one of those guys who never stopped learning, and was always trying out something new. He had blacksmithing projects when he was in high school back in the 30's, and I guess it always stuck with him. He was a machinist by trade, in the Air Force, and as civil service with the Navy.  He knew how to do mechanical repairs, wood carving, did U-control airplanes, cooked, did drawings, knitted on occasion, and much more. What I learned from him was never stop learning, and at least try something before deciding yes, or no.  After he passed away I couldn't think of parting the smithing gear, so I hauled it all down to my new place in NV. It all sat for a few years until one day something just clicked in me again, I set it up, and started back into it.  One of the aspects I like about smithing is that I can take a chunk of metal that most would think is trash, and make something useful, or beautiful out of it. It fits into my recycling , reusing mentality.