Hello all,

My name is Jason and I recently relocated my family to Northern Colorado from Idaho for work. I'm an executive project manager for a general contractor that self performs miscellaneous metals (though I've found it less risky and more cost effective to sub) and steel erection. My education background is mechanical engineering specialized in machine elements, but upon graduating, I jumped into construction engineering & design, then estimating and management because I didn't enjoy the engineering nearly as much.

My wife is an AFA Certified Farrier from Boise, ID. She's quite a hand and loves blacksmithing. I helped her get her get farrier business running well (business-wise) working with her for a year. I admit, I'm not even novice level, but thoroughly enjoyed working in the forge. She did some blacksmithing on the side for friends. Nothing nearly as nice as I've seen here! Just functional hooks and a set of saddle bag brackets for a Harley, etc. When we had our son, she stopped being a farrier, sold her gas forge to another farrier, but kept all of her other tools. Now that our boy is going into kindergarten, she wants to get into blacksmithing exclusively.

To stay away from life stories, I'm going to leave it at this. I'd like to add, I perused this site over the last few days and I'm very impressed with the things I've seen. It's obvious this forum is full of professionals. I have many questions, but will search quite a bit more before asking.

-Jason

Welcome; you are off to a good start here as you have listed a location in your profile and already said you will search before asking!

Very Refreshing!

Any specific types of blacksmithing all y'all are interested in?

welcome to the forge well iforge anyhow there certainly is I wealth of talent/knowledge on this site! please be aware some are touchy" and not in the "feely"way they don't like those that couldn't be bothered to research  and ask for advise and then tell those that take the effort to reply that they knew better all along or some such BS.

Welcome aboard Jason, glad to have you. I think you're going to fit right in here. It's a real pleasure to answer questions and talk to folk who know how to research and pay attention to answers. It's not like we expect a person to take advice, it's just really irritating when the asker argues if the answer isn't up to their expectations.

Frosty The Lucky.

3 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Welcome; you are off to a good start here as you have listed a location in your profile and already said you will search before asking!

Very Refreshing!

Any specific types of blacksmithing all y'all are interested in?

Thanks! Great question... to be honest, this will be primarily for my wife and she's expressed interest in ornamental work as well as knife making. I personally like the tooling aspect of blacksmithing, whether reproduction, repair or new and thoroughly enjoy the heat treating, quenching and annealing processes (material science was a bit of a focus). I heat treated a rounding hammer head and thought it was pretty slick, especially after paying so little for it and having it perform as well as hammers that cost 10X-20X as much. My wife made a couple of punches and I find myself using them often during projects.

3 hours ago, ianinsa said:

welcome to the forge well iforge anyhow there certainly is I wealth of talent/knowledge on this site! please be aware some are touchy" and not in the "feely"way they don't like those that couldn't be bothered to research  and ask for advise and then tell those that take the effort to reply that they knew better all along or some such BS.

I appreciate the tip.

1 hour ago, Frosty said:

Welcome aboard Jason, glad to have you. I think you're going to fit right in here. It's a real pleasure to answer questions and talk to folk who know how to research and pay attention to answers. It's not like we expect a person to take advice, it's just really irritating when the asker argues if the answer isn't up to their expectations.

Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks. Well, you know what they say about discussion forums.

Jason,

Welcome, you are off to a good start.

SLAG.

Yeah, I do know. Sorry Jason, I got Trolled a couple days ago. I guess I'm more ticked than I they deserve. 

Let's talk about what you want to do.

Frosty The Lucky.