Blacksmith shop for students

[ThomasPowers]

Come now; one member of this august body has done DIY Brain Surgery in just one Tree!  I myself have reworked my brain in seconds using only a concrete floor---twice so far.  

[jlpservicesinc]

11 hours ago, John McPherson said:

Trying to convey the state of the blacksmithing/fabrication art and craft here and now, as it applies to money-making endeavours and not hobbys, does not come easily with archaic texts. It is like trying to teach students how to work on modern computer chipped, fuel-injected, anti-lock brake system cars with a Chilton manual for a Model T. 

I'm not scoffing. Don't be so dismissive.  You asked..   I was a professional smith for many years and ran a fabrication business for many years.   Time is money.  

My question would pose this way.  What is it exactly you want the students to learn in that time frame in regards to training????  You must have an outline in your head or on paper at this point based on industrial standards, and demographics for employment.. 

 Forging of steels has not changed much in the last 100 years so saying a book is outdated for hand forging well, Is kinda not hitting the mark. 

Is production your only goal?  If a basic skill set your only goal?   Is production forging in a highly competitive lean, manufacturing environment your own goal?  Or is starting an Etsy store for someone who only wants to make key chains and make 60K a year your only goal.  Entry level position in forging?  What kind of parts?  Hand forged R&D? 

If you are teaching a forging class the sky is the limit on the level of knowledge or skill set you desire to teach based on what you want the outcome to be.. Which industry? 

   Having such a broad background would really limit any truly useful knowledge from a baseline stand point if hand forging.

If all the students only learn how to work with closed die drop hammers that can produce 1 fully forged part per heat cycle it is sure fast, but how useful can be debated as there are not many forge shops left. 

With this said the true way to produce is to increase the level of machinery to get to a finished product..   So don't be snotty.    Donald Streeter had a book on it.   there is no reason to reinvent the world or the wheel.  Unless of course that is exactly what you want to do. 

One of the most interesting aspects of forging is technically no one even needs to know how to hand forge if they are given instructions on how to run a closed die hammer.  With this said.  What are you expectations to what the person or student will actually learn?  

[pnut]

The Canadian office of essential skills in industrial arts program has a blacksmithing course. I found the PDF for the facilitators guide by searching blacksmith and essential skills. Maybe get in contact with the office I mentioned above and you may be able to purchase the curriculum since your not in Canada or maybe with some creative digging with search terms from the facilitators guide you can find it on PDF.

Pnut

[John McPherson]

I did not mean to come off as flippant or dismissive: I truly value the input of this august body of voluntary mentors.

I am not trying to replicate everything that the ACBA Blacksmithing program does in four years in two semester-long courses. I am trying to add a specialty track into the mainstream Welding Technology offerings. We have done the same for Automated Welding and Cutting, Pipefitting, etc.

Many institutions either refuse to share information, or simply never return calls or emails.The tip from pnut was worth more than gold to me. I simply do not have 600 to 1000 spare unpaid hours to devote to course prep if there is something better out there pre-existing.

Online, print, and hybrid texts for welding curricula, (whether for internal corporate training, private trade school, union journeyman program, or public college degree track), are easy to come by, and constantly updated by teams of editors. Systematic blacksmithing, not so much. I talked to owners and managers of production blacksmith shops to see what skills they wanted in a new employee.

Shipyards and corporations from as far away as Washington state and Minnesota send HR folks to our community college to headhunt our Welding and NDE graduates.We pride ourselves on being a national leader in Workforce Development. I have been part of a team taking students with zero background or knowledge of welding, teaching them everything from blueprints to orbital welding, and turning them into useful entry level workers for a while now. Former students now work for Lincoln Electric, SpaceX, the Electric Power Research Institute, etc., and make a heck of a lot more than I do. Some are maintenance welders in quarries, shutdown welders chasing the next power plant offering 7/10's, shipyard workers, pressure vessel fabricators, underwater welders. Others have their own shops and have been on Forged in Fire.

I never said that the basic forging chapters in many old books were not valuable, just that the context, format and sourcing data was outdated. The science of working and forge welding real wrought iron, expectations of years long paid apprenticeships working alongside masters, and walking down to the corner hardware store and picking out an anvil with all the trimmings was fine in 1919, not so easy to come by in 2019.

CAD/CAM, CNC plasma cutting, picking the right inverter arc welder and process/electrode/shielding gas for the job, laying out and measuring job sites with laser tools, and other needed modern production/fabrication skills are added to basic forging, shop tool usage, heat treating and metallurgy lessons to create an up to date program.

[jlpservicesinc]

there are many Vocational schools offering blacksmithing programs additive to their welding and fabrication programs and much of it is based on the desires of the teacher and is additive. 

In Worcester there were Wyman and Gordons who had forge shops for over 100 years in worcester.  they also have a forge shop in Grafton with one of the largest forging presses in all the world.   Today there are a few larger ones out there..  But all of the forge shop in Worcester are gone except 1.  W&G It was a 7 acre complex with 100 hammers and it is all gone. 

But overall in this area the forging shops have gone the way of the dodo.     There are still places in industry that want forge experience and fully understand modern and adaptive MFG. 

Doing a 4 year forging program with industrial, Aero space, Heavy fabrication, and such at a college level would be a tough roll indeed as most of it is book learning vs hands on. 

Forget about wrought iron but the methods employed are still valid.  

this is just my take on it and years back I took business classes and met with many industrial annalists as a way to have a better business model.   

Every person whom I met with all came back to machinery..  That in order to be productive I need to produce X, Y, Z at a rate fast enough to offset all other costs.     This model or modern MFG model does not apply to hand forging or to blacksmithing persay if its hand work.   I know a few industrial blacksmiths and they make a living but it's not what most think it is.  

Where I see the biggest advantage is when there is a special problem while fabricating a weldament and knowing how to forge on the spot, I can make the part needed and include it in the item. thus both saving time, making more profit and it benefits with less rework time. 

So, while i understand offering the course in terms of furthering a knowledge base so the student can have additive capability each and every time with forging it all comes back to the basics and then the learning comes to the adaptive nature of the person.  (where or how can this be applied).  In other words being realistic to what can in fact be done or learned  and then applied in the real world work environment. 

Welding and fabrication is a whole different beast than Forging..  The sky is the limit with both technology, CNC, equipment and such.  Again, it's a different process and more widely spread with AWS, etc, etc.  

Forging on the other hand always comes back to the same means unless using closed dies.   Today we have inverters with induction coils to heat metals quickly and in small areas so no need of gas or solid fuel forges are needed.   But it is then still forged the same whether open die or closed die.  Hammer, press, hydraulic press or hydraulic hammer press. 

I understand part of why you want a newer text for teaching as it's snazzy and up to date..  IE It just looks better.. 

Keep in mind there is a reason why the forging industry has not really changed in 200 years..  There is a limitation and is the reason why CNC has taken up many of the forging jobs and Billet became the hot word vs forged. 

Not one thing from 1910 has changed with forging and all the information passed along then is still the same exact information needed today to understand the forging of metals. 

I wish you much luck on your journey.   

[jlpservicesinc]

FYI,  this is just some extra info. 

The SME,  liquid metals and robotics as well as adaptive MFG with 3D metal printers are the buzz words. 

SME is a non-profit student and professional association for educating and advancing the manufacturing industry in North America.

Formerly called: Society of Manufacturing Engineers

Purpose: To advance manufacturing and attract future generations

Founded: 1932

here is one from 2017 and while it touts advances.. I don't see any new information. 

ART20178736.pdf

[JHCC]

13 hours ago, pnut said:

The Canadian office of essential skills in industrial arts program has a blacksmithing course. I found the PDF for the facilitators guide by searching blacksmith and essential skills. Maybe get in contact with the office I mentioned above and you may be able to purchase the curriculum since your not in Canada or maybe with some creative digging with search terms from the facilitators guide you can find it on PDF.

Pnut

I've created a forum page with links to the course materials:

 

[John McPherson]

Our Welding and Machining Technologies departments both currently use some of the online SME education products, but they do not exist for the sector that I am setting up. 

Unfortunately, I agree that the forging article was sorely lacking in detailed content, and the Canadian skills student document was less thorough than the Boy Scout Metalwork merit badge book. The facilitators guides were useful. 

Not here to name drop, but there are at least 6 shops in NC that I know of personally that produce custom forged ironwork, be it architechtural, decorative, or custom tools and knives. They all employ helpers that need to possess certain skills to be useful . Some are owned by a single individual, others are corporations. I have reached out to, and visited most of them at one time or another about what they need in a new hire. Some were willing to spend a hour or two answering in depth questions.

Above the scale that I am targeting, there are shops where the "tongs" are manipulators on forklifts, and the "hammers" are giant presses and rotary forging units that make the earth shake.

No community college program can be more that the equivalent of military basic training. We can ensure that they are capable of further advanced training for a specialty of some sort, and have the necessary skills to not be totally useless from the start.

 

[ThomasPowers]

There is a member here that is a Metallurgist at Scot Forge; perhaps you could ask HR there what they are looking for in a new hire and work backwards?

I would think that any large corporation that uses smiths might be happy to provide you with a wish list to slant your program towards putting out people they would find of interest...

[John McPherson]

Scot Forge is one of the companies that sends recruiters to our college for NDE grads, and I have talked to the Plaid Jackets. Welders they do not need. They would love to have students with the skills that I am proposing. Scaling up is easy if you have the fundamentals.

[ThomasPowers]

I recently hooked them up with the Metallurgy department out here at NMT; they were looking for interns and summer job people in Metallurgy programs.

As a blacksmith it's always nice to have a friend or three who are metallurgists; especially if you like to get into weird stuff. I remember once working on a roman gladius out of real WI and seeing a weird pattern in the grain, a mix of very tight small grains and very large grains in a swirling random distribution.  Weird enough that we took it down to the local state U and asked a metallurgy prof about it.  He asked us what we thought was going on and I explained that as it had been a wagon tyre and we were in the mountains, (Ozarks), I thought that extremely rocky roads back then had made a lot of dislocation clusters in a random pattern and then when I did a fast low number of heats forging of it, (I selected that tyre as it was close to finished shape), it had both grain growth a in sections not deformed and renucleation where it had had a pounding on the roads.  I still treasure the look on his face as he said "Why aren't you in my classes!"

[Latticino]

On 12/5/2019 at 9:21 AM, John McPherson said:

Again, I am looking for ***one book*** that covers everything that goes on in a production shop, conveyed in a modern, concise text and illustrations. And it does not seem to exist, although many sources have useful projects, chapters or passages

How about the Aspery books?  I know they lean a little towards artist hand smithing, but they still do cover the basics well, and the projects teach applicable skills that crossover to production work and planning.  The illustrations are good and the author is available as a visiting instructor.  Nothing for power hammer or presses to speak of as far as I know, but my basic thermo class didn't exactly prepare me for HVAC design either, it just gave me the framework to understand what was important.

[pnut]

4 hours ago, JHCC said:

I've created a forum page with links to the course materials:

Thank you sir.

Pnut

14 hours ago, John McPherson said:

The tip from pnut was worth more than gold to me. I simply do not have 600 to 1000 spare unpaid hours to devote to course prep if there is something better out there pre-existing.

Glad to have been some help.

Pnut

[jlpservicesinc]

8 hours ago, John McPherson said:

Scot Forge is one of the companies that sends recruiters to our college for NDE grads, and I have talked to the Plaid Jackets. Welders they do not need. They would love to have students with the skills that I am proposing. Scaling up is easy if you have the fundamentals.

Which skills are you proposing?   or did I miss it?  If I missed it I apologize.. 

Oh, and by the way I spoke with Mark A. at the 2018 ABANA conference and then again at the NEB meet that Mark was the lecturer.    We talked about histories and IIRC when he was in Blacksmith school in the UK they used the Blacksmith craft Cosira which he mentioned directly.. And he patterned his books with a baseline on this book..  He made it his for sure with tidbits and such. 

The other one that is a good one is the ABANA forging curriculm. https://abana.org/education/controlled-hand-forging/

[John McPherson]

3 hours ago, jlpservicesinc said:

Which skills are you proposing?   or did I miss it?  If I missed it I apologize.. 

 

"CAD/CAM, CNC plasma cutting, picking the right inverter arc welder and process/electrode/shielding gas for the job, laying out and measuring job sites with laser tools, and other needed modern production/fabrication skills are added to basic forging, shop tool usage, heat treating and metallurgy lessons to create an up to date program."

I will be glad to put up a more comprehensive list of the skills in each class, and the other classes that complete the Certificate. Let's do that next week, and start a new thread. Give me a chance to put on my PPE before you all take a swing at me. 

[jlpservicesinc]

Just trying to figure out what you are actually trying to do within the forging aspect.. Not the welding aspect as this is all ready in place.

How in depth of a forging program are you looking to include?  What level or time commitment are you looking to include?  These kinds of things.  This will change just what takes place at the program/class level.  Do they just need to see it? Or do they need to experience it?    etc, etc. 

I'm sorry you feel like i attacked you.. that was not the case or my intentions.  So please accept my apology.

[ThomasPowers]

Hmm make sure there is a lab on "making things to the print".  I've heard a lot of folks complain that their new hires just can't make things to the print which can cause a lot of trouble in a large Fab shop.