Big fan of old medieval / timberframe / castle sort of architecture.   If I google medieval blacksmith shop all that come up are images from computer games, artists drawings, or similar.   Usually they look very cool but of course are not real.

Anyone have photos or know of any actual historical metal working shops / foundries /armouries that survived that were build with big timberframe style with stone etc... maybe a water wheel?   Like the lego blacksmith shop - is there a real life version out there someplace besides maybe disneyland?

photos of course welcome.

Take a look at this post and references mentioned:

 

Also, you need to consider the context of a blacksmith shop, in a town, village, monastery, castle, etc..  In a town the construction might have been fairly substantial and comparable to the neighboring buildings.  In a manor house some of the same considerations would go into the construction of a smithy as went into a kitchen located seperately from the main buildings.  Both were places where fire was in use and were more likely to accidentally catch fire.  They were separated to keep the fire from destroying other buildings.  So, they may have been of lighter construction which is easier and cheaper to replace in case of a fire.  Also, they would probably be less likely to have a thatched roof and would be located away from any building with a thatched roof.

You may want to do some research into architectural history of different types of buildings in the medival period.  And you probably will have to do real research in a public or university library and utilize Inter Library Loan.  Doing research only on the internet is very insufficient and inadequate.

If I were to design a general late medival blacksmith shop I would probably have 4 corner posts and roof trusses of mortise and tenon construction with the walls filled in with wattle and daub.  Light panels in the upper part of the wall which would swing up under the eaves for light and ventilation.  Probably a tile or lead roof.  Probably a stone floor in the main part of the smithy with dirt where animals would be brought in.  Probably a brick forge and chimney.  Great bellows suspended from the rafters.  Square anvil with what we would now call hardy tools set in stumps or a bench.  Half barrel (willow withey hoops) for a slack tub.  Lots of tongs in racks.  Various sizes and types of hammers.

Hope this helps.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

On 12/22/2023 at 9:45 PM, George N. M. said:

Doing research only on the internet is very insufficient and inadequate.

I'd like to have that quote on the back of a t-shirt.

-----

I've found that research is 5 to 10 times more labor intensive than I think it will be when getting started...

Takes practice and good references. It takes too much time shoveling past marketing . . . stuff online. It's still a huge data base if you can filter it. 

Still, the more you do the better and faster you get at it. If you're really lucky you like research. I do.

Frosty The Lucky.

Bull, you can probably get one made at your local tee shirt shop but I doubt that there is one in Westcliffe.  Pueblo?  Salida?  Alamosa?

I had one made for Martha, my late wife, that said, "If I am talking you should be taking notes."  It was true most of the time.

G

Here's a video of an 15th(?) century smithy in Spain:
Digital Demonstration #21 - Fritz Bramsteidl forging with a water-powered trip hammer.

I see the OP, Johnnyendeavor is still checking in, hopefully he'll join in and let us know what he's discovered.

The video you linked is an 18th c. smithy Billy. The basic design of the tools are much older than the smithy. Water driven trip hammers were used a couple few thousand years ago in China to make paper and felt, then to crush ore, mill grain and as a natural outgrowth, forge bronze and later iron. Before that was the "walking beam" hammer, basically a long beam, maybe a straight tree trunk with a hammer head on one end balanced on a fulcrum. It was powered by villagers walking back and forth on the beam, towards the hammer head and it struck a blow with all the momentum generated by the hammerhead, beam and people walking, they then turned around and walked back to raise the hammer. 

It's not hard to see why someone connected a water wheel to it and put the walkers to work elsewhere. Having the cog wheel drive bellows was a no brainer as was the development of line shops to power other machinery.

As George says there are a number of factors as to where the smithy was placed. One he didn't mention is custom AKA the market. The Hollywood image of a single person blacksmith shop never really was. Newly O'Brien THE blacksmith in Dodge City of "Gunsmoke" fame was entirely a producer's fantasy. The Dodge City smithy of the show's period probably took up several city blocks with corrals, wagon shop and charcoal storage. There were probably a dozen men working the operation plus town kids learning the trade and adding to the home cookie jar. I've visited the oldtown blacksmith shop in Scottsdale Az a good 25 years ago and it was half a block wide and a full block long, not counting the corrals and materials storage. Just the iron stock took up a shed roof outbuilding around 12' x 20' with room nest to it to park the wagon bringing the iron from the RR siding. The Scottsdale collier supply was across the street / road with a lumberyard and the RR siding and yard.

It was a much smaller town than Dodge City but the smithy was a small factory with some cutting edge innovations like the acetylene reactor that was in an adobe building next to the smithy and plumbed acetylene to various places in the smithy. There was covered water tight storage for the calcium carbide necessary to feed the reactor. 

Anything but a farmer repairing things wouldn't be a single man operation and the farmer had sons or hands to help. Perhaps the tools were shared between a couple farms so even that wouldn't have been one man operations.

Someone posted an article about a Roman blacksmith shop a while ago, George maybe(?) and it was no small operation. No Dodge City but still large, half a Roman block had been excavated at the time of the article.

I haven't gone back and read the thread linked above about the 15th C operation but if Thomas Powers contributed I'd take it to the bank. Not that Thomas was infallible but he readily admitted his mistakes and tended to thank the one who pointed it out. Unless they were snarky about it then his inner punster came out to play. 

Absent Companions.

Frosty The Lucky.

Thanks for the edit, Frosty, I noticed this too late to edit the information (one of my main complaints about this site).

 

No biggy Billy, we all drop a decimal or commit typocide. Evidently there's nothing we can do about getting AIs to just do what they're told, they seem to have to make decisions. Sometimes I've gone back and edited posts days later, others it's set in stone as soon as I submit it. 

You might try again a little later after the AI has harvested as much as it can and makes it's decision.

WHEW! I managed to control my AI auto-rant reaction . . . this time.

The 15thC. blacksmith thread posted above is pretty darned useful, lots of links seem still active though too many of the posters have dropped out of sight.

Frosty The Lucky. 

"Bull, you can probably get one made at your local tee shirt shop but I doubt that there is one in Westcliffe.  Pueblo?  Salida?  Alamosa?"

I spend about 30% of my time N of Denver and have a friend in Boulder that makes great T's and cuts me a deal.  The front could be a hammer logo with motion streaks and "I Forge Iron".  

Frosty, I suspect that a Dodge City smithy would have been bringing in coal by rail as fuel since it had a rail connection to the east since the time of its founding as a railroad town.  Coal would have been imported anyway for the railroad steam engines.  And there would not have been any local supply of charcoal on the Great Plains.

And the industrial and lighting use of acetylene, which is generated by the reaction of water and calcium carbide, postdates the invention of the electric arc furnace, which is used to produce calcium carbide (CaC2), in 1892.  That is why you don't see the use of carbide lights in mines until the late 1890s.  Prior to that some sort of candle or oil (real oil, not kerosene) was generally used for mine illumination.

I must've been mixing towns and time periods or just made things more confusing than good. I've been to Scottsdale old town that dates from 1880 and doesn't compare to Dodge at all. Dodge isn't old enough to be pre-coal and nobody would ship charcoal if coal was available by rail. 

What did people cook with before rail? During cattle drives the chucky usually had a wagon with their preferred fuel to cook with among other supplies. IF the drive was large enough to afford a chuckwagon. Ah, that's too wide open to answer, every chucky was a private contractor and made his own chuck. The job of the chuck wagon was WAY more important than TV and movie producers would have us think. The true drive and wagon masters, the owners of the herd and trains were actually second in command. 

The acetylene generator at the Scottsdale oldtown blacksmith shop was used as forge and furnace fuel, acet mantle lights were a short lived thing and only in the shop buildings and residences. Acet wasn't supplied like a utility and was replaced with Edison lamps by the turn of the century at the latest.

Anyway, Thanks George I should've read before writing, my memory needs refreshing more often than I realize.

Frosty The Lucky.

Frosty; 

I have an old book from one of the founders of Scouts in the USA who mentions that all cooking on the trail was done using dried "buffalo chips" or "cow chips". 

Published in 1904 or thereabouts. 

No wonder the food tasted like...

Never mind.

Don't eat Cooky's fish and chips. Got it.

Frosty The Lucky.

Always wondered what “bean hole” meant.

Completely dry cow chips burn pretty well.  Although I've never burned peat I imagine it is similar.  Damp or only partially dried chips, not so much.  Wood is preferable but out on the plains chips may be all that is available.  Sagebrush smells nice when burning but gives a bad taste to anything in an open pot or anything you try to roast on an open flame.  Do NOT try to toast your weenies and marshmallows on a sagebrush fire.

And don't make spits out of oleander!

Don't put sagebush in a dish like an herb either.

The good thing about oleander is the sap is so bitter nobody even chews the first bite off a skewer. Remember fellow travelers, if it tastes or smells Bitter it is an alkaloid poison. Sour means acidic.

A "bean pole" is a tall stick stuck in the garden for bean plants to climb. Bean plants growing as a creeping vine on the ground don't produce much food. Beans are easier to pick off a single stick than a trellis fence and WAY easier than out of a bush.

Wild peas and beans can be really tasty but some not so much.  Don't eat NO bitter beans!

Frosty The Lucky.

About the origins of Dodge City Kansas. This is a pretty good article from the mid (maybe) 20th.

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ks-dodgecitybeginnings/

Pretty good article. 

Frosty The Lucky.

Frosty said: "Remember fellow travelers, if it tastes or smells Bitter it is an alkaloid poison."

That is a good general rule to live by.  Emphasis on "live".  My grad dissertation was focused on natural product alkaloids.  Working in that area, you run into all kinds of literature about alkaloid consumption gone wrong - to the point of poisonings and death. 

After I finished school, I went to work with a guy that had been an apprentice of Alexander Shulgin.  Shulgin discovered and re-discovered many alkaloids from the synthetic side, informed by structures found in nature.  For example, MDMA was one of his re-discoveries, and you can think of MDMA as a synthetic analog of amphetamine.  Shulgin was fairly successful at finding and testing (on himself and/or his wife) psychoactive alkaloids.  He lived to age 88, managing to thread the eye of the poison needle.  I find it ironic that much of his work was done while employed at a major chemical company, where his management chain was clueless about what he was really doing.  When they finally figured it out, they pushed him out.

Relative to your comment, Frosty, Shulgin ingested his purified alkaloids for decades, but if you read his publications, you see he started with low doses, in the microgram range, then ramped up stepwise.  I wouldn't even recommend people to replicate that process.  People have died by drinking wildflower teas that had low quantities of pyrolizidine alkaloids, for example.

 

Building a tolerance isn't something to be done casually or quickly. 

And thank you VERY MUCH for the "pyrrolizidine" Sunday morning rabbit hole, Bull. Now I'm afraid to eat darned near anything flower! Then again I LOVE onion and garlic. 

Nothing like building a lifetime's tolerance for otherwise toxic plants eh? It makes you wonder about humans doesn't it?

Frosty The Lucky.

LOL on rabbit hole. Yes, much of the natural product world makes me wonder about humans.  For another large rabbit hole, look at Sacred Datura and Native American rituals.

Pyrrolizidines were a badger hole for me at the time.  I did my work in Scrophulariaceae, mostly Indian Paintbrush.  They are worth avoiding:

chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/20801500/PALecture2010.pdf

 

Okay, that wasn't fun. When I searched it out I found myself looking at a scholastic one upmanship of naming. Seems the attempt to simplify the order, family, genus, species, mess has turned into a wild west game of coming up with new designations. It's an unnavigable mess of names.

Even the old nomenclature was beyond me, I was more a walk in the woods and ID the safe vs. dangerous stuff. I would've lumped Scrophulariacea in with the "Warts" on my inedible list. Perhaps if I'd looked it up, with an asterisk indicating a possible medicinal. 

I'm WAY more cautions with fungi though cut Death Angels in a dish of milk, made excellent fly exterminators in a barn. Call it pest control, couldn't keep the mice and shrews away, though they never drank milk a second time. 

Frosty The Lucky.