but this is a blacksmith cart half of this on this side are hammers that i strike with on this side
are tools that are struck with a hammer flatters and smoothers cutters and punches things of that
nature and then at either end there are tongs of one type or another um a lot of them i make myself
and here is an anvil this is my small anvil at 100 pounds you're working with hot materials
sometimes large sometimes small when you're working with pieces of metal that are small
you have to get to the anvil pretty quickly so you want to be no more
than one step away from your work so here i have the mouth of my furnace i'm literally one step um
when i pull it out of there i'm one step from my power handle or i'm one step from my
press so when you as soon as you pull the metal out of the furnace the clock starts and you only
you've only got literally seconds to start your work the smaller the piece the less time you have
you know a lot of times people think that you use big hammers all the time and actually you don't
little work little hammer so what i want to do here is i want to get all this stuff collected
before i even start my fire what we're going to do is we're going to make this letter opener
without using any electricity the blacksmith will usually start off with a known
unknown length of material and i'll get my chalk or my sandstone
soapstone and i'll take off about six inches of material we'll start cutting in here
and you can see if you come up close here how this oil is literally boiling off see that that surface
of that cut is probably right around 300 degrees it is so hot it's boiling off that lube oil
and if you're hack sawing so hard that you can't hold a conversation you're working too hard so
that's what i tell my students work smart not hard don't hold your breath
so i've got a little piece of material there
enough to make a letter opener out of and this is 3 8 inch square mild steel
knock this off because you don't want to have any
loose ends you want to have a clean piece to work with
so i'm going to make this piece entirely with hand tools
we have to get a starting point on it so anytime i'm making whether it's a leaf a fence picket
a knife blade or a letter opener i always start off by making a point
so
if you want your work to stay even you have to work it evenly
you can see i've got kind of a pyramid shaped point on there now
but you can see it's a little bit skewed to one side see how it's up there a little bit
well that's no problem it's an easy fix
see i just straightened that point out some
because what i'm trying to do
is get it to play out evenly so we've got a nice clean piece of metal there now i'm going to
forge the blade so since i want to get maximum width out of that instead of hitting it here
i'm going to turn it on its edge because i'll get an additional maybe 20 percent of width on that
now what i'm trying to do is make an effort to strike the same number of blows
on each side
you'll see that metal white
notice that i'm moving
see that yeah and you'll start to see a line forge in the center see that it's very subtle yep um
that's how you forge a double-edged sword blade it's the same technique basically so i'm just
gonna dress that tip up a little bit but that blade is essentially done and i want symmetry
i'm gonna mark off a section to put the twist
so i'm using
what's called a half face blow to put a shoulder in there see
we had a nice deep shoulder in there that's a fairly well polished
piece of metal it's not too rough right
so that's what you want to shoot for you not only do you have to control the shape of the metal
but where a lot of blacksmiths drop the ball is they're not maintaining
surface quality and that was the hallmark of the old european smiths not disfiguring their material
so when you're using an oxy acetylene torch what you want to do is you adjust
you see there's a bunch of smoke coming off there so i want to adjust that out
so the sooting just stops and it's feathery at the end then you add your oxygen and then what you do
is you start heating up the piece you want to twist and it won't take very long because there's
to twist it because there's only a little section
that needs to be twisted so then i put a twist on that
just enough to go around once see we got a nice little twist in there see
very cool yeah so now we're gonna roll our scroll
now notice that there's not a lot of scale forming on this
and that's deliberate because at this phase of the game i don't want to compromise my surface quality
and what i'm trying to do
is get it to roll over nice and even
so you kind of have to coax it a little
ooh la las they say in france
so there's our little roll back see so now
i still want this thing to roll up true
so it's a little strike here
a little strike there because i really want this thing to be as round as possible
tuck your blade in there
and we get down to some hand work this is a half round file with double cut teeth so this is the
file that you use when you want to take material off quickly and also it has a half round body
on it you can see that it allows you to follow a curve in a way that you can't with a cornered file
so it's a real good way to do and so what i do when i'm doing this kind of work is i will start
with my file on one corner see that line that i forged in serves as our guide as our file guide
and you just work it in and the keys of success here is you you want to be patient so that's my
first grade of file see so on this file i'm just kind of cruising along because i'm not really
aggressively hogging off metal like i was doing earlier this is finishing work and this is done
with what's called a second cut file the teeth are finer smaller and sharper than the double cut file
so what i'm doing at this point is i'm scratch farming i'm cutting out all of the prior marks
from the coarser file and that's typically the the logic behind most finishing of knives
is you're basically uh scratch farming the crocus cloth so you develop a feel for this
and what we're going to do is we're going to produce a finish on this that is kind of pearly
gray it's going to be mostly free of scratches if we're fortunate um but it'll be pearly gray
so what i do is i put some oil on that blade because it keeps the grits from falling off
so i've got like a paste where the grits are held against the work piece without falling off
it's one of those work smart not hard kind of things so as you go along you start to
feel the metal resist less it feels like it's smoothing up now you can come around this side
and you can see how it's produced a pearly gray finish on that so i'm wiping that down a lot of
times i'll spray a little lacquer on this to differentiate the handle etc but yeah that's a
so what you've got is a cross section c where it's thick in the center so it's not app to bend and it
tapers towards the edge and so that's how you want to do you know a lot of this kind of stuff
but it's the same technique regardless you know regardless of what you're making whether
it's a letter opener or a big long dagger or whatever else it's basically the same