- Earth - Our iron and our coal
- Fire - To heat the iron and make it shape to our will
- Air - To make the fire burn hotter as needed to weld
- Water - To harden the metal
What makes someone decide to be a smith in the late Twentieth Century?
There are many influences that have made me fall in love with forgework and shaping Iron. These are the two main ones.
When I read The Lord of The Rings I was fascinated by how the sword that was broken was remade and I wondered at how was it remade.
The other and main influence was when I was ten or eleven years old Mom's cousin, Oli Roa, was out at my Grampas visiting and was going to use Grampas forge to make some carving tools for making fiddles. Oli was a master smith who did all the tricky repairs for the neighbours before retiring to the coast. My Dad thought that this was something that I should get a chance to see because with the local blacksmith's having dissappeared it might be the last chance for me to see such a thing.
Oli let me turn the blower for him and I fell in love with
how he was able to shape the metal to his will with just a hammer
and anvil. It was there I decided that some day I would be able
to do that as well.
I don't stick to any certain period with my Ironwork I find
this to limiting but what i do stick to is
using traditional methods
and techniques, I will try and explain some of them here so please
read this first before you bother asking me any questions.
I will on occasion refer to a certain colour of heat, this is how a smith knows how hot his iron is. For example a black heat is around 600'F and a white heat is about 2800'F
My work is forged, what forging is is heating the metal up to an orange heat or better and then shaping it by placing it on an anvil and hitting it with hammer. By controlling the force and direction of my hammer blows I can make that metal do anything I want it to.
Key to most of my pieces is forge welding. This is done by heating the metal up to a white heat till the surface is just at the melting point, placing two or more pieces together and hammering them together. This makes one solid piece with out any filler as would be in a machine welded piece. Forge welding is a process of cohesion not adhesion.
I also work as if steel is as precious as it was 150+ years
ago. This is why most of my work is "off the anvil"
my blades are shaped by the hammer and then just the profile is
cleaned up on the grinder, its electric powered I'm not that much
of a purist. I then use a file to clean up the grind marks. That's
it. Unless it is a special commissioned pattern welded blade there
is no fancy highly polished blades here. I would rather put the
effort into making an affordable quality blade than an affordable
mirror bright blade.
Metal can be made dead soft by slowly cooling this is called annealing. I usually anneal steel by either putting it in the wood heater in the shop when I quit,(winter) or heating the piece to a blood red and placing it in the ash under the forge over night(summer)
Lastly is tempering. This is done by gently and evenly heating the blade up to a red heat. It is the quickly cooled by putting it in water or oil. This leaves the steel as brittle as glass. It is then reheated to a lower temperature to slightly anneal the edge. There is a balance between to hard and too soft depending on the use of the tool.
It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little.
When you pay too much you lose a little money... that is all.
When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything,
because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the
thing it was bought to do.The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little
and getting alot... it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest
bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, And if
you do that you will have enough to pay for the something
better!
