Category Archives: On Blacksmithing

I took the four day blacksmithing class in mid-June. What with one thing and another, the summer is almost over and I never did finish my metalwork.

My plant hanger and fire pokers still had traces of scales (slag) that needed to be polished off with a stiff metal brush. What’s more, rust had begun to speckle my projects, a sure sign they needed their finishing touches.

“When you get home, you’re gonna want to finish these,” Tim Middaugh had said, a cup of coffee in his hand, his safety glasses still on as he tipped back precariously in his plastic lawn chair. “Heat ’em up in your oven, or on your grill, to about 200 degrees. Brush ’em really good, and while they’re still warm, rub ’em all over with Johnson paste wax.”

With some trepidation, I went ahead and followed instructions. Our outdoor grill worked like a charm. I could have used a vise, but settled for a less-than-perfect brushing. Still, most of the scales came off, and the paste wax did the rest. Now my metalwork is officially finished, it feels like summer has come to a satisfying end.

This old photo on the wall in the forge where I took blacksmithing reminds me of Henry Wadworth Longfellow’s classic poem. (That orange glow in the lower righthand corner is a reflection from one of our forges.)

The Village Blacksmith

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter’s voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother’s voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his haul, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,–rejoicing,–sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.

****

On Blacksmithing Workshop Day Three, I wore my anger management t-shirt. Grrr.

Just in time. Before I knew it, I was striking. Or standing in as striker. Or whatever the correct terminology is.

Here’s how it works. The blacksmith holds the glowing hot metal on the anvil and points out where to strike with her hammer. It’s then the striker’s job to strike at that exact place with a massive sledgehamming blow.

“I’m afraid,” I said to R. I had a different idea about going on strike. My heart was racing a mile a minute. Only day three, and I’m supposed to be wielding a sledgehammer?

“Tim put your piece in the forge and it’s already hot,” she said. “We’re supposed to take turns.”

So much for cowardice. I mean really, if this long-haired blond wearing yellow safety glasses and a kind smile invited you to beat the @#$% out of something, how could you refuse? Especially after you’ve been struggling all morning with @#$% hole punching and leaf-fashioning.

So I grabbed that sledgehammer and started striking. Tap, tap, tap — WHAM, tap WHAM, tap WHAM. Our mission: to draw out the ends of our plant hanger frames (stretch and thin them from 1-1/2 inches to 1/2 inch at the tip). In a hundred or so more WHAMs we accomplished it.

Did I finish the plant hanger frame? Almost — drew it out, scrolled both ends, just gotta vise/wrench it to a perfect right angle dead center.

Here’s my sketch of the plant hanger drawn at about 7:15 a.m.

And what I’ve got so far — I’m proudest of the leaf scroll.

So how do I feel after a long, arduous day? Anger managed.

Day Two of my Beginning Blacksmithing class. Last night I went to bed worried about how I’d ever manage to forge the wreath hanger. But here it is, on the left, voila. In the picture below, I’m hammering that top piece flat. We used a jig to make the big dipper, so no problem. And making that little twist — that’s a gas. You heat up the middle of the stick, put it in a vise, use a wrench to grip the exposed metal about 4 inches down, and rotate one full turn. Easy peasy.









No, my comeuppance was the weight of my hammer. I had to get a lighter one. Or was it my new gloves — there are holes in them already, and they didn’t protect my arms from searing when I cut in chase lines. Or was it when I spilled my can of water, all my hot metal, and my punches and chisels besides, trying to fit a rivet into my 3/8″ punch holes? Or maybe my comeuppance was when I finally got the glowing hot rivet pounded in, only to discover my pieces were facing the wrong direction, so the rivet had to be cut out so I could start over. (Of course I couldn’t figure it out, and Tim had to help me.) No, that wasn’t it. Whatever the reason, thank God Tim turned off the forges when he did or I would have started to weep.

Learnings of the day: If you want to be a blacksmith, it helps to have manual dexterity, and just a smidge of coordination. If you want to be a blacksmith, it helps to be quick. If you want to be a blacksmith, it helps to have a knack for bending molten metal to your will.

All that agony and pounding, pounding, pounding. But look, Ma, I made a scroll thingie and a wreath hanger, and a fireplace poker.

I’ve wondered a great deal what blacksmithing would be like previous to taking this four day workshop with Old West Forge. I no longer have to wonder. Tim Middaugh is great, he actually lets us make stuff.

There are five of us in the class, a man from Portland, a woman from Spokane, a couple from Darrington and me.
On our very first day, we took mild steel stock and made a drift, two bending forks, and started practicing rolling eyes. (It’s really what they’re called–the circle at the end of a bar of steel–and I did a lot of eye-rolling trying to make them, too.) Okay okay, our teacher made the one pictured here.

We also hammered away at tool steel. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a picture of the mild steel and tool steel in its bar state:

And here’s what I made (yes, Tim helped) by the end of the day:

To the uninitiated, that’s a 1/2-inch and a 3/8-inch bending fork, a fuller, a hot cutter, a 3/8-inch punch, a walking chisel, and a drift. Tomorrow, bright and early, we’re supposed to use all these tools to make other stuff, starting with punching a rivet hole.

Here’s to roaring forges and banging and pounding and grinding and sparks flying and metal in various shades: shiny silver to yellow-orange to cherry red to blue to straw. Tim taught us about the SOR method of hammering (Square, Octagonal, Round). Add an E and you’ve got SORE, as in Egads my forearm is killing me. Think of me at dawn, as I head up to the forge for another go.

A-blacksmithing we will go, hi ho the dairy-o, a-blacksmithing we will go.

Tonight in White Salmon, Washington, in preparation for my long-awaited Beginning Blacksmithing Workshop at Old West Forge, I ate a Greek Salad at a pub called “Everybody’s.” True to the pub’s name, everybody in White Salmon seemed to be there. Great place. I chose the salad because all I did was drive 4-1/2 hours. Tomorrow night, after a day of blacksmithing, I might just order a steak with a raw egg chaser.

I’m excited. And not a little intimidated. The blacksmithing art, according to an introductory book I read, requires precise judgment, perfected skill, and a keen sense of timing. This will be a four-day event; in this blog I hope to provide a blow by blow (ha!) account of how it goes for me, so check in tomorrow evening for a report on my first day.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of photos of my journey to White Salmon. I drove I-90 East over Snoqualmie Pass, then down through Ellensburg, Yakima, and Goldendale to reach the Columbia River Gorge and White Salmon. The landscape is mostly sagebrush desert, and as I approached the gorge, a forest of wind turbines.

The east-of-the-Cascades route turned out to be the right choice — ominous gray clouds covered the Western sky, but from my side of the mountains I enjoyed a great view of Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood (pictured here — this is the view from the Inn of the White Salmon).

Tomorrow, when I post photos of my day, I doubt you’ll be as envious 🙂

For my MFA thesis, I’m writing about my great-great grandfather, who apprenticed as a blacksmith in Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century. Here’s a picture of him.

Unfortunately, as a 20th/21st century woman, I don’t come across the blacksmith craft very often. So, my plan is to take a class this June at Old West Forge.

I know a metalworker named Pia, of B32 Metal Fabrications and the other day I was talking with her, nervously, about my upcoming class at Old West Forge.

“How should I prepare?” I asked her. “Lift weights? Walk on my hands?”

“I’d practice my aim,” Pia told me. “If you can hit the mark with your sledgehammer, it will be a lot less frustrating.”

I don’t have an anvil at home, but I do have a large cedar log. Hence, for Mother’s Day I asked my husband and kids for a set of large wood-carving tools, specifically a straight chisel, a gouge, and a small sledgehammer to pound with … and got them! I couldn’t be more delighted.

Already, I’ve been practicing my aim, and so far, haven’t done injury to myself. Somehow, though, I think it’s going to take more than this to measure up come June.

I took a trip to Knott’s Berry Farm with my teens and hung around the Ghost Town blacksmith shop like some kind of history geek.

The shop was operating, so we saw a demonstration, and heard a spiel, during which I learned the origins of two colloquial expressions.

“Too many irons in the fire” comes from the fact that blacksmiths used to put a piece of iron in their fire to cool it down quickly. So too many irons in the fire will render your fire useless.

“Beat the daylights out of” — in the photo at right, two anvils are pictured. The standard one on the left looks like a Wright or a Hay Budden. The one on the other side of the water barrel is called a “cone anvil.” It was used to make perfectly circular rings. The standard anvil’s horn makes an oval shape, so once a ring was pounded to approximate size, the blacksmith would transfer it to the cone anvil to form it into a perfect circle. They’d beat the ring down on the cone until no daylight was showing, thus beating the daylights out of it.

I spent the day at Mission Farriers School, watching horseshoes get pounded into being. And I mean pounded — bending metal takes heavy hammers and brute force.

Mission Farrier School, Snohomish

I heard tell that “in the old days” a 14-year-old  boy, in Ireland, say, could crank out 110 horseshoes daily. Plain stamp shoes.

While I looked on, one mule did a sidekick like Chuck Norris on her owner. Six times. Whoa Nellie! Luckily, the horsewoman was wearing a padded, loose-hanging jacket.