Blacksmithing

“We started off with a length of mild steel, around 10mm in diameter [...] First job, heat the end until it’s yellow, then hit it with the hammer. The aim is to move steel downwards, thinning it as you go to make a point. Hit it, turn it 90° and hit it again, turn it 90° and so on until you’ve hammered it into a nice square point. Then you turn it 45° and hammer out the edges and neaten it up until you’ve got a rounded point. This took forever. Well, it was our first attempt at forging anything. Actually, it wasn’t so hard. I mean, it is hard but I was kind of expecting my arm to be exhausted pretty quickly and it wasn’t. You don’t need to be Iron Man swinging a sledgehammer. You can just be a polar bear with a five pound hammer hitting reasonably accurately. If the metal is glowing yellow, it’s going to move. Nonetheless, as beginners, this took a while. I didn’t help myself by leaving my material in the fire too long. I burned the end off. Did you know you can burn steel? Yep.”

“This was where it all went wrong. I couldn’t find any pliers to hold it properly on its side to flatten down the sides. It just bounced, it got loose, it escaped and tried to set the bench on fire a couple of times. It didn’t help that after burning my poker, I was inclined to pull the bottle opener out of the fire while it was still orange and it didn’t move terribly well at that temperature.”

“A difficulty here was that these, unlike the three or so feet of 10mm steel, are too short to handle with your bare hands. The end you’re holding will be far too hot within seconds of dropping it into the fire. [...] In this case, with maybe six inches of thin steel, the only way you could handle it was with pliers, great big two or three feet long pliers. Jake, assistant blacksmith, said that it’s a bit awkward to be holding it back here but working up here but that seemed fine. That’s exactly the situation we’d had with the pokers. What was awkward was that you had to keep a grip on the pliers.”