You may remember that a while back I had a go at glassblowing. I wasn’t great at it because blowing that much pressure down a tube triggers my gag reflex. The actual manipulating and handling of the glass was all new but with practice, I could probably become competent but if you can’t blow the glass, this probably isn’t the craft for you. But before I’d even thought about glassblowing, I’d already booked in a full day’s introduction to blacksmithing and I finally went and did it! At time of writing, that sentence finished “…did it this weekend!” but that was at the beginning of April and it’s now the middle of August and although I’ve chased, I’ve still not had the photos that the professional blacksmiths took of me working and I think this post is going to have to go out without them, because it’s getting ridiculous.
Spoiler: I’m better at blacksmithing than I am at glassblowing!
It’s a proper traditional coke-powered forge, out in a dusty barn on an otherwise apparently deserted far – give or take the happy healthy hungry cows in the barn next door – in the middle of the countryside at the foot of a semi-ruined castle. We started the day with an introduction to how our individual forges work, with particular reference to the fan and the airstream that mustn’t be blocked, lit them with wood and a lighter (I have no idea how to use a lighter apparently) and once they were lit and piled up with fuel, it was time for the first adventure of the day. That was a fire tool.
We had an option to finish it as a poker or as a rake. I’ve never used a rake in my life and so I decided a poker would be the more practical to take to campfires with the Guides. We started off with a length of mild steel, around 10mm in diameter (although that’s measured inaccurately by holding a ruler up against it). 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. I thought all it would do was get hot, glow and then melt. Turns out it will make spectacular sparks and the expert blacksmith in charge will tell you “you’ve burned the end of. I think we can rescue it”. Rescue involved vigorous brushing with a wire brush and more hammering. From my point of view, it felt like all I was really doing was continuing to tidy up my reasonable point. I didn’t feel like I was starting from scratch or taking a step back and re-doing what I’d already done.
Next was to curl it into a shepherd’s crook. To do that, you put your point over the edge of the anvil, hammer it downwards and then turn the stick so you can hammer the curl back towards the stick. Then you do the same higher up but at a bigger angle, using the horn of the anvil rather than the side. I didn’t get on with this. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to hold the metal against. If I’m going to hammer hot metal, I want it to feel rock-solid steady and this didn’t. Perhaps it would have improved with practice. Nonetheless, with a pro’s help to hold it, I got it into an adequate shepherd’s crook shape and then took it back on top of the anvil to hammer out the imperfections, round it off nicely, shape the profile of the metal and so on. I did that much quicker than my partner, Mike from near Devizes. At least, I thought his name was Mike. The blacksmiths kept calling him Steve and he didn’t correct them so probably I’m wrong. For the purposes of this blog, he’s staying as Mike. I admit, Mike’s crook was much tighter than mine, almost closed up while mine was open and maybe I hadn’t spent enough time perfecting mine. But I liked the idea of being able to hang it up from that crook and also, my blacksmith assistant said my crook was pretty perfect and we agreed that we were both happy with the shape.
I’d hammered the other end into a square point before Mike had even finished his crook. I was very pleased with that. I was expecting to be the slow one, the one who struggled, who wasn’t strong enough. I turned up with blonde pigtails, pastel spring-coloured nails and a Taylor Swift t-shirt! It’s hardly the image of a traditional blacksmith, is it? But it turns out I could hold my own in the forge, at least for a beginner.
Next came a keyring. We were going to use very thin steel here. It’s almost impossible to measure given what we did to it but maybe 3 or 4mm? We were going to make a spiral, just like we had on the crooks, which would be the keyring end, then we’d make a second spiral on the opposite end in the opposite direction and roll the entire thing along the length of the rod until we had something almost s-shaped. We also had the opposite to make it “like an ammonite” which we just couldn’t fathom. What Steff, our chief blacksmith, meant was that we’d heat the metal and then twist it really tightly and use the twisted rod to make the keyring instead of a straight rod. We both went for that option.
So, first we had to heat it, point the ends and then hammer the rest into a square profile. Then we clamped it and used a pair of tongs to haul it round and round until we made a twist, reheating as it got too cool to continue twisting, then turning it the other way round and twisting in the other direction to make sure we got the twist all the way down the rod.
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. The pokers did get warm but it took a long time and you dipped the end you were holding in the trough of water when it started to get a bit uncomfortably warm. 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. I spent far more time, and wasted several heats, adjusting my grip, dropping the steel, changing pliers and getting comfortable holding the rod.
Making a point and hammering it square was just doing what we’d already done on a smaller square. Twisting was a little tricky in that you don’t have enough hands and you have to switch pliers but luckily, we had Steff there, trying to get us both in and out of the clamp at the right time, getting them twisted. Then the first curl. I don’t know if it was just because I’d had a go at curling it over the edge of the anvil before or because this was so much smaller and easier to bend, but I felt like I’d got the hang of curling it. Bend it at a right angle, turn it over, hammer it back towards yourself to tighten it, then hammer it downwards to close up the loop nicely. Turn it round, grab it at the other end, back in the fire, do the same to the other end. Re-heat, do the same further up and keep going until you’ve rolled it all the way up. I got on with that pretty well. There was no anvil horn involved, just repeating curling it over the edge and shaping it back into itself, with the occasional variation of heating it so you could lie it down on its side to flatten it out. I glanced over at Mike a few times and was very pleased to see I was ahead of him again. Steff helped me tighten up the end the keyring was going to go through, using a pair of needle-nose pliers and then I was very happy to be done.
After lunch, we had a choice of a love heart or a bottle opener. In a change from the expected programme, Mike went for the love heart and I went for the bottle opener. For a start, I wanted to make a bottle opener! Second, making the heart was basically just more curling thin rods, although they’d be spot welded at top and bottom and that would be something new. But no. I wanted to make a bottle opener!
You start with a rectangle of steel. Steff marked three holes in it, then you heat it – this takes a while because it’s thick – and then you get a slot punch. Put the heel of the punch in the first hole and hit. Move it to the second hole and hit. Re-heat and repeat. Then you turn it over, where you can see the shape of the slot starting to appear and you do the same from the other side. Re-heat and repeat on both sides until you eventually cut through and re-heat to make sure it’s all flattened out. Then you use a drift, which is like one of those earrings you use to stretch the hole in your earlobe. It’s small at the bottom and wide at the top. The punch gets hot because it’s in contact with hot metal, so you douse it after every use. In the case of the drift, it was going to get really hot so you’d have to handle with tongs as well as douse. There aren’t enough hands for that, so Steff, who is very trusting, held the drift while I hit it. As it makes the hole bigger, it pushes the outside of the metal outwards.
We got to the bottom of the drift, went up a size and then went up again. I did my best Tony Stark on those drifts. Proper hefty whacks! By the time we got to the end of the biggest and to the correct size of the hole, the end of my metal was rounded and the corners of the rectangles had been pushed inwards towards each other in something that looked like a pretty perfect and deliberate pair of cat’s ears. Then we made the bit in the middle that pushes up the bottle top by Steff holding a round-ended hammer and me hitting it not too hard until we got the dent in the right place.
I was very pleased with it. I thought I was done. Turns out I still had fifty minutes and while that wasn’t enough time to make anything else, I had to shape the handle. Mike had made his love heart and was now at work on a bottle opener too. A record for the most things made in one of these sessions. Well, if I’d used the time I was waiting for him to finish his rake and keyring and skipped the handle (he didn’t do the handle of his bottle opener!) I could have made several love hearts. The love hearts were just two curls in two rods, shape the rods around a mould and then weld top and bottom together. He had a piece of copper wire to wind around the top and make a decorative hanging loop but he took that home to do there. I do sound both competitive and superior – it’s definitely arguable that his rake and keyring were better than mine but my bottle opener was better than his. Mine was shaped perfectly. His needed a lot of correction around an anvil horn and it lost its ears and even when it was finished, the top was still a bit deformed.
But then… I had to do the handle. Jake showed me some variations that they’ve done. I had to reject the plain handle, because that’s what I already had. I didn’t like the feel of the wavy one, although I guess it’s meant to fit your fingers. I went for the pointed one in the end. I didn’t want it to point altogether, because the cat ears are the star of the piece and I don’t want the whole thing to be interesting pointy shapes but I figured I could narrow the end and make it pointy-ish.
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. Eventually Steff found me some good pliers and put a ring round them so I didn’t have to squeeze them or adjust my grip and then, twenty minutes later, I could actually start work on shaping the handle. I got it adequately pointed but in moving the material down, I’d made a kind of shallow cliff edge on each side of the flat part of the handle and I couldn’t hammer that out for the life of me. I tried turning it at 45° and flattening the edges, just like when I’d rounded off my points, but that didn’t work very well. The best I could manage was a kind of hammered metal effect, which wasn’t what I was after.
I’m not unhappy with the end result. As Jake said, it does look handmade and Steff was pleased enough with it that he said “I’d buy this one” – he didn’t because it’s mine and because he makes these things for a job – but he liked it. I was definitely the winner on the bottle opener challenge.
Jake polished everything up with the wire brush outside so it was all shiny and pretty by the time we took them home and I stopped off at Tesco to buy something in glass bottles to try out my new opener on. It’s actually not wonderfully shaped. Using it in the traditional way to just lever the top off broke the glass neck of the bottle on my first attempt. To use it without filling your drink with grated glass, you have to lever it off just a little all the way round and then pick it off with your fingers once it’s just sitting on top. Nevertheless, it does work and it’s the coolest bottle opener ever. A proper heavy-duty forged steel bottle opener that I made! The keyring, obviously, is now on my keys and I’ll try out the poker either next time I go camping on my own or at the campfire we’re planning for the Guides for next term.
Yes, I was very pleased with the day. I’d made some fun stuff with a hammer and fire, I didn’t ache, I hadn’t burnt myself (well, not significantly. A piece of fuel popped out, smacked me in the neck and stuck there. And we had a rake to keep our fires tidy. Jake had tidied mine up for me and left the rake the right way round for him, instead of the right way round for me, which meant when I grabbed it without looking, I grabbed the hot end, but it gets dipped in water between rakings and although it was very hot and made me shriek, it wasn’t hot enough to cause any damage), I’d mooed at some cows, I hadn’t chipped my spring nails and I was delightfully grubby. I may go for another session at some point in the future, when I’ve thought of something else I’d like to make (a fork to match my poker!) but no, it’s not something I’m going to seriously get into as a hobby. I have nowhere to put a forge and I don’t think the neighbours would appreciate the sound of hammering. But I really enjoyed it and I’m going to really enjoy showing off all the things I’ve made.