I’m taking a beginning blacksmithing class at the Toledo Art Museum right now. It’s a huge amount of fun. There’s something enormously satisfying about banging on hot iron with a hammer, and shaping it into useful and beautiful (I hope) things. Steel is usually such an unyielding material; so durable, so touch, so hard to modify. But a little (okay, a lot) heat, and it becomes a joy to work with.
Anyway, on to what I’ve made. Of course, the first thing we made, the blacksmithing equivalent of Hello World, is a fireplace poker:
The point (ha!) of the poker is to learn to draw out a point, to flatten an end, to shape a loop, to flatten and twist. Lots of basic hammer techniques, that are useful for most projects, and all of them that actually involve a hammer and anvil.
The poker was an assigned project. The teacher provided the steel, and walked us through the whole thing. The idea was, presumably, to give us something to do, to give us an idea of what’s possible, to ease our entry into the world of blacksmithing. After the poker, however, we were more or less on our own. We were supposed to come up with a project to do, buy the steel for it, design it, and make it. The teacher would help us, of course, with all of the parts, but it’s ultimately up to us, and our interests.
I decided to make a pot rack for my kitchen, to replace the board-with-hooks I was using right now. I wanted to do something other weld a hook, so I decided to twist two 1/8″ rods together, and bend them into hooks, and weld that to a 3/16″ x 1″ steel plate.
This was a fun and useful intro project for me. It only took me 1.5 sessions (and would have taken less than one, if the teacher had had time to show me the techniques I needed; but hey, there’s 8 other students…). It resulted in something that is useful to me, and I think it came out quite good looking. Plus, it allowed me to learn several new techniques, and practice my hot hammering.
First, I had to learn to twist the rods. The basic idea is that you clamp the rods together with vise grips, heat the rods, clamp the other end in a vise, and twist by hand. The variation here is in how you heat the rods. The first set, I heated with an oxy-acetylene torch while it was already in the vise. That’s fairly quick, but is expensive (not for me, of course, but for the shop), and requires either help or lots of coordination. The second technique is to head the rods in the forge, then carry them over and clamp them in the vise and twist. This is much more time consuming, since multiple heatings are necessary, but can be done easily by yourself. I used both techniques; I admit, because the torch scares me a little.
Once the rods were twisted, I hot hammered them into hooks, and cut them with the saw. Then, I got to try something else new: welding. In this case, MIG welding. This turns out to be surprisingly easy, and lots of fun. After a brief tutorial, I welded the hooks onto the back plate.
That’s it. Several holes drilled with my drill press, and it’s done.
Tags: Blacksmith, Personal by Daniel
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