Due to the overwhelming popularity of the first post of this series… (with 0 readers so far)… I have decided to just keep plowing ahead with the exciting adventure of my first blacksmithing class, and also, giving you free lessons…

I learned many valuable lessons at my first class… among them, the fact that blacksmithing is hard… and also, the fact that you should really shave the back of your neck… or have someone do it for you… because there are hot sparks and cinders and ash flying around, and you are bent over a lot… and, well, a burn on the back of your neck is bad.. but not as bad as a forest fire… (okay, that didn’t really happen, but it could have)…

That there is our awesome volunteer teacher… who is brave enough to let a bunch of amateurs play with fire and red-hot metal… (not really, if you let the metal get red, you ruined it, it needs to be a bright orange, the same color as the hottest coals)…

That is a demonstration of the steps needed to make our first project… a steak turner… It might sound easy, but it took us more than 6 hours to do it, what with all the learning everything from scratch… Remember, this is three six-hour classes just to learn enough basic safety and skills to be allowed to take the beginner class.

After we got our forges going, we all got to cut an 18-inch piece of steel from a long, square, steel bar.

The teacher showed us the first steps, and then we were ready to try it on our own… look at my new hammer and gloves… so clean and virginal… sniff… they grow up so fast…

There is no feeling like sticking your first piece of steel into the forge… well… there is… but I’m not going to talk about that here…

That is the perfect color to get your metal… well, the orange part, not the red part… once again, that part is too hot. You can ruin the structure of the steel by burning all the carbon out of it. When you get it so hot that it comes out of the fire looking like one of those sparklers kids play with on the 4th of July, you really messed up.

There is a lot of juggling going on… not literally… but you have to pump air into the fire, check your piece, move coal around, poke the fire, check your piece, dump the ashes and the clinker… (see last post if you don’t know what that means)… check the color of your piece again, pull it out, hammer it, then stick it back in the fire when it cools… which doesn’t take long.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but we first had to pound the end of our bars out into a 7-inch-long, still square, tapered point… which isn’t easy. Then we used a u-shaped bending tool in a vice to get a loop in the end.

Then we had to keep heating and pounding until we got the whole tapered end wrapped around the bar in this cool knot. Join me later to see how my project came out.