Well, I now only have a year’s worth of classes I have to take, (which may take two years, because,  if you miss one of the twelve projects, you need to wait until it cycles back around), before I get my blacksmithing certificate… level 1… But yesterday, I did finish the last of my three projects that prove they can trust me to be around forges, hammers, and glowing-hot metal.

I apologize for some of the pictures. I forgot my little camera… you do not want to take a good camera into that barn full of smoke and soot and coal dust… and I used my cell phone. And what did we all learn from the Bad Company concert pictures? That my cell phone does not like low-light situations. I tried correcting the red haze in Photoshop with some color correcting and equalizing… which works okay in the center of the picture…

Anyway, there you can see I have cleared out my clinker box and gotten my newspaper ‘jellyfish’ ready to light my forge.

I sorted all my clinker out… which is the coal that is so burnt that it won’t really burn anymore… and threw it away… and piled the coke… which is the coal that was heated up around the fire by the last person to use the forge… up over my fire starter… and built up the raw coal around that, so that it can start to turn into usable coke… (I think I explained all this better in my first series of posts after my very first class, three months ago, and if you are interested, you should go back and look at those… it is quite a process…

Okay, everything is ready to go!

This is what we were making… BBQ tongs.

My forge is lit.

I am so excited…

Because I am going to turn a plain iron rod… seen there in the middle of the table… into something useful.

I know all of this looks easy. ‘Oh… you have to get metal hot and pound it with a hammer?’ So what’, I can practically hear you saying…

Yes, flattening the ends wasn’t that hard to do. But heating and flattening the middle part and not ruining it by burning the metal… but getting it hot enough to do what you want it to is not easy… One guy did burn his in half, and had to start over.

In that poor image right there, you can see the flattened center. Which needs to be pounded just thin enough, then needs to be heated to just the right color, bent, and then cooled in just the right manner at just the right speed, so that it will act as the spring for your tongs.

Then there were the crazy bends at each end of the gripper legs, and those were challenging… and the grippers have to line up with each other when you are finished. All in all, it was six hours of hard work.

And at the end of it all, you end up with some nice tongs… seen there beside the blacksmith tongs that I made last month… and which I actually used for this project!!!

The tongs will work well with my steak flipper that I made the first day.

If you look closely at that selfie I took when I got home, you will see that there are chunks of soot all over my shirt… and my face… and in my hair… but you will also see a profound look of pride on my face.

Now if I could just finish blowing the black stuff out of my nose…