At this point, I started drawing out the stems of the leaves. This was tricky, because usually, we have a long piece of metal to work with. These were just a couple inches long after we cut them off. So I had to shove them way down in the forge… being careful not to burn the steel… then I had to grab the leaf tip with a pair of tongs. Holding the leaf in the tongs while trying to rotate it and slowly pound the stem into a longer and thinner stem was tricky. And I actually lost them down in the hot coals a few times… HA!

In the end, I had two finished pieces… one with a sideways loop so you can wear it as a necklace or hang it somewhere or whatever, and one with a front-to-back loop for putting on a keychain ring… Not great, but I did pass the class.

Now, I could have made a few more, and maybe ended up with a great one… but I have this project in mind. I was watching a show called ‘Fire and Iron’ or something like that, about a guy in the Ozarks who forges awesome stuff the old fashioned way… which is just about the way we do it in class. He showed a friend of his how to make a railroad spike knife. He actually makes incredible reproductions of antique knives and guns… museum quality stuff… but his friend was getting on his nerves and he gave him this project to keep him busy. The guy had no experience, so I figured it was the perfect project for me.’

I found a couple of rusty old railroad spikes in the scrap metal bins behind the barn. One of the real blacksmiths, a nice lady, told me that railroad spikes are actually made in different grades. They use higher carbon steel, which is stronger, to nail down the tracks on curves. The tops of theses spikes are imprinted with an ‘HC’…

Oh yeah… I twisted a freekin’ railroad spike!!! The twist makes the handle more interesting, and easier to hold. The downside of this high carbon steel is that it is so hard, it takes forever to heat up.

So at the end of the day, I had two railroad spike knives with the handle twists, and I even had started to flatten out the blade ends… which took a lot of pounding… and my two funny little leaves… and the blacksmithing tongs I used on both these new projects… the tongs I made in the beginner safety class, you might recall.

So I am feeling more upbeat about the whole blacksmithing thing. When I went to the class list and checked off my leaf project, the very first project in my first official class, mind you, I saw that everybody else had been checked off on this project long before. I was the only new guy in the class, and the only one who hadn’t already made the leaves before. Which explains why people were making them so much faster… and better than me.

Yay!