Okay, I skipped ahead a little in the order of these pictures I took, because red-hot metal makes a better hook for drawing in people to the blog than this picture…
That is my cold bar of steel, that I cold-chiseled the first cuts into, in order to, eventually, make the one piece of steel into two pieces…
At this point, I am still relatively clean, cool, and hopeful, like I was when I first showed up. To return to the first picture, that shows the bar of metal after I hot-chiseled deeper into the cuts, and I have begun to flair and flatten the one end.
But here is what I finally figured out yesterday. I am all art-side-of-the-brain… I’ve done posts about this… I think one of my very first blog posts explained how I was tested and am actually a freak of nature in this respect… I am off-the-charts.
So I do all kinds of art… painting,drawing,writing, tiki carving, and on and on… and most art comes naturally to me… so I assumed, blacksmithing would too.
But here’s the thing… (hello, thing, I knew you would show up in this post)… Nature gives with one hand and takes away with the other. My all art-side-of-the-braininess means I have no real life skills… I’m not good with tools… and blacksmithing is an art form that uses tools…
It is messing with my head…
There you can see that I have flattened… or ‘butterflied’ one of the ends of the bar, giving it a wing shape, and have started to punch the screw holes. You can also see, by the pitting and weird growths on the metal, that I burned it… yes, you can burn steel… trust me… I have done it on almost every one of my projects so far…
Okay, I got both ends flattened and the holes all punched… sloppy, ugly, but still, not too bad for a beginner.
After much heating and pounding with a hot-chisel, I have the two pieces separated. They look like they want to get back together… in an almost romantic sense of the word…
I began to bend the legs over… once again with much reheating and a lot of delicate hammer work… you have to eyeball it… there are no cheats of shortcuts… this is old school blacksmithing.
Oh boy… the instructions continue on the back… Now, to be fair, the teacher does give a demonstration first… this project took him two hours, and he has made hundreds of these… and it wasn’t easy for him. It took me more than five hours to do mine…
I no longer look so confident…
Well, it looks like the two parts of a hinge…
And now it is a hinge. I won’t bother you with the details of how long it took to get the pin in, how my three barrels didn’t line up… how I finally gave up in disgust, and just pounded the pin in while the whole thing was hot… or how much rubbing there is when you move the hinge… but it does work… sort of…
Okay, just a couple more pictures… that one, of me in my car getting ready to leave the class… aching and sweating, and covered with soot and ash and coal dust… I really need to shave the back of my neck before class… I am going to start a forest fire…
And that is my arm… each hair follicle and wrinkle embedded with grit, and there are big coal chunks hiding in the hairs… it takes a long shower to clean up after this stuff… just sayin’…
Now, I do have some exciting news. Our computer finished doing its big backup… so I think I can now get the rest of the pictures of my exciting drive down the coast of California on my laptop and share them… I know you have all been waiting for that.
They chase each other around until they fall over panting…
