Fire&Iron II
May. 30th, 2003 04:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cdybedahlWe arrived at Patric's smithy in mid-afternoon. One of Patric's apprentices was working on a piece of his own, so we started out by planning exactly what we were going to do mixed with watching someone who knew his stuff making it look very easy.
This is the smithy from the outside.
Patric, by the way, is rather well-known to Swedish SCAdians (and other medieval reenactment types) as Comar. He's a really good blacksmith, one of the best in this country.
Anyway, once the apprentice was done with what he was doing (the core for a damascened largish dagger), Patric looked over our plans. He declared that it'd take us four days to finish it all. Then he re-lit the fire. Which you have to do occasionally, since slag builds up in it and starts blocking the air flowing through it. And when the air can't flow properly, the fire doesn't get hot enough to work with. For the pretty soft iron we were going to use, the fire had to hold a relatively cool 1200 degrees celsius. For steel, it has to be a bit hotter.
Here's Patric lighting up the forge.
The basics of blacksmithing are trivial. You heat the iron until it reaches a suitable temperature, then you bang on it with a hammer until it has reached the shape you want. If it cools down too much before you get the shape you want, you heat it again.
The devil is, as they say, in the details. You have to know which temperature is suitable, and you have to get it there by sticking the piece of iron into a heap of glowing coals. The only way you have to judge the temperature of the iron is to see how much and what color it glows. "White-hot iron" is not a simile or anything like that, by the way. And if it does get white, it'll also start throwing impressive amounts of sparks around as the iron burns. Yes, burns. Like firewood, except much, much hotter. Which is quite a lot to hot. With soft iron like we used, it should glow a mellow cherry-red. After a few hours you start to get the hang of how long you have to hold the iron in the fire. Although you still get it wrong from time to time, as the time varies with how thick the spot you want to work on is. The smaller the amount of material, the faster it heats. Which is obvious, really.
This is me heating the iron.
Once you have the iron as hot as you want it, you hold it aginst the anvil and repeatedly hit it with a hammer. That's the bit where you really can tell the difference between those who know their stuff and those who don't. When glowing hot, the iron behaves a bit like very, very hard cookie dough. When you push one spot in, the material you've just displaced goes somewhere else. So in order to get the shape you want, you have to plan the angle, power and order of your hammer strikes so that all the iron ends up where you want it to. This is nontrivial. That the iron cools so that once you've worked it for thirty seconds or so you have to stop and ram it in the fire again doesn't exactly help.
Anyway, you start out with getting it into a rough shape proper for getting it into a finer shape later. To do that, you use a sledgehammer. Like the one Jennifer holds in this picture.
Since you can't really use that kind of hammer effectively while you also hold the iron, one needs help. One person holds the sledgehammer and hits the same spot in a regular rhythm while the other holds and moves the iron under it so that the right spots get hit at the right angle. Force isn't so important at this stage, it's basically just a matter of "The more, the better". Wielding that hammer is bloody hard work, too.
Here's me holding the iron and Jennifer wielding the sledgehammer while Patric looks on and instructs me in how to move the iron under the blows. It took us a while, but eventually we got the hang of it and got the piece in pretty much the shape we had planned.
And once you have the rough shape down, it's down to one person heating and hammering over and over and over again until finished. Jennifer and I took turns working, until about eleven in the evening when we were both too tired to go on. We managed to finish two pieces and get the rough shape into the other two, so we'll have to go back once more to finish up. Which will be fun, in spite of the fairly serious soreness in lots of muscles I have today. I've never been sore in the muscles inside my hands before...
This is the smithy from the outside.
Patric, by the way, is rather well-known to Swedish SCAdians (and other medieval reenactment types) as Comar. He's a really good blacksmith, one of the best in this country.
Anyway, once the apprentice was done with what he was doing (the core for a damascened largish dagger), Patric looked over our plans. He declared that it'd take us four days to finish it all. Then he re-lit the fire. Which you have to do occasionally, since slag builds up in it and starts blocking the air flowing through it. And when the air can't flow properly, the fire doesn't get hot enough to work with. For the pretty soft iron we were going to use, the fire had to hold a relatively cool 1200 degrees celsius. For steel, it has to be a bit hotter.
Here's Patric lighting up the forge.
The basics of blacksmithing are trivial. You heat the iron until it reaches a suitable temperature, then you bang on it with a hammer until it has reached the shape you want. If it cools down too much before you get the shape you want, you heat it again.
The devil is, as they say, in the details. You have to know which temperature is suitable, and you have to get it there by sticking the piece of iron into a heap of glowing coals. The only way you have to judge the temperature of the iron is to see how much and what color it glows. "White-hot iron" is not a simile or anything like that, by the way. And if it does get white, it'll also start throwing impressive amounts of sparks around as the iron burns. Yes, burns. Like firewood, except much, much hotter. Which is quite a lot to hot. With soft iron like we used, it should glow a mellow cherry-red. After a few hours you start to get the hang of how long you have to hold the iron in the fire. Although you still get it wrong from time to time, as the time varies with how thick the spot you want to work on is. The smaller the amount of material, the faster it heats. Which is obvious, really.
This is me heating the iron.
Once you have the iron as hot as you want it, you hold it aginst the anvil and repeatedly hit it with a hammer. That's the bit where you really can tell the difference between those who know their stuff and those who don't. When glowing hot, the iron behaves a bit like very, very hard cookie dough. When you push one spot in, the material you've just displaced goes somewhere else. So in order to get the shape you want, you have to plan the angle, power and order of your hammer strikes so that all the iron ends up where you want it to. This is nontrivial. That the iron cools so that once you've worked it for thirty seconds or so you have to stop and ram it in the fire again doesn't exactly help.
Anyway, you start out with getting it into a rough shape proper for getting it into a finer shape later. To do that, you use a sledgehammer. Like the one Jennifer holds in this picture.
Since you can't really use that kind of hammer effectively while you also hold the iron, one needs help. One person holds the sledgehammer and hits the same spot in a regular rhythm while the other holds and moves the iron under it so that the right spots get hit at the right angle. Force isn't so important at this stage, it's basically just a matter of "The more, the better". Wielding that hammer is bloody hard work, too.
Here's me holding the iron and Jennifer wielding the sledgehammer while Patric looks on and instructs me in how to move the iron under the blows. It took us a while, but eventually we got the hang of it and got the piece in pretty much the shape we had planned.
And once you have the rough shape down, it's down to one person heating and hammering over and over and over again until finished. Jennifer and I took turns working, until about eleven in the evening when we were both too tired to go on. We managed to finish two pieces and get the rough shape into the other two, so we'll have to go back once more to finish up. Which will be fun, in spite of the fairly serious soreness in lots of muscles I have today. I've never been sore in the muscles inside my hands before...
