Pun intended. The very talented Adrianna McKinley taught a blacksmithing class at Pumping Station: One last weekend. The topic: making fire pokers. I’d played with blacksmithing many years ago at a Boy Scout camp, but never done anything with it since. Well, Pumping Station: One has a forge, and this class was also certification for it, so based on my life philosophy of “whoever dies with the most hobbies wins”, I signed up. My partner Elizabeth did as well.
Next was scroll work, which took quite a bit of hammering to get into the general shape. The scrolling process was very counter-intuitive, and I think I need to do some reading on the topic to get the theory down, and then a lot of practice. Although I did find a creative way to recover from the mistake of making one of the coils too tight: holding the poker horizontal on the ground, inserting a thin piece of steel horizontally between the loops, and hammering downward on both sides of the steel. The final steps: bending the handle into shape, and bending the business end of the tool.
All in all, a very fun class, and very well taught! After about four hours of work, I thought my right arm was about to fall off from all that hammering. I had no idea it would be so exhausting! But I do have some projects in mind. I’ve been considering getting back into camping, and I’d like more S hooks for hanging candle lanterns from the interior frame of my canvas tent. And one of my glassblowing projects was an inverted cone. It would make a killer martini glass save for the fact that it has no stem or foot. But I’m already envisioning bending round stock to make a spiral stand to hold it. Eventually I’d love to make damascus steel, but from what I hear, the forge will need some additional work to support the higher temperatures needed for forge welding.
So, my next steps: get books on the subject, get some metal, and get practicing!