Just Like a Blacksmith

Today at my metal apprenticeship I hammered some more iron. Hugh keeps having me practice, because I don't quite have it down. It's a lot harder than it appears. I have trouble keeping the hammer steady. My arms are not quite strong enough. But here's guessing that my biceps will really shape up by the time I'm done. Just like a blacksmith!

Today I was heating the iron with the acetyline torch and when it was firey orange...I would turn to the anvil and hammer it down. I was trying to flatten the edges to make it form a hexigon shape from a square. And then I would heat it and hit it some more to extrude the end into a point. The secret is raising it up at an angle and putting the edge of the steel on the edge of the anvil. Then you hammer toward yourself...toward the end of the steel. If you get it right on the edge of the anvil...it gives the metal a place to travel with less resistance...which makes it form into a point. The next thing I did was to heat it again, place the point on the horn of the anvil and hammer it into a hook. That was pretty cool to do!

I'm starting to get a little more comfortable using the torch and I didn't burn myself today! That's a good thing! But the time went way too fast, I could easily have stayed there another three hours. We get lost in our work...and lost in time. In fact, we don't even notice the heat out there, which has been in the nineties.

One of the other things I learned was how to blow a hole in a piece of steel. First we marked a cross in it so I would have a spot to concentrate the heat of the torch. I heated it up, right where we marked it. Once it was really hot...I pressed the oxygen lever on the torch to triple the rate of oxygen. That makes it burn extremely hot. And very quickly, with a loud ss-sh-shsh and sparks flying every which-way, I had melted a hole right through that half inch steel. Amazing! Then I used a rat tail file to finish the hole...and darn if it didn't look pretty good. Not quite manufactured looking...but not too bad!

I also put a horshoe into a vise and heated it with the torch. Once it was really hot, I bent it with a set of vise grips. It bent real easy just like a piece of putty. Next week I'll be making a simple sculpture from horseshoes. It's a cowboy twirling a lasso. The horshoes form his legs, back and arms. And the lasso is made from a finer piece of steel. It's cute! And I was getting all my pieces ready today.

I will finally learn to weld next week, when I assemble all the pieces. We thought we would get to some welding today, but we ran out of time. To get the pieces ready for next week, I spent some time grinding off the burs, buffing off the rust and rough spots and scooping the hardened horse manure from the crevices. That was the yucky part! My cowboy is all ready to go. So, it looks like I will finally walk out of there next Saturday with my first sculpture!!