How To Start Blacksmithing for $100

so a lot of people are interested in blacksmithing but are discouraged because they think it takes tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and it's nice to have the equipment but you don't have to have the equipment you can start into this craft with just the barest minimum of tools and so to back up that assertion I'm gonna make what is really for me one of my favorite entry-level projects for someone who's thinking of starting into blacksmithing a marshmallow roasting stick and I'm gonna make it with just bare bones basic basic tools now I could use this map gas I could use this little gas bottle a plumbers gas bottle but I'm not going to it's too slow and I think the Yellow Jackets have been lame make building a nest in there and it doesn't work and so I'm not using that but you could I'm gonna use a cutting torch all you need is some sort of heat source if push comes to shove you can get ironheart hot enough to forge in a wood campfire it's kind of slow and tedious and smoky and messy but you could do it so anyhow a heat source something to use as an anvil I've got this little piece of railroad track animal I've put on here it doesn't have to be this sophisticated it can just be a block it can be a big wrench clamped in a vise it can be the top of a post vise you need something to smite to steel with I'm gonna use this little one-pound ball-peen hammer you need something to hold the steel with at some point now a lot of this time I'm gonna be holding it in my hand but a vise grip or a pair of pliers a pair of channellocks makes it perfectly suitable Tong [Music] [Applause] okay so I'm going to use this little post vise next you don't have to have a post vise you may not have a post vise you may never have a post vise anything that will grab the material and hold it securely will work just fine when you're twisting small sections of Steel that's an example of a yin-yang twist now we're just gonna put sort of a couple of simple twists on it actually we may stop there yeah this is an example of this is an example of less and more less is more and knowing when to quit there's a blacksmith here in this part of the country up around Eugene his name is Dave Thompson he's a wonderful Smith he has a fabulous artistic sense and he had a cliche that I heard him say a couple times and I didn't understand it until about five years into this craft he said move the metal until the metal moves you and I thought what you know and so now riddles are part of blacksmithing and then one day it just dawned on me you can be working along you can be twisting you can be drawing out and at a certain point if you're paying attention you're just gonna think whoa whoa whoa that's that's enough don't hit that thing even one more time that's a place to stop and I think that's where we're at right here I'm going to chamfer that edge cold gonna cool this off because it's starting to burn my hand all you're doing is just breaking the corner a little bit giving the light a place to reflect off the corner you could go ahead and texture the whole thing if you wanted but it's a marshmallow roasting stick you got to know when to stop on these things so the last step with iron work is to finish about nine times out of ten it seems like I just use a hot wax finish but I got to scale the whole thing first so it all has the same sort of scaled patina on there and then we'll wax it and it'll be looking good Johnson's paste wax is what I use for a hot wax finish for an indoor application you just get it hot let it cool down to you know four or five hundred degrees this is a little too hot but that's alright it's gonna get hotter when my grandkids use it for roasting marshmallows you just paint that on there and when it sets up you can buff it up a little bit if you want and there you have it marshmallow roasting stick out of quarter-inch cold rolled with a yin-yang twist or you gonna go get something like that you don't have to have a million dollars worth of tools to do blacksmithing work I've got about a hundred dollars worth of tools here maybe less little railroad iron anvil propane map gas torch little bitty ball peen hammer a pair of vise grips and a coffee can full of water with that and any kind of an old vise you can make a really cool marshmallow roasting stick in a short period of time to learn how to do this click the link check out my channel

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 1,394,745

Keywords: blacksmith, blacksmithing, smith, forge, forgin, forged, fire, steel, marshmellow, stick, roasting, metalurgy, fabrication, essential, craftsman, tools, trades

Id: u_f3hQqNM6Q

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018