MAKE 100 OF THESE WHEN YOU START!!!

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the work of it's fantastic to have you here because today I want to talk about what it is that you need to do 25 to a hundred times once you first got set up in your backyard you've got yourself a little bit of instruction what can you do to really get some good grounding in the fundamentals I'm gonna be putting that duress to hammer to good use now I've got a handle on it give it a little we're gonna give a little test spin see how it goes we're gonna do one of the most basic things which is making a leaf I talked in a previous episode about getting yourself a mentor after taking a blacksmithing class but while you're doing that if you can you should be getting your own setup become however basic it is heat source block of Steel for an anvil so that you can start practicing the basics and getting better at it and this is a basic project that I think is so so important it is making something super basic and that is a leaf keychain we start with an aggressive angle on the bar and we tilt a hammer very aggressively using the flat side of it and we Forge ourselves a little tiny point like that beautiful then we want to go a cube away from the taper and we want to work from one side to the next to isolate it and create a shoulder you notice we turn with every blow and would you look at that that makes a shoulder so we're gonna keep using that round side of the hammer and work that shoulder down until we get half the material thickness now a lot of you guys may have seen me do this before which is great because we then go to the near side of the anvil and what we're doing is we're cutting opposing two-sided tapers and this is a technique that I learned from Brian Brasil and it's a wonderfully good technique to practice so that you can get your hammer control down we work that near side of the anvil don't worry about it bending keep the bar parallel to the ground you see when that bends up the instinct is for us to lift our arm up so that it's then flat on the anvil again the result of hitting here with the round side of a hammer is that we're pinching the top side a little more and so it pulls this leaf blob up off the anvil and it means that our brain is going oh wait hang on it's it's I need to make that level I need to make that level the trouble is is that as we then lower this leaf blob down to try and satisfy that urge to make it level it then opens up another gap which means that we then make a worse bend the key when you're forging is don't worry about what the metal is doing especially in a step like this just keep your bar straight you'll keep your keep your feed horizontal don't lift up don't lift down the same thing happens on the power hammer I see people getting under the power hammer for the first time or maybe not the first time and they're feeding in and the material is developing a curve and they instinctively I did this too when I was starting you instinctively lift up to try and get rid of the curve it accentuates the curve it makes it more so and these are little tricks that you pick up with repetition and doing it more and more and more again so as I take another heat I can keep working it and I don't worry about it being bent up because when I go to the next side it straightens itself out anyway we hit that blob we work it back now I want what's called a reverse taper that is a reduction in material reducing itself towards my side of the anvil where I am standing and so I'm tilting the hammer towards me and Jimmy might I say we have made you a phenomenal hammer this is just a joy to use it's it's lively oh lively it's it just feels great I'm very excited to get this to you Jimmy so now I'm gonna switch from my round side of the hammer which is more aggressive to the flat side of the hammer I'm gonna keep working that reverse taper down like so when I get up to this shoulder I'm naturally better come back to the near side of the animal just to clean it all up and you see this is where you're gonna be learning a lot of fine details with your hammer control and if you're able to control your hammer to hit accurate and and Babloo bit and goals on the anvil if you're able to control your hammer and hit accurate angles on the anvil that is a very good skill to have and practicing it is gonna be very helpful naturally at the very outset the hammer control as well as the willingness to hit hard are gonna be the two skills that you're most lacking at the anvil when you're hitting a big piece of steel you need to let loose and relax and hit it hard but when you're hitting a small piece of steel you need to be very cognizant of the individual hammer blow and reflect on each and every Hamlet Hamlet you reflect on each and every hammer below to discern what you need to adjust on the next one I know if the diagonals I've got more tutorials and all this stuff you guys can look way back when on the YouTube channel but you see we need to be very careful and it's a it's an easy thing to get carried away and think about it in terms of what am I gonna do this heat rather especially at the outset when with fresh to it I want you to think about what you're gonna do with every hammer blow if you reason through every hammer blow you're gonna be in a much better spot and this is a great way to help accelerate that learning of these important fundamentals of the hammer control you know I make a lot of knives but that's not how it is that I started in blacksmithing I say I make a lot of knives recently I've been making a lot of knives but that wasn't my start what was my start was making a boatload of stuff like this was learning how to make and learning how to control the hammer and move the material around has meant that when I finally decided to jump into making more knives it was a good deal easier than it would have been otherwise those foundational things so important and you should really really focus on getting them nailed before you take anything on that's much more complex I remember when I was 13 and I did my first ever craft fair I worked the entire summer holidays to make stock for the table and it was one of the most educational parts from my blacksmithing career even though I was only two years into it because I was making bottle opener after bottle up and a hook up to hook after hook leaf after leaf after leaf practicing and I was slowly slowly slowly no faster than any way possible I was really solidifying a good deal of the muscle memory a good deal of the eye for the work but gone on to be extremely helpful today as it is that that I'm making even you know something like a Scottish play ball so now we're gonna flatten a little bit of the leaf I'm gonna hold it on the diagonal and we're gonna work it down now there are gazillion things that you can do from here you can take a cross feed you can take the round side of the hammer you can take Fuller's you can do all sorts of things we're gonna keep this super simple I'm going to take the round side of the hammer and we're just gonna use it as a little bit of a peen we're gonna treat this as a little bit of a minimalist type of thing we want to see if we can get you to information for you to start practicing things straight away and so that's the name of this project I'm tilting the round side of my hammer here which is allowing me to get in there and push the material around how I want it's not as aggressive as a cross beam in the lateral draw but what it does do it means that we can make a pretty decent lateral draw without reaching for another hammer you might only have one hammer so you know hopefully this is showing a little bit of the versatility of opting for a rounding hammer one of those things you can never have a tool that does it all there you just got to work out what's the best tool for the job that sometimes you don't have the luxury of picking the best tool for the job you should try and get it done anyway I have not made a leaf and like that in a while so this barb is ten millimeter square bar you're gonna be able to buy a twenty foot length of this stuff for like 15 bucks 20 bucks inexpensive steel is inexpensive and the great thing is is that we have used about an inch of material for this particular project which means that the amount of cost for getting a huge amount of time to practice is super duper small for a project like this which is why I want you to do simple projects like this as you're getting into it because it's only costing you your time but you're gonna reap the rewards in terms of your ability to tackle projects afterwards the material is so expend inexpensive and taking a weekend or two to make a hundred little leaf keychains that may just sit in a box forever I mean I've got stuff that I made there's just satin boxes you know from way back when when I started and that's fine you don't need to sell it but what you do need is you need to practice and what I want is for you to make a hundred of these things that maybe make twenty five whatever you might get bored but make more than the point where you get bored but I want you to make a whole bunch of them and then eventually get far better than I am at making them because you love practice little run penny scroll another top tip know where you're putting your hot material is about to do this with my tongs but I realized so what I know a lot of people are getting daunted by the amount of tools that you need so I'm just gonna take some tools that you can find at any hardware store to do this everybody's got a pair of pliers and a pair of needle nose pliers and every hardware store sells them can do a lot with basic tools don't be daunted about the fact that you don't have tools just make do it's another heap of course it's not as good as a pair of blacksmith tongs and you should absolutely grab yourself a pair of black something comes by them you know find some place that sells them there are plenty of online stores and stuff like that get some but when you're starting out basic tools like this you can go a long way to helping you learn the requisite skills to do more and do more and do more okay now gonna take a little wire brush give that a brush okay maybe you don't have one of these that's fine every hardware store sells a little thing like that and he used one of these things forever until I finally got one of these farriers block brushes and there we go we've made a little leaf keychain but don't just make 25 or 100 of them you want to be doing this you make it you know maybe you want to maybe you want a second maybe turn a four job for a second just so you know there's a little peace and quiet and you give yourself a minute to 30 you know a minute to two minutes and you set that thing down and you put aside the excitement for just having made something that's rather cool and you go right what can I improve upon on this let's have a look these shoulders are not lined up nicely I slipped my shoulders when I was working then the very GetGo which means that I need to be much more careful to keep my shoulders lined up point number two this side here swells out and much more than this side here and I have an errant hammer blow here in the middle and you can be more careful with my hammer control to make sure that don't get an errant blow and to make sure that I evenly pull out this material part of why this has happened is the shoulders are misaligned which means that this is angling itself upwards more and just making it all look twisted you can see the result of the shoulder misalignment here too I like that point that point is good I don't want it to be much pointed than that otherwise it's going to be kind of a little dangerous to have as a keyring in fact that might be a little bit dangerous too in terms of sharpness that didn't close up I should have made sure to close that up fully and if there's ever a little spring and a piece that you can that you make if you heat it up and you hold it you know you put it in the Forge let's do it if there's ever a little spring in a piece like that and you want to close it all you got to do is get it warm hold it close and then cool it off this is mild steel so we're not going to do any damage by quenching it at all so I can just cool that off like this then it gets it closed and it didn't close it damn it there we go take to see if it works this time wasn't hot enough the first time now we have it closed up hey another thing to look at this could be rounder it could have done a better job with that it's rather square to the leaf the penny scroll looks good from the rear though it does still look a little funky and a little bent over to one side there is something really exciting about the way that I am knife and sword making which is taking on projects that are far out of my comfort zone and attacking them I'm going full hog but it's inefficient in terms of the time that's put in I'm very fortunate to built a business which means that I can do that to learn this skill it is time expensive and costly to spend all this time making projects so far out of my comfort zone if I was smart about learning these skills like knife and sword making I'd be doing what I recommend with this which is you make one your critique it rigorously and that $2 piece of steel you have goes right back in the Ford cut off the little rag on the end make another hundred more you will have learnt so so much I'd love to hear from you in the comments below pleasure having you along as ever I hope that this has been informative I hope that you go take a blackening class and I hope that you then go and get started in your own little little space to start blacksmithing hope you enjoy it and I hope your practice practice hard and get better at it each time thanks for watching I see you on the next episode bye bye

Channel: Alec Steele

Views: 1,024,519

Rating: 4.9011908 out of 5

Keywords: alec steele, alex steele, steel, alec, damascus, blacksmith, make, forge, anvil, mill, lathe, weld, tig, mig, engineering, blacksmithing, blade, bladesmithing, knife, knifemaking, sword, handmade, diy, craft, woodworking, forged in fire, axe, fabrication, art

Id: pCZ0QkYMaOU

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JVonDron]

Well, I started on it when the video was posted. I was going to hold off posting until I had a few more made, but I've been away and haven't been able to light the forge recently. Definitely something worth practicing.

[u/Aarinfel]

This video, and the other 2 'minis' he posted around the same time have helped me realize that blacksmithing is something I can probably take up as a hobby, and to quit putting it off! I know some people have issues with the 'popularity' of internet/tv blacksmithing, but Alec really has done some very good things for the craft.

[u/KnightOwlForge]

It's kind of funny because I have yet to make a single leaf and I have only made a couple S hooks once so far. I started with making knives and slowly worked my way into tools like tongs, punches, chisels, hammers, hatchets, and so on.

I think there is a lot of valid arguments why you should make "1000 nails" so to speak, but I also think that you should do what makes you happy and have fun. In my case, making 1000, 100, or even 50 of something seems boring to me and I would lose interest in the craft at that point.