: Peat Oberon
: Creative Blacksmithing
: Crowood
: 9781785000348
: 1
: CHF 8.80
:
: Heimwerken, Do it yourself
: English
: 112
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Discover the thrill of working with hot metal and creating your own pieces. This book shows you how: with lavish photographs, it captures the excitement of working at the fire and explains the techniques to get you started. Drawing on traditional methods, it encourages you to develop your own style and to design your own tools and creations. Step-by-step instructions to shaping, bending, splitting and drawing down hot metal are given along with advice on traditional methods to fasten metal pieces together. Projects included in this new book are making a hanging basket bracket and a toasting fork. Aimed at blacksmiths, sculptors, metal workers and farriers, Creative Blacksmithing explains the techniques required to get started, how to make your own tools and tongs and how to help create your own designs, in particular leaves and organic forms. Superbly illustrated with 176 colour photographs.

Peat Oberon is an artist blacksmith, who specializes in architectural, sculptural and decorative ironwork. He founded his own school of blacksmithing in the 1990s, and now combines his skills as an artist, craftsman and teacher with his life-long passion for working with metal.

CHAPTER TWO


BASIC TECHNIQUES


Drawing down


Drawing down is the blacksmith’s term for tapering, or reducing the size of material. Assuming now that you have got an anvil, a fire and a hammer, it is time to do some work.

A good preliminary exercise to practise both drawing down and bending is to make a rat tail handle. This is a task that involves drawing down the end of some 12 round steel along a distance of 150.

Rat tail handle.

Cold practice

Take a 700 length of steel, making sure that the ends have any burrs removed. Take hold of the bar about a third of the way along. Stand about 300 away from the anvil, place the end of the bar at the far side of the anvil, and press the left hand, holding the steel, against the left leg, which is your ‘third hand’, keeping the steel steady on the anvil. Raise the left hand so that the bar is lifted, making the far end slope at about 15 degrees to the anvil. Holding the hammer at the end – do not ‘choke’ the hammer – raise the right hand until the hammer face is about 15 degrees to the bar. This makes the hammer 30 degrees to the anvil. That will be the shape of the taper.

BURRS HURT

Safe working practices should be used always. Burrs on steel can cut hands.

Into the fire

Now, having tried all this cold, put the metal into the fire.

As a beginner, take a small hammer. You can do a lot of work with a small hammer. If you try to use a hammer that is too heavy, your arms will ache, and you can do permanent damage if you are not careful. Build up your strength gradually.

COLOUR CHECK

Until you have done quite a lot of practical forge-work, make a habit of drawing the metal out of the fire quite frequently, say, every thirty seconds, to check the colour. This is a necessary precaution. It is very easy to overheat the metal, and burn it beyond redemption.

Starting the taper with a blunt point; body about 300 from anvil, left hand pressed against left thigh; steel bar at 15 degrees to anvil, hammer at 15 degrees to metal, making point 30 degrees. The taper is 25 long with rounded end about 3 wide.

When the metal has reached orange, place it on the far side of the anvil, just away from the edge, not overhanging. With the hammer at 30 degrees and the bar at 15 degrees, using mostly the wrist, hit the end of the bar four times. Turn it through a quarter turn quickly, and hit it again four times. Always draw down with the metal square. Keep hitting until the metal has turned maroon, and return to the fire. When the end of the bar is down to 3, stop. The taper should now be about 25 long.

Now is the time to elongate the taper. When the metal is orange hot again, place the bar on the beak with about 85 overhanging. Using all parts of the arm, hit the metal as hard as you can, drawing the metal every blow about 6 towards yourself. When you reach the end, turn again a quarter an