Introduction

Hello!

I'm Derek, welcome to my blog.

I decided to start this blog months ago to start showing my work and ideas to more people. But, it took me a while to finally post something. I'm generally pretty reserved, but my wife says I should start a blog to become a bit more sociable.

I have been forging off and on for the past 2 years, and reading about blacksmithing and metal work for the past decade or so. The first time I picked up a hammer to hit hot metal was when I was 13 years old in blacksmith shop older than my great-grandparents. It had been disassembled and moved to this Boy Scout ranch about 10 years before. I wish I could remember where it came from, but that was 15+ years ago.

The class made turn keys (slot-head screwdrivers) and candle holders. I still have the turn key, but the candle holder is AWOL. I took a few pictures for sentimental reasons.

This piece has its good and bad points. There are definitely more bad ones, though. There were lots of hammer marks on the blade and you can see it was filed crooked. If you look closely I burned the tip of the spiral, which is uneven and starts off without a sharp enough bend, but the taper is pretty even and free of obvious hammer marks. The twist is crooked, but pretty even and it terminates close to parallel.

 Here you can see that it's pretty far from straight and how I didn't know how to angle the steel to match the taper of the horn of the anvil to keep the scroll from twisting.

Even despite all the flaws, the adults there were very supportive and complimented me on the evenness of my twists and the nice reversed twist on the candlestick I made. I guess that positive, encouraging attitude is what planted the seed for a life-long love of metalwork, and I want to be that guy for young people today.


I planned on forging a new turn key and taking pictures along the way to show how to do it better. But this is how my shop has looked for the past week or so....

I guess it's finally time to dig those drainage ditches I've been dreaming of for the past 2 years.

Not that a little rain will stop me from forging, but I've been trying to hook up electricity in my shop, which takes forever, and is no fun when it's cold and wet.

I'll be able to forge a new one soon since I'll be leaving my full time job in 2 weeks to devote more time to finishing my degree and preparing for the FE exam. I have a few more projects in the works, as well.

Thanks for visiting my blog! Keep coming back, since I plan on making at least one post per week for the next few months, and more often after that, depending on where life goes.

--DC