Blacksmithing

A shallow hearth with air from below or the side, a deep bed of charcoal, and the work buried in the fire just above the tuyère, not lying on top. The hot zone is small. The anvil face at knuckle height when you stand with arms hanging — too high and you strike short, too low and your back goes.

Wear eye protection — hot scale flies — a leather apron, and natural-fibre clothes, since synthetics melt into skin. Keep a quench bucket by the anvil. See the forge.

Every operation has a correct colour, and working outside it either does nothing or ruins the piece. Work in shade — daylight makes metal look cooler than it is and leads to burning.

• Dull red, ~700 °C: stop forging. Below this, iron cracks internally without visible warning.
• Cherry red, ~800 °C: light work and bending.
• Orange, ~900 °C: general forging.
• Yellow, ~1,000–1,100 °C: heavy drawing and upsetting.
• Near-white, with the first sparks: welding heat.
• White and sparking hard: the metal is burning and being destroyed.

See the smithing guide.

Everything is built from six operations. Practise each on scrap iron until it is controlled:

1. Drawing out — longer and thinner, with blows over the horn or with a fuller.
2. Upsetting — shorter and thicker, striking the hot end down onto the anvil.
3. Bending — over the horn or in a jig, at a good orange heat.
4. Punching — a hole started from one side, finished from the other over the pritchel hole.
5. Drifting — opening a punched hole to size with a tapered drift.
6. Forge welding — entry 4.

Work the heat you have: several quick, full blows while it is hot, then back into the fire.

The hardest and most valuable skill here — how large pieces are built up from small ones without a foundry.

1. Scarf both ends — thin them to overlapping tapers — so they lap without a step.
2. Clean fire: no ash or clinker at the hot spot.
3. At yellow heat, sprinkle flux — borax, or fine clean silica sand — onto the joint faces. It melts and keeps out the oxygen that would form scale between them.
4. Bring both to welding heat — near-white, with the first few sparks — turning so they heat evenly.
5. Out, together, and strike lightly at first to tack, then harder to consolidate. Seconds count.
6. Reheat and work the joint at welding heat once more.

Tongs first — you cannot hold work without them, and every other tool needs a pair made to fit it. Then punches and chisels. Then hammers. Then swages, fullers and a hardy — the formers that shape everything else.

Make finished goods for the settlement only after this set exists. A smith making axes with borrowed or improvised tongs makes fewer and worse axes, and never catches up.

Files are how everything else gets finished, and cutting one is a bottleneck: high-carbon steel, softened, each tooth raised with a chisel blow, then hardened and left glass-hard. A good file is worth days of work.

Forge the blank from the best steel you have — see steel. Anneal it by heating to red and cooling slowly in ash. Cut the teeth with a sharp chisel at a consistent angle, overlapping evenly. Harden — to just past non-magnetic, then quench — and do not temper it, or only to the palest straw. Test by stroking it across mild iron: a good file bites; a soft one skates.

In rough priority: axes and adzes, knives, plough shares and coulters, nails, hinges and hasps, saw blades, drill bits, wheel tyres — see wheel, cart and road — and the fittings for the water wheel — see water power.

Keep a list of what the settlement is waiting for, and work down it. A smith who makes whatever is interesting leaves the plough broken.

This is a decade-long skill and it must not sit in one head. At least one apprentice from the first year, and two once the forge is busy.

The apprentice strikes — swings the sledge to the smith's direction — which doubles the forge's output from the start and teaches heat and timing without risk to the work. Then drawing out, then tongs, then welding. Write the smith's methods down — heats, fluxes, quench media, what failed — so the knowledge survives a death.