Blacksmiths? You got that right!

Blacksmiths? You got that right. Learn all about this age old occupation in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we
have a book coming out finally, finally, after all these years.
It's great, it's fun. You're gonna love it. It's called
Stuff You Should Know Colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly
interesting things, and it's twenty six jam packed chapters that
we wrote with another guy named Knowls Parker, who's amazing

(00:23):
and is illustrated amazingly by our illustrator, Carl Manardo. And
it's just an all around joy to pick up and read.
Even though we haven't physically held in our hands yet,
it's like we have Chuck in our dreams so far.
I can't wait to actually see and hold this thing
and smell it, and so should you, so pre order now.
It means a lot to us. The support is a

(00:44):
very big deal, So pre order anywhere books are sold.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, You're welcome to the
podcast Time Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryan
over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere, and this is

(01:05):
Stuff you Should Know. Did I tell you about my
new hobby that started yesterday? I'll bet I can guess
watching blacksmithing videos. Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing, man, Like, Um,
I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself. Nope, I
just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing about them. Yeah,

(01:25):
there's one. I don't know if you watched. It's on YouTube.
It's called Blacksmithing Forging a Bearded Axe. No, I didn't
see that one. Oh god. It just reminds me of
the the sort of the lulling of that show how
it's made. But I watched this video and and most
of them have some sped up stuff too, because blacksmithing

(01:47):
takes so long that a thirty minute video, I mean
half of it is in fast motion, so it just
goes to show you and it's edited, and they always do.
They always put it to yakety sax. But it's just crazy, though,
when you see how long it takes to make this
one axe, and then you think about outfitting armies. Yeah,

(02:09):
it just feels like it was every other person a
blacksmith and did they just do that? Yeah? I get
the impression. There was a Walt Whitman poem about blacksmith's
and he was basically like they were the most important
people in any community. Everybody loved them. They owed no
one anything because they never had any debts, because they

(02:30):
were so vital that anything they did probably was worth
ten times what anybody else could do for them. Um,
and they seem to have been pretty amazing people on
the whole. Yeah. I mean, and we'll talk about this more,
but when you think about just nails, yeah, and how
many nails built this country and the world, right, those
nails had to be forged. Yeah. When you watch some

(02:52):
of these Blacksmith videos and like you're saying, when you
do see how long it takes to just make an
average thing that you would like buy in a second
these days, it really gives you an appreciation for just
what a sea change the Industrial Revolution was where this
was automated and made converted to mass production. It just
could have never happened before, and it didn't happen before,

(03:16):
but it was up to the lone blacksmith to equip
their entire communities with all this stuff. Is pretty cool.
So are we gonna do blacksmith history first or the
metal history first? Um, We'll do blacksmith history first, I think, Okay,
I guess we gotta look at the name because if

(03:37):
you if you look at other smiths, they were a
little more specific. They were called bron smith's, um blacksmiths,
or not called iron smith's, even though they work with iron,
and most of the other smiths were named for the
metal that they work with. Silver smith. That's a good one. Yeah, God,
good silver smith. It's worth their waiting. Gold silver. Don't

(03:58):
bring up gold to those, Oh no, no, But black
comes from well, we're not positive, but one explanation is
blacksmith comes from the hammer scale or these scales. If
you're watching these videos, you'll see when they're hammering the stuff,
these little tiny, chunky thin not chunky actually just little
chunks of thin scales are falling off every time the

(04:19):
hammer it. That's the hammer scale. And it is black,
and your hands get all black and your face gets black.
Or it might have just been because iron is black.
Typically it's it's pretty dark. It's dark enough, especially wrought iron.
It's it tends to be black. So that's where they think.
One of those two reasons is where um blacksmith came from.
And the name smith itself. We actually talk about this

(04:41):
in our book that's coming out, you know. Um. In
the episode on Keeping Up with the jones Is, we
talked about mean the chapter yeah, yeah, the chapter I'm
keeping um in our book, we talked about how keeping
up with the Joneses could have very easily been keeping
up with the Smiths, um, because the names are so prevalent,
and in fact, smith is the most prevalent name in

(05:04):
the United States, and it's all derived from blacksmiths. And
just how many blacksmiths there were, because every community needed one, um.
And then if you were in a large enough community,
you had multiple blacksmiths all working because one blacksmith had
to do all this work to supply this one community
with all this stuff, um, and they could only keep
up with a certain size community, you know. Yeah, and uh,

(05:27):
if you had an on site thing that you were doing,
you had a blacksmith with you. If you were out
at war in battle, you had blacksmiths there because not
only do they create these weapons and the armor, but
they have to fix stuff. You know, after a big,
long day of battle, you go in and trade in
your sword and say fix this thing. And though smith

(05:48):
he's gotta be working around the clock. Yeah, And they
have like apprentices and help and all that kind of stuff.
But but yeah, I mean, like the you get the
impression that the community could come to a standstill when
the the blacksmith was sick for a week or something. Yeah,
and there were blacksmith's doing all kinds of work all
over the place, so many that they eventually, um, and
this makes sense, would become a little more specialized. And

(06:11):
horses were a big deal back then. We still love
horses today, but back then they did a lot more
for humanity then just look pretty and run around in fields. Now, uh,
so they had to make horse shoes, and it was
a very specialized set of equipment for making horse shoes
as opposed to just regular blacksmithing, So that was a
very busy job. They were called farriers, and even when

(06:32):
blacksmithing as a whole kind of went away, there were
still farriers working. Because it's not like a shoe store
where one size fits all. Well, shoe stores aren't one
size fits all, but it's very specific to your foot
size or your hoof size as a horse, So you
can't just throw any old shoe that's close enough on there.
You gotta make them all a cart basically made the order.

(06:55):
I think in the fashion world, what's it called bespoke.
Oh yeah, that's the opposite of pretaport. And so farriers
continue to work for years and years and years, and
I think there are people that still do fairier work today,
aren't they? Sure? Sure, just to show off. Sure, but
I guess you kind of spoiled the ending. Blacksmiths aren't

(07:16):
really around much today because of of industrialization, but they
were Inoklyn, New York. Yeah, they are for about two
thousand years. They were extraordinarily important to society. Um. But
you know, society was around for for a very long
time before blacksmith came around. So there's this this really

(07:36):
important window in the historical development of human society that blacksmiths,
you know, existed in UM. Prior to that, you know,
we had tools, but they were mostly made of stone. Uh.
And then at some point somebody said, hey, if you
put tin and copper together, you can come up with
a stuff called bronze. And it's pretty great. You can

(07:57):
make some pretty neat things with it. And one of
the things about bronze is that it has a fairly
low melting point, something like um hundred and forty two
degrees fahrenheit degrees celsius, which you could get a hot
camp fire to that that temperature to melt melt into

(08:19):
molten liquid bronze, which means that you can create casts
and molds, and you can pour that molten bronze into it,
and as it cools, you've got a handy sword that
you can make over and over and over again. So
bronze fulfilled this purpose for tools for many thousands of years,
so much of the um and and these metals were
so important that we go back and call these historical

(08:42):
ages by the name of the metal tools that were
being produced. So you got the Bronze Age, and then
that was eventually followed by the Iron Age. And one
thing that stuck out to me, Chuck, I hadn't realized before,
is that um you think of history is progressing, you know, constantly.
But the Bronn's Age, even though it was followed by
the Iron Age, the Iron Age marked a period of

(09:05):
cultural decline where the Bronze Age, which had come previously,
was a period of cultural blossoming. But for the first
several centuries of the Iron Age, it was a step backwards.
A lot of the classical or antiquity society is kind
of crumbled at about the same time. They think possibly
because of um climate change or mass droughts and starvation,

(09:27):
kind of like the Maya. Yeah, so it's not like
the iron cause that. But iron, like really good bronze
is probably superior to iron in a lot of ways.
I think iron is a little softer. Um, it might
rust a little quicker. It depends on what kind of
iron you have for sure, Right, But the iron that
they were using basically they started using, and you know,

(09:48):
there's not like a demarcation line. Then there is some overlap,
and no one knows exactly when the big switch happened.
But it was cheaper and it was more readily available
than bronze was, so they just started iron basically in
its surpassed bronze. Yeah. The Greek's pin a semi mythical
group called the chala Bees who supposedly were absorbed by

(10:09):
the Hittites in Anatolia and Turkey, and that they were
the ones who figured out how to mine iron because
originally there was iron stuff Like King Tut was found
with the dagger made of iron, and it would have
been even more highly prized than anything made of gold
in his entire tomb, because iron was so rare at

(10:31):
that time, because the only source of iron on Earth,
as far as humans knew, came in the form of meteorites.
So you have to find a meteorite above ground to
find your deposit of iron. So making a dagger out
of that would have been that would have been a
very special dagger. And then eventually they say, the calibies
figured out now there's actually iron like in rock in

(10:52):
the earth, and people started figuring out that you could
take that rock and heat it to some pretty high
temperatures considering and hammer it, and you can hammer the
other stuff out, the ore out or hammer the iron
from the ore, and you have something approaching what what
you would consider iron, something called bloom. Yeah, so they

(11:12):
just couldn't get the fire hot enough basically at first
to get to the iron point, but they could make
out hot enough to get to the bloom and they
would put it in an oven known as a bloomery
and it would kind of just roast out those impurities.
Um had iron had slag, which is sort of a
glass like byproduct that you you know, it's so funny
that you just hammer the stuff out, but bloom would

(11:33):
eventually uh when they I mean it worked Okay, you
could heat it up, you could hammer it and it
would get a lot of the slag out, and it
was It was useful enough for tools. But when the
blast furnace came around, when you really got larger furnaces
and hotter fires that incorporated bellows to really get that
oxygen in there and get it super super hot. That

(11:56):
eventually allowed them to get that ore to pig iron,
and pig iron was a pretty big advancement because from
pig iron you could hammer that slag out to eventually
get to wrought iron. Right, Um, I want to give
a shout out to Harold the Smith h a r
a l d. He wrote an intro to iron smelting

(12:18):
that talks all about making bloom himself with pictures. It's
pretty cool, it's sure. And the Abster helped us with
this one, right yeah, big time. Thank you grabs stir Um.
But with pig iron, that was like it was, like
you said, like a pretty big change in that, like
you could suddenly make much purer iron because we had
a much hotter um furnace that we were working with

(12:38):
and the thing about pig iron is in very much
the same way as bloom. You've got to hammer out
those impurities. And so to make pig iron into wrought iron,
you would take this pig iron, which is pretty impure,
heated up and hammer it with a sledge hammer over
and over again. Heated hammer, heated hammer, very much the
same process as bloom, but this at higher temperatures and

(13:01):
producing a much pure iron, and then eventually you would
have wrought iron. Um And they say that, they say
figured out how to use water hammers like water powered hammers,
in part because of the plague of the thirteenth century.
It killed so many people that they didn't have the
human power any longer that they needed to hammer pig iron.

(13:23):
So it made people devise um water hammers. Yeah, water hammers,
steam hammers. Um. You know, if you look at these
videos today, these these people in their in their shops
and their sheds they have behind their house have it
looks like hydraulics. I guess that are pounding this stuff.
And at first when I saw that, I was disappointed.
I was like, oh, man, but that's just the big

(13:46):
initial work, Like there's still tons of hammer work by hand.
Um because there are many many there's a lot more
to it than that initial hammering right to get to
the wrought iron stage. But I was at first I
was kind of like, man, what they don't use They
don't like swing a hammer anymore? Right now? No? No, there,
there's just right. It's called work smarter, not harder. But

(14:09):
there are traditionalists who are like, no, you want to
use a hammer. Um. But so the different types of
irons that that humans have come up with over the
over the ages, and this is a really important point
I think we should point out here, Chuck, Like the
blacksmithing um and all of the information and knowledge and
like ways of working with different types of iron, different

(14:32):
techniques and actually coming up with different types of iron.
All of that started with those people who figured out
that you could take rock from the earth and hammer
the iron out of it, and just more and more
people over the ages as it spread and continue to
be around for hundreds and thousands of years um. All
the people working with with metal contributed to that body

(14:53):
of knowledge, and so that's I think one of the
things that's so appealing about blacksmithing is that it is
a genuine human technology that was created by humanity, you know,
not just like a couple of people who had a
really good idea. It was this this group of humans,

(15:14):
countless humans, all working together over thousands of years, contributing
to one another's knowledge. You create this body of knowledge,
and I think that's what makes it so neat to me,
so cool, and and like such a brute way of
doing it, you know, those the finesse comes in for sure,
and maybe that's what I like about it is both
like it's swinging the heavy hammer, but it's also doing

(15:36):
this really beautiful finesse work later on in the project.
Really cool. So if we're gonna well, maybe let's take
a break and then talk about the types of iron.
How about that. Let's oh, all right, we promise you

(16:16):
talk of iron types. There's iron maiden. Sure, there's um
take your iron supplement. That's right, there's really just iron maiden. Yeah,
I guess that's all. That's all you need to know.
Iron types. They're based on the carbon content of the iron.
So if you hear wrought iron, you might just think

(16:39):
that's like the cool thing that your your stair case
spindles are made out of. They are not made of
wrought they have frought iron anymore, at least they used
to be back in the day. But this is also
called bar iron. It's about point eight I'm sorry, point
or less carbon. And this is sort of from what

(17:00):
I saw um back in the day. Just the main
iron that they would mainly use for the most part,
the wrought iron. Yeah, um. And the difference, the big
difference between wrought iron and steel is that wrought iron
has um silicates in it that kind of ends up
as like these fibrous filaments that get hammered into order

(17:25):
basically by the blacksmith um from pig iron, which which
gives it a certain structure. With steel steel um. Like
you said, all types of iron are basically based on
their carbon content. Steel has a much higher carbon content
than wrought iron does, and so it doesn't need to
be hammered like wrought iron does because it doesn't have

(17:45):
these iron silicates that need to be arranged just so
or else it will make it brittle. Um. Instead, because
of this carbon um in it, it forms this kind
of crystalline structure in the iron that makes it horror
and durable. UM way way harder and more durable than
wrought iron. The problem is is because that that durability

(18:07):
and the strength and hardness, um, it makes it more
difficult for a blacksmith to work with down the line
than it has wrought iron. But it's also a much
more effective, say, battle acts than a wrought iron battle acts. Yeah,
and like you said, it's not what we use on
our staircase. Isn't wrought iron these days, it's not wrought iron.
And the production of that and like a big way
went out in you know, the century pretty much altogether

(18:31):
went out with disco. Gosh, I wish it lesson to
the seventies. So one thing we should say also to
Chuck is we tend to think of steel is like
a modern invention. Steel was perfected in in the modern times.
It was like basically the thing that kicked off the
Industrial Revolution, if I remember from our Robber Barons episode.
But that's not to say that people weren't experimenting with

(18:52):
steel long before that. It was just the scientific understanding
of it was lacking in dead that was replaced by
an intuitive understanding among blacksmiths of you know, what fuel did,
what to steal what to iron to make it stronger.
They weren't saying like Oh, if I use charcoal or coke,
it's gonna make this a um a better steel than say,

(19:15):
you know, um coal or something like that. That's right.
Then you've also got cast iron. If you have a
a nice cast iron collection in your kitchen, it's gonna
be two percent carbon or more. It's very brittle, so
you're not gonna hammer cast iron. Uh. It is formed
into shape by casting it. That's why it's called cast iron.
And use a mold while it's molten and poured in there,

(19:37):
and it's a great thing to cook with. Yeah, And
we would have never been able to make anything out
of cast iron until those those bellows were introduced to
the forge to to really bring that temperature up because
at a very high melting point. Yeah, if you're gonna
pour it, it's got to be super super hot. And
we'll get to these temperatures in the different kinds of
hot later on, which is very interesting stuff. Yeah. So

(19:58):
we've got like the black that's a are working with this.
They're figuring out that if you add like carbon or
if you do this like if you if you um
heat the iron to a certain temperature, um, it's and
and then take it off and hammer it and then
let it cool on its own. It's going to form
one type of finished product if you um do something

(20:19):
that's called quenching it, which is cooling it down in
a bucket of water and usually mineral oil these days,
it's going to cool differently, so it's structure is going
to form differently. Um. And again they didn't they were
passing this knowledge on, but they weren't using terms necessarily
that we were using. What's interesting to me is we
use terms that they came up with, like quenching and
slag and scale and that kind of stuff like those

(20:41):
are all still very much around and it makes sense
still even after having made the transition to industrialization, they
still use words very much like that, if not those
same words. Now do you mean quenching is in how
a human might quench their own thirst? Um? Kind of
kind of, But rather than turning up a bucket of
water and mineral oil, you would plunge the iron, the

(21:04):
hot iron, into that bucket of mineral oil and water.
That's right, very cool stuff. Are you making a joke
that I just missed a reference? Okay, No, I didn't know.
I didn't know if you were saying the etymology of
the word quench was from smith ing. Oh maybe, and
that when we quench our thirst it's taken from that.

(21:24):
Maybe it's possible, I mean smite. They think that the
words smite and smith are from the same word, right,
because smite means very biblical meaning or not meaning. But
these are a lot in Bible times. To to hit
something right, or yeah, to strike it to to to
smite something's right, and that's what a smith does. Should

(21:45):
we talk about tools? I think so. One of the
cool things about blacksmith is that they when you get good,
you just start making your own tools, man, and then
neat tools to make tools. Yeah, you gotta start somewhere
though though even yeah, you gotta lay down to little
tot of money first. But I saw I saw this
one blog post by a blacksmith who's like, look, if
you're just starting out, just you know, get the bare

(22:07):
minimum stuff, get some used things. See if you like
it first, and then eventually when you get good you
can invest a little money. Then you can just start
making your own stuff, right, which is very cool. I
did see there was one YouTube video that was like
how to how to get going for less than a
hundred bucks, some very basic stuff. So if you're gonna
be a smithy, you're gonna need some things. It might
be less than a hundred dollars to start. You're gonna

(22:28):
need a forge, which is the heat. Um, there are
different kinds, you know that the one that I saw
the acts this is sort of a UM I don't
know if it's old timy, but it was actually using
coal and that's very appealing to the eye. If you're
watching on YouTube, it seems like the backyard smithy these
days uses a gas powered oven, a gas powered forge

(22:52):
where they using coal or charcoal, because there's a big difference.
It was coal. Okay, I didn't know much about charcoal
until this. We'll talk about it later, but it seems
like these days the gas powered ford just kind of
what you use. They're not very big. It's sort of
like a double size of a breadbox. Because when you're
making something, you're not making you're not building a car

(23:15):
out of iron. You're making a tool. You're making a
a dagger or an axe head. Like they're all kind
of small, something you can just sort of stick in there. Um,
you're gonna have your anvil, very key, very key piece
you're gonna have a lot of other tools, um for
like the more finesse work um grinders and files and

(23:35):
stuff like that, and you're gonna have a nice collection
of hammers. Of course, yeah, you definitely. There's different hammers
for different things. And like we said, you know, hammering
pig iron and noraw iron. People don't do that these days,
so you're not using a sledge hammer and so using
like a little more finesse and precision to um to
kind of strike what's called the workpiece. Whatever you're working
on is called the workpiece. Um. That's one thing that

(23:57):
really stood out to me watching some of these blacksmith
videos is like these guys do not miss. At least
if you're at the level where you're doing close ups
of your work um on video and posting them to YouTube,
you don't. Your your hammer is not missing. It's going
exactly where you want it to every time, which is
pretty cool too, it is. But I also, and this
is not to not the smithy's it seems like a

(24:18):
bit of a forgiving craft and art um so where
you can sort of like if something didn't if you
did strike it and it kind of did something you
didn't quite like you can change that, right, you can
restrike it, you can reheat it. Um. Yeah, I'm sure
there's a lot of trial and error involved when you're
first getting started, you know. First, Yeah, I'm sure too,

(24:38):
and then you know, as you keep advancing, you're figuring
out new techniques and all that kind of thing. But
like you're saying, the anvil is it's um, it's pretty neat.
Like I didn't realize all the different parts to it.
Like anybody who's seen a Wily Coyote cartoon can recognize
an anvil until you probably draw one from memory and
you'd probably be pretty close. And that's a pretty accurate
image of what an anvil does. But all the little

(25:00):
different details from like the point on the front to
the feet of it, um, all of those serve this, um,
this kind of group of purposes that come up pretty
frequently in blacksmithing. Yeah, so the anvil is super heavy. Uh,
it is very hard. Obviously, you don't want the anvil
itself to be dented or start falling apart when you're

(25:21):
swinging this heavy hammer on metal, on this thing or
on iron, and uh so you also want it so
it doesn't like just absorb. The hammer blows too, so
it's got to be the right amount of hardness. Can't
be breaking, can't be shattering. Um, you've got a horn
on the front. You talked about the pointy thing. Yeah,
that's what's on the front of it. And usually in

(25:42):
all the anvils I saw when I looked them up
to buy one just to have, although they were way
too expensive. Um, it's got a little dip right before
the horn where the horn juts out. So the horn
is that. Yeah, the horn is an exactly level with
the regular base of the anvil. It's down just a
bit and that, and it's not by accident, that's very much.

(26:04):
One of the big uses of the horn is that
little step down. Yeah, that's That's one of the neat
things about anvils is like each little detail has a purpose,
a larger purpose that's hidden until you understand what you're
looking at or what it does. What about those holes.
There's like two holes in every anvil pretty much. One's
round in one square, and the round one is called
a Pritchel hole, and it is basically a hole so

(26:26):
that you can punch holes into, um, whatever workpiece you're
working on. Um, I saw that if you're punching a hole,
you actually want to punch it on the face of
the anvil, which is the top. You punch it on
one side almost all the way through, flip it over,
punch it on the other side almost all the way through,
and then you move it to the pretel hole and
then that's when you widen it to the shape you want.

(26:47):
So it just allows you to punch a hole all
the way through without harming the face of your anvil. Really, um,
that was one of my favorite parts of the video
I saw because that was where the ax head hole went,
where you would you know, put the axe handle. Oh
yeah yeah, So I was like, how you gonna do that?
And just to see it happen in front of your eyes,
it was. It was pretty awesome. And then what's the

(27:08):
other whole, the hardy hole? Yeah, the hardy hole is
actually square with the d yes h A R D Y. Yes,
it's it's not hearty because it's very tough, although it
is very tough, but it is a square hole, which
sounds kind of intuitive, but it's not. And you can
put tools in there that allow you, like you might

(27:29):
stick something in there and then use that to then
bend the hot iron around to make different binds and
cuts and shapes and things. Yeah. I saw this one
tool and a couple of different videos that fit into
the hardy hole. The hardy hole is almost like a
drumal tool, right, So like there's all these different things
you can put in that that square hole that hold

(27:50):
in place UM. But the difference between them is what
what tool is attached to that square peg? That's right,
square peg, square square peg. UM. And one of the
ones that I saw it looked like a tuning fork.
It's like two rods that are very close together and
you could put like um, a hot um workpiece in
between them and then you know, bend it so you

(28:11):
can make like an s hook. It's used for like
very tight creating very tight curves in the workpiece. It's
very very cool. Yeah, you gotta have your tongues. And
I think we should have mentioned to the anvil um
it's not it doesn't have a sharp edge. Like the
edge all the way around the main work base of
the anvil is a little bit round. Because you know,

(28:31):
if you've got something super sharp and you're hammering away,
it's going to make little creases in the iron. You
know what, I think the step is the sharpest edge
of the whole thing, between the horn and the face
the top of it. Yeah, I think that's where you
need it to be sharp. One other thing I saw
that UM that I thought was really interesting is um,
when you buy an anvil, you want to actually fit

(28:52):
it to a block of wood. And traditionally people will
use like a good tree stump of wood that doesn't
split very easily, and like may and you you fasten
it to that would that tree stump, and then you
bury the tree stump whenever you can, about three feet
into the ground, so that Um, the anvil becomes part

(29:13):
of the tree stump, becomes part of the ground, so
it distributes that extra energy that that gets lost rather
than back up at you down into the ground where
it's absorbed, which I just find absolutely fascinating. But you
you make it so well fastened to the stump that
the stump the anvil become basically one. Yeah, It's like
the anvil is essentially connected to the earth at that point.

(29:33):
It's so nice. Just just man, just keep thinking of
thor and led Zeppelin, all the things. JR. Tolkien. Um
the smithy you gotta have those tongs. And these are
not like grilled tongs that you have on your back porch.
These are those big thick metal uh iron. They look

(29:55):
like like like gussied up nail clippers almost, And that's
what you're gonna used to put stuff in the in
the forage and that fire pull it out. Um. It's
funny here it says that pretty much no one wears gloves.
I didn't see that. I saw plenty of videos with
people wearing gloves both, and I saw some where they did.

(30:15):
And I guess sometimes if you're working really near the heat,
you might want your gloves on, but you might also
want to have the hand feel during that finesse work. Yeah,
because and I think it's worth saying one more time
that that that um forge where the fire is, it's
I mean, it is very small. I saw as little
as like a six by six inch um like little
area of extraordinarily intense heat. So it's a small area

(30:39):
of heat, but the heat that is there is so
hot it can turn iron white hot. So yeah, you
want to not get too close to it. And even
when you're wearing tongs, it's smart to wear gloves from
what I saw, yeah, and we we never really talked
much about the fuel UM and I said, these days
they power it with gas mainly UM. Back in the day,
back in the day, they would use charcoal. That was

(31:01):
the first thing. And charcoal apparently, if you're, you know,
going to be a Brooklyn hipster, you want to work
with charcoal because that is the superior product and the
superior superior fuel. But it's really messy, very wasteful. It's
very wasteful, it's expensive a lot of it takes a
lot of wood to make charcoal. So then coal comes
rolling around, and there was a lot of coal and

(31:23):
it was super cheap and they had to kind of
rebuild their forges. But coal, even though it has some
impurities like sulfur and stuff in there, they basically kind
of made the big switch to coal at a certain
point in time. Yeah. And and even better is if
you can get your hands on coke UM, which is
a derivative of coal, just like charcoal is a derivative

(31:44):
of wood. It's just wood with the sap and the
water burned out, so it's a really energy dense form
of it. Coke is the same thing with coal. It's
got the impurities generally burned out, so it's a pure energy,
dense form of of coal um. But both of them
play a really important role and that they produce really
high temperatures, but they also introduce a lot of that

(32:04):
carbon that gets absorbed into the iron at those high temperatures,
which produces better, harder, stronger steel. Can you cook with
that stuff? Can you cook with coke? Cook with coke?
I don't know, come out of cook I don't know.
That's one thing that I saw on one of these
blog posts about different types of fuel. I think it
was like the Nobs, but they spell out the word BS,

(32:27):
which I'm not gonna stay here got because they're they're blacksmiths. Um.
They the Nobs guide to different kinds of fuel. They said,
one of the things he considers what kind of environmental
impact is your fuel having? So that's a good question.
If you're like, I'm not sure I should be cooking
with this, don't forget. You're going to be in a small,
enclosed room that's your blacksmith shop with that same stuff,

(32:50):
and you probably have a pretty high efficiency chimney, but
some of it's still coming back. So that's definitely a
consideration to think of your own health and the health
of Mother Earth, who is absorbing the blows from your anvil.
That's right, you do need good ventilation in your workshop.
I protection. Uh. Sometimes if you really want to kick
at old school, you might have one of those leather aprons,
like a leather face. And then your quench. You know

(33:12):
we talked about um quenching. It's called a quench or
a quench bucket, and that is the bucket with the
water and like you said, sometimes mineral oil these days,
where you'll plunge it in there, just like on TV
and in movies when it makes that great steamy sound
and the steam rises everywhere. Then they pulled out a
beautiful battle axe or long sword. Yeah, apparently the So

(33:37):
it's not that surprising when you consider samurai. But the
Japanese are really really good at creating high carbon steel blades.
And there's one guy named Goro g O r O
who is like well widely considered the greatest Japanese swordsmith
of all time from back in the thirteenth century. So
he can throw together at katana, no problem, no problem.

(34:00):
Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we're gonna
take a break in, talk a little bit about and
get quite a bit wrong, probably about techniques. Right after this,

(34:28):
Oh all right, let the parade of misinformation begin. You know,
these worry me more than other episodes that we do
when it's something very technical and very specific, because these

(34:49):
guys make battle axes. Yeah, and it's anytime it's a
very specific craft or something that you haven't done, like
we haven't done. You can research it and watch videos
and do your best, but it until you've actually done it,
you can't get it percent right. So I will say though,
the videos help tremendous if like this is even remotely
interesting to you, and hopefully it is if you're you

(35:12):
know this many minutes thirty three minutes or so into
this podcast. That that is, go watch some videos. There's
a bunch of them on there, and I think you're
gonna be like, Okay, I get what they were saying. Now,
Oh that makes sense. Forging a bearded battle Uh, forging
a bearded X that's the one. I've got one black
bear forge, this giant man, the giant beard and a

(35:34):
tiny little leather capable yeah he he um. The video
I watched is called scarf theory and making chain, which
we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's just amazing.
It's so cool. And like you said, I don't want
to do it. I want to have a friend that
does it. I want to come over to their house

(35:55):
and watch them do it. Like let's see if we
can get John Hodgman into it. Hodgeman also, he's got
very strong forearms. He does freakishly like Popeye. All right,
So here's some of the techniques. What you're doing if
you're a smithy is you are shaping hot metal. That's
what it comes down to. And this is where the

(36:15):
temperature of the metal comes becomes really important because certain
metals have to be at certain temperatures to do certain things.
These days, like I said, if you've got your your
gas powered forge, you can set that baby on whatever
to exact temperature you want. And it's not quite as

(36:36):
um it's still very impressive. But back in the day
when they were using coal and charcoal, there was I
feel like much more intuition and trial and error and
actually looking at the color the color temperature, because the
metal will turn different colors at different temperatures. So there's
white hot, orange, hot, yellow, hot, red, hot, different kinds

(36:56):
of gradients of orange and yellow and white too. There's
glowing white, which is the hottest. It's just those aren't
just expressions. People say, no, And that's again that's the
anomology etymology of of um of blacksmith lingo. Basically that
has made it into yeah, like those abs of yours

(37:19):
are white hot. Oh no, wait, that was a different,
different episode. That's right, so um. And but apparently blue
white hot is the hottest of all, but you don't
typically see that in blacksmithing. White hot is about as
hot as you get. And how hot is white hot?
White hot from what I saw was fifty degrees fahrenheight,

(37:39):
which is super high and celsius. Okay, yellow I think
is just below that. Yeah, and then you've got orange, right,
and then you've got lamo red hot, which is which
is only degrees seven and sixty celsius. And you can't
do anything with red hot. You can do some very

(38:00):
like very limited stuff. But at that point the iron
is is I mean, it will probably bend a little bit.
I saw um, good old black Bear Forge was making
some chain with what looked to be red hot um
iron at the time, and he was bending it pretty good.
But I mean, I'm not the best judge of color.
He was making chain. Yes, I'm just gonna I'm not

(38:22):
gonna wait any longer. This guy made a chain, a
length of chain perfect. Each length was exactly the size
of the last. He was making them like in threes,
and then connecting those threes to other threes, and he
was using the horn. Chuck, are you climax or something? No,
it's just so satisfying. It It touches these uh parts

(38:45):
of my body. You know, it's not sexual at all. Right,
you know what I'm saying. Oh, I know what you're saying.
It's um, it's it's I know exactly what you mean. Alough,
I haven't seen it. You never know what might happen. Right,
But this guy, so, you know the horn of the anvil, right,
he would make like he would He would bend the
chain initially on kind of like a thick about the
middle part of the horn, and then he would bend

(39:06):
it even further, moving in a little up the horn.
And this guy just so expertly put it exactly where
he needed it to be. Um. I think one of
the things I like about black Bear Forge guy is
that he doesn't seem the least bit pretentious. I'm pretty
sure he lives in Minnesota. Uh he's he's not wearing
his little leather cap ironically like he just he seems
very helpful. He was born in the videos to help. Yeah,

(39:28):
I think he might be right, and with a white beard.
He was born with a white beard as well. Well.
When you watch this bearded axe thing, what this guy
does is he starts with a block of iron and
then eventually makes an axe head. But he's hammering this
thing out. He's using this little rolling tool and hammering

(39:49):
that as he's kind of rolling it forward and it's
almost like kind of reminded me of baking, like the
way you would use a rolling pin to smooth out
dough and then when it came time to actually make
the the sharp part. I guess what he was doing
was forge welding. And we're kind of jumping around, but
this is one of the techniques and it's also called
fire welding, and that's when you combine different grades of

(40:11):
iron and steel and you're joining these things together and
multiple shapes together. I think that's what was going on
because what he did, he had this axe head and
the sharp part he split, and I was like, well, dude,
what kind of an axe is at that's crazy looking.
I thought he messed up. But then he puts some
other kind of metal in between and would use this

(40:33):
and what I gathered, it's, uh, whereas it flux? Is
that what it is? Flux? Yeah, like sandy did. Look well,
it was in a bottle and it looked like a
little sandy chemical, so I guess that's what it was.
And he would heat it up and then spray this
stuff on it and hammer it together. Heat it up,
spray some of this in, hammer it until that metal

(40:53):
becomes one and the really, you know, the super specific
metal that he needed for the sharp axe blade was
melded with the rest of that iron, so you couldn't
even tell. It was just like they became one with
one another. He was probably real reinforcing the axe head
with a stronger um, a stronger type of iron, totally

(41:15):
slightly different carbon content, and then the outside was a
harder kind so it resisted surface deformities. But the interior
stuff was was strength, was strong, so it resisted breaking. Probably,
But he was making these two one I saw a
black bear force do the same thing with the chains
he was he was using a scarf weld where you

(41:37):
make um one end angled and then you make the
other end that it's going to join to angled in
the opposite direction, so they kind of fit tightly together.
And then he would heat it up and hammer it
together and it just became one. But he used um
flux as well, and from what I could tell, when
you use flux like sand or borax, I think is
is something you can use um it prevents that joint

(41:59):
from exidizing, which makes it a stronger, a stronger joint,
a stronger seam, rather than kind of a compromise team. Yeah,
And it was also interesting to see how this guy
would sometimes that block was out for quite a long
time of hammering and shaping and hammering and shaping, and
then it looked like when he got into the little

(42:19):
more detailed work, as it became an axe head, he
would he would put it in the fire and he
would turn around very quickly and start hammering. You could
tell he wanted to do it very fast, and he
would hammer it for like ten seconds and then put
it right back in the fire and then pull it
out and hammer it really fast for ten seconds. So
whatever he was doing at that point required a super
super super hot piece of what do you call it,

(42:41):
ground piece workpiece? Yeah, but I mean so most most blacksmiths,
you'll notice in their shops, they set the forge and
the envelop within just twisting distance, like you're standing in
one place, moving from one to the other, so that
you can lose as little heat as possible when you
transfer it off the fire. You don't walk across your shop.
You don't stop and make a sandwich or anything. There's

(43:04):
also drawing, which is drawing that metal out into a longer,
thinner shape. You might be shaping something into a rod
or a block into a blade like I saw, and
that's sort of, um, it's sort of lengthening it without
flattening it out right, because you can also flatten it.
That's another thing that's called peening. Yeah. Um. There's also upsetting,

(43:27):
which is the opposite of drawing, where you shorten the
length of iron or steel by hammering it. And that's
what happens when you make a nail. What you want
to talk about making nails here? Yeah, I mean we
kind of mentioned earlier, you know, the the foundation. I mean,
there were things that were built with dovetail joints and

(43:48):
corn cobs to keep log logs together, and there were
technologies like that. But if you really want to talk
about the building of of the world, you gotta talk
about iron nails and how many millions and tens and
millions of iron nails that were made in the world
by hand by people. Yeah, I mean before industrialization. They

(44:12):
were all made by hand. And it's apparently harder to
make them than you would think. I watched the video
by a blacksmith named Nick Kimball on Instructibles and I
guess his brother writes for instructibles and interviewed him and
he's like a blacksmith at one of the colonial model farms.
I think maybe Mount Vernon. They didn't say, um, that's so.

(44:35):
He looks like it too. He looks like a cool dude. Um.
But he he showed how to make a nail and
he says he can make one a minute. And this
guy is an advanced blacksmith, Like he has a job
as a blacksmith. That's how advanced this guy is in
the twenty one century. And he can make he can
make one a minute. Apparently blacksmiths of your could make

(44:55):
ten to a dozen of him a minute. Um. And
it's very involved, like it's you would you actually have
to make the tool first to make to make the nails.
So you take an iron bar, flatten that, punch a
hole in it using your pretchel hole in a punch,
and then you take um nail rod little strips of
of the iron that's gonna be nails. UM, heat it up, UM,

(45:18):
hammer shoulder into it on the edge of the anvil
so that there's like a it's it's narrower at the
in the for the bulk of it, and then up
top it just kind of is a little wider in boxy.
And then you put it into the hole of the
tool that you made, and then you heat it up
and you hammer the head a bunch of times to
flatten it. That's what you have to do to make

(45:39):
one single nail. And some blacksmiths in the days of
yore could make a dozen of those in a minute,
that's how good they were at it. Unbelievable. I would
have charged so much for nails, it would have been astronomical.
I would have been like, no, I will you know, like,
let's make you some chainmail instead. What do you need

(45:59):
nails for let's do something cool. And they see, you know,
I need to build a second story in my house,
I'd be like, all right, it's gonna cost you the
Josh nail. Yeah, the Josh Clark special because it would
not be fun to make nails for sure. No, but
boy they made a lot of them. Um. There are
also some other techniques. There's bending we've kind of already
talked about when you're creating curves and things. If you've

(46:24):
mentioned the staircase irons, how they're how they're twisted around.
That is done with a square bar, which is a
bar with a square hole in it, and that's placed
over a square rod of hot iron, and then you
turn that square you basically sort of like that drimmal
you were talking about. You stick that hot thing into

(46:45):
the hole and you twisted around you create those little twists. Yeah.
I mean every time it's a blacksmith tradition. You say
a walla, you got anything else? I don't have anything else.
It's just an we got stuff not quite right. But
hopefully the smithy's hopefully our enthusiasm won them over. Yeah,

(47:06):
let's hope so. Um ignorance, Uh, the there and also
there's like a ton that we didn't talk about. It's
a really I mean, this is a countless human, thousands
of year long body of knowledge and we just tried
to do them forty five minutes, uh and failed at that.
But um, there there's a lot to it. So if

(47:26):
you're interested in it, go go check it out. At
the very least, go watch some videos. And since I
said go watch some videos, everybody, it's time for a
listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this Olympic torch bearer. Okay,
hey guys. I was a torch bearer for the Winter
Olympics and it was a lot of fun. The amount
of logistical coordination that went into it was incredible. I

(47:47):
was told four months in advance when down to the
minute I'd be carrying the lit torch, and it wasn't
off by more than a few Actually, a guy came
to our hotel with a bunch of toys, vehicles and
action figures and modeled exactly what would happen. That's so cool.
I had to be reminded by my handlers to ensure
that I kept it very high, um, high enough so

(48:07):
as to not light my hat on fire. Uh. The
torch is pretty light, but fairly top heavy. I'm sure
we were wearing mittens to make it impossible for any
of us to make any finger gestures, even accidentally. It
could be seen by the world on the live feed.
Did you think about that one term you didn't use
that I thought you'd appreciate. When one torch bearer passes
the flame to another, it's called the torch kiss. We

(48:29):
went through training and practiced just this part on the street.
We did a little dance after we kissed, and then
I and whoever just finished got back on the bus.
As you mentioned, a guy took my torch and extinguished
it right afterward, and since it was still hot, they
stored it in a rack on the bus. When we
got back to the starting point, they removed the fuel
cell and gave it back to me. And that is

(48:50):
from Matt Jones. We had quite a nice little exchange
about this. He said he did get it through work,
but he was not a C level executive. Uh, he
won it through a drawing it is worth. Oh, that's
that's totally great. That's great. He might as well have
gotten it from contributing to society. As great as that is. Man,
I gotta thanks for that, Matt. Also, I knew it

(49:11):
was called the Kiss. I thought I said it was
the Kiss. And if I left that out, that drives
me crazy. Man. When there's a fact that I know
that I failed to put into the podcast that somebody
then comes and said, you left out that's really awesome fact.
And I just dropped to my knees like the Liberty
mutual guy in the elevator and go, no, you know
how much that bothers me when that happens to me?

(49:32):
How much? None? Man, It's like it'll ruin my week.
My weeks just toast now thanks to Matt. There's the
difference between you and I. Well, if you want to
ruin my week and have a neutral effect on Chuck's week,
maybe even make it more positive, Um, you can email us.
Go ahead and type it out after that, wrap it

(49:53):
up after that, spend it on the bottom, and then
send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's
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