September 5, 2026 • 50 mins
Blacksmiths? You got that right. Learn all about this age old occupation in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi guys, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I'm
going with our 2020 episode on blacksmiths. Growing up, there
wasn't a lot of smithing going on around me. Pretty
much zero smithing, actually. So I wasn't very familiar with
this topic. But I found very quickly that I really
enjoyed researching it and talking about it, too. And I
(00:23):
came to admire all the blacksmiths. on the videos that
I watched. It's just kind of mesmerizing. And if you
think about it, there are many things that people do
today that are essentially unchanged over the last few thousand years,
which is pretty cool. So I hope you like listening
to this one as much as I liked researching it.
(00:51):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere,
and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Did I tell you about my new hobby that started yesterday?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'll bet I can guess.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Watching blacksmithing videos.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, man. Like,
I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing
about them.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, there's one. I don't know if you watched. It's
on YouTube. It's called Blacksmithing Forging a Bearded Axe.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
No, I didn't see that one. Oh, God.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It just reminds me of the sort of the lulling
of that show, how it's made. But I watched this video,
and most of them have some sped up stuff, too,
because blacksmithing takes so long that a 30-minute video, I mean,
half of it is in fast motion, so it just
goes to show you, and it's edited.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And they always put it to Yakety Sachs.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
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. It just feels like it
was every other person a blacksmith. And did they just
do that 24-7?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, I get the impression there is a Walt Whitman
poem about blacksmiths. And he's 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 were so vital that anything they did probably
was worth 10 times what anybody else could do for them.
(02:39):
They seem to have been pretty amazing people on the whole.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Those nails had to be forged.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Right. Yeah, when you watch some 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.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
To where this was automated and made, converted to mass production.
It just could have never happened before. And it didn't
happen before, but it was up to the lone blacksmith to...
equip their entire communities with all this stuff. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
So are we going to do blacksmith history first or
the metal history first?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
We'll do blacksmith history first, I think. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I guess we've got to look at the name because
if you look at other smiths, they were all a
little more specific. They were called bronze smiths. Blacksmiths are
not called iron smiths. No.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
No.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Even though they work with iron, and most of the
other smiths were named for the metal that they work with.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Silversmith, that's a good one.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, oh, God, good silversmith.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
It's worth their weight, and it's gold.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Silver. Don't bring up gold to those guys.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
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 this stuff, these little tiny, chunky scales, thin,
not chunky actually, just little chunks of thin scales are
falling off every time they hammer it. That's the hammer scale.
(04:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Typically, yeah, it's pretty dark. It's dark enough. Especially wrought iron,
it tends to be black. So that's why they think
one of those two reasons is where blacksmith came from.
And the name Smith itself, we actually talk about this
in our book that's coming out, you know, In the
episode on keeping up with the Joneses.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh, that's right.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We talked about. You mean the chapter?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The chapter. In our book, we talk about how keeping
up with the Joneses could have very easily been keeping
up with the Smiths because the two names are so prevalent.
And in fact, Smith is the most prevalent name in
the United States. And it's all derived from blacksmiths and
just how many blacksmiths there were because every community needed one.
(05:14):
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. And they could only keep up
with a certain size community, you know?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah. And 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.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And those smithies got to be working around the clock.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, and they have, like, apprentices and help and all
that kind of stuff. But, yeah, I mean, like, you
get the impression that the community could come to a
standstill when the blacksmith was sick for a week or something.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and there were blacksmiths doing all kinds of work
all over the place, so many that they eventually, and
this makes sense, would become a little more specialized.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And horses were a big deal back then. We still
love horses today, but back then they did a lot
more for humanity. They just look pretty and run around
in fields now. So they had to make horseshoes, and
it was a very specialized set of equipment for making
horseshoes as opposed to just regular blacksmithing. So that was
a very busy job. They were called farriers. And even
(06:34):
when 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.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
So you can't just throw any old shoe that's close
enough on there. You got to make them a la carte, basically,
made to order, I think, in the fashion world. What's
it called?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Pret-a-porter?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Bespoke.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh, yeah. That's the opposite of pret-a-porter.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And so farriers continue to work for years and years
and years, and I think they're are people that still
do farrier work today, aren't they?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Sure. Sure. Just to show off.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Right. Sure.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
But I guess you kind of spoiled the ending. Blacksmiths
aren't really around much today because of industrialization. But they were.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
They're around now. They're in Brooklyn, New York. I guarantee it.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah, they are. For about 2000 years, they were extraordinarily
important to society. But, you know, society was around for
a very long time before blacksmiths came around. So there's
this this really important window in the historical development of
of human society that blacksmiths you know existed in um
(07:47):
prior to that you know we had tools but they
were mostly made of stone and then at some point
somebody said hey if you put tin and copper together
you can come up with this stuff called bronze and
it's pretty great you can 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
(08:07):
um 1,742 degrees Fahrenheit, 950 degrees Celsius, which you could
get a hot campfire to that temperature to melt, melt
into molten liquid bronze, which means that you can create
casts and molds and you can pour that molten bronze
(08:28):
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 so that— and these metals were so
important that we go back and call these historical ages
by the name of the metal tools that were being produced.
So you get the Bronze Age, and then that was
(08:50):
eventually followed by the Iron Age. And one thing that
stuck out to me, Chuck, I hadn't realized before, is
that you think of history as progressing, you know, constantly. Yeah.
But the Bronze Age, even though it was followed by
the Iron Age, the Iron Age marked a period of
cultural decline. where the Bronze Age, which had come previously,
(09:10):
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 societies kind of
crumbled at about the same time. They think possibly because
of climate change or mass droughts and starvation, kind of
like the Maya.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, so it's not like the iron caused that, but iron,
like really good bronze is, probably superior to iron in
a lot of ways. I think iron is a little softer.
It might rust a little quicker.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
It depends on what kind of iron you have, for sure. Right.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
But the iron that they were using, basically, they started using, and,
you know, 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.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Was.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So they just started using iron, basically, and it surpassed bronze.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, the Greeks pin a semi-mythical group called the Chalabes,
who supposedly were absorbed by 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 a dagger made of iron.
(10:24):
And it would have been even more highly prized than
anything made of gold in his entire tomb because iron
was so rare at that time. Yeah. Because the only
source of iron on Earth, as far as humans knew,
came in the form of meteorites.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
So you had to find a meteorite above ground to
find your deposit of iron. Yeah, totally. making a dagger
out of that would have been, that would have been
a very special dagger. And then eventually they say, the
Calabese figured out, no, there's actually iron like in rock
in the earth. And people started figuring out that you
could take that rock and heat it to some pretty
(11:00):
high temperatures considering and then 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 you would consider iron, something called bloom.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, so they just couldn't get the fire hot enough
basically at first to get to the iron point.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
But they could make it 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. It had iron, it had slag,
which is sort of a glass-like byproduct that you, you know,
it's so funny that you can just hammer this stuff out.
But bloom would eventually, when they, I mean, it worked okay.
(11:39):
You could heat it up, you could hammer it, and
it would get a lot of the slag out And
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 eventually
allowed them to get that ore to pig iron. And
(12:03):
pig iron was a pretty big advancement because from pig iron,
you could hammer that slag out to eventually get to
wrought iron.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Right. I want to give a shout out to Harold DeSmith, H-A-R-A-L-D.
He wrote an intro to iron smelting that talks all
about making bloom himself with pictures. It's pretty cool. It's
worth checking out for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And the Grabster helped us with this one, right?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, big time. Thank you, Grabster. But with pig iron,
that was like a, 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
furnace that we were working with. 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
(12:48):
make pig iron into wrought iron, you would take this
pig iron, which is pretty impure, heat it up and
hammer it with a sledgehammer over and over again. Heat it,
hammer it, heat it, hammer it. Very much the same
process as bloom, but at higher temperatures and producing a
much purer iron. And then eventually you would have wrought iron.
(13:08):
And they say that they figured out how to use
water hammers, like water-powered hammers. In part because of the
plague of the 13th century, it killed so many people
that they didn't have the human power any longer that
they needed to hammer pig iron. So it made people
devise water hammers.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, water hammers, steam hammers. You know, if you look
at these videos today, these people and their and their
shops and their sheds that 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
initial work. Like there's still tons of hammer work by
(13:52):
hand because there are many, many, there's a lot more
to it than that initial hammering to get to the
wrought iron stage. But I was, at first I was
kind of like, oh, man, what? They don't like swing
a hammer anymore?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Right, no. No, there's definitely— It's very smart.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
They don't need to swing a hammer.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Right. It's called work smarter, not harder. But there are
traditionalists who are like, no, I want to use a hammer.
But so the different types of irons that humans have
come up with over the ages— and this is a really
important point I think we should point out here, Chuck.
Like blacksmithing— And all of the information and knowledge and
(14:31):
like ways of working with different types of iron, different
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.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And just more and more people over the ages as
it spread and continued to be around for hundreds and
thousands of years. All the people working with metal contributed
to that body 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
(15:08):
by humanity. You know, not just like a couple of
people who had a really good idea. It was this
group of humans, countless humans all working together over thousands
of years, contributing to one another's knowledge to create this
body of knowledge. And I think that's what makes it
so neat to me.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So cool. And like such a brute way of doing it.
You know, 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 this really
beautiful finesse work later on in the project.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Really cool. So if we're going to– well, maybe let's
take a break and then talk about the types of iron.
How about that?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Let's. All right.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
We promised you talk of iron types. There's Iron Maiden.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Sure. There's Take Your Iron Supplement. That's right. What else?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
There's really just Iron Maiden.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
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 that's
like the cool thing that your staircase spindles are made
out of.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
They are not made of wrought iron.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
They aren't made out of wrought iron anymore, at least.
They used to be back in the day.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
But this is also called bar iron. It's about 0.08%
or less carbon. And this is sort of, from what
I saw back in the day, just the main— iron
that they would mainly use for the most part.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
The wrought iron?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah. And the difference, the big difference between wrought iron
and steel is that wrought iron has silicates in it
that kind of ends up as like these fibrous filaments
that get hammered into order, basically, by the blacksmith from
pig iron, which gives it a certain structure. With steel... Steel,
(17:36):
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 these iron silicates that need to be arranged just
so or else it'll make it brittle. Instead, because of
this carbon in it, it forms this kind of crystalline
(17:59):
structure in the iron that makes it hard and durable material.
way harder and more durable than wrought iron. The problem is,
is because that durability and the strength and hardness, it
makes it more difficult for a blacksmith to work with
down the line than it does wrought iron. But it's
also a much more effective, say, battle axe than a
(18:20):
wrought iron battle axe.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yeah. And like you said, it's not what we use
on our staircases and wrought iron these days. It's not
wrought iron and the production of that in like a
big way went out in, you know, the 20th century
pretty much altogether.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Went out with disco.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Oh, gosh, I wish it lasted until the 70s.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So one thing we should say also, Chuck, is we
tend to think of steel as like a modern invention.
Steel was perfected 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 steel long before that.
It was just the scientific understanding of it was lacking. Instead,
(19:02):
that was replaced by an intuitive understanding among blacksmiths of,
you know, what fuel did what to iron to make
it stronger. They weren't saying like, oh, if I use
charcoal or coke, it's going to make this a better
steel than say, you know, coal or something like that.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
That's right. Then you've also got cast iron. If you
have a nice cast iron collection in your kitchen, it's
going to be 2% carbon or more It's very brittle,
so you're not going to hammer cast iron.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
No.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
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 pour it in there. And it's a great
thing to cook with.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, and we would have never been able to make
anything out of cast iron until those bellows were introduced
to the forge to really bring that temperature up. Yeah, yeah.
has a very high melting point.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, if you're going to pour it, it's got to
be super, super hot. And we'll get to these temperatures
and the different kinds of hot later on, which is
very interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah. So we've got, like, the blacksmiths are working with this.
They're figuring out that if you add, like, carbon or
if you do this, like, if you... Heat the iron
to a certain temperature 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
(20:19):
you do something 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 its
structure is going to form differently. 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.
(20:43):
Like those 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.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Now, do you mean quenching as in how a human
might quench their own thirst?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Kind of. Kind of, but rather than turning up a
bucket of water and mineral oil, you would plunge the iron,
the hot iron, into that bucket of mineral oil and water.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
That's right. Very cool stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Were you making a joke that I just missed? A reference? No. Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
No, I didn't know if you were saying the etymology
of the word quench was from smithing.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Oh, maybe.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
And that when we quench our thirst, it's taken from that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Maybe. It's possible. All right. I mean, smite, they think
that the words smite and smith are from the same word.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Right, because smite means very biblical meaning, or not meaning,
but they use a lot in Bible times to hit something, right?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, to strike it, to smite something.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
That's right, and that's what a smith does.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Smithies.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Should we talk about tools?
Speaker 1 (21:48):
I think so. One of the cool things about blacksmiths
is that when you get good, you just start making
your own tools. Oh, man. Isn't that neat?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Tools to make tools. You got to start somewhere, though.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, you got to lay down a little bit of
money first. But I saw this one blog post by
a blacksmith who's like, look, if you're just starting out,
just get the bare 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. And
then you can just start making your own stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Right, which is very cool. I did see there was
one YouTube video that was like how to get going
for less than $ 100.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Oh, I'll bet, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Some very basic stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
So if you're going to be a smithy, you're going
to need some things. It might be less than $ 100
to start. You're going to need a forge, which is
the heat. There are different kinds. You know, the one
that I saw, the axe, this is sort of a,
I don't know if it's old-timey, but it was actually
using coal. And that's very appealing to the eye if
(22:45):
you're watching on YouTube. It seems like the backyard smithy
these days uses a gas-powered oven, a gas powered forge.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Were they using coal or charcoal? Because there's a big difference.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
It was coal.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Okay. I didn't know much about charcoal until this. We'll
talk about it later.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
But it seems like these days the gas powered forge
is kind of what you use. They're not very big.
It's sort of like a double size of a bread
box because when you're making something, you're not making, you're
not building a car 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
(23:24):
of stick in there. You're going to have your anvil.
Very key, very key piece. Yeah. You're going to have
a lot of other tools for like the more finesse work,
grinders and files and stuff like that. And you're going
to have a nice collection of hammers, of course.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, you definitely, there's different hammers for different things. And
like we said, you know, Hammering pig iron into wrought iron,
people don't do that these days. So you're not using
a sledgehammer. And so you're using like a little more
finesse and precision to kind of strike what's called the workpiece.
Whatever you're working on is called the workpiece. That's one
thing that really stood out to me watching some of
(24:01):
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 on video and posting them to YouTube,
your hammer is not missing. It's going exactly where you
want it to every time, which is pretty cool too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
It is, but I also, and this is not to
knock the Smithies, it seems like a bit of a
forgiving craft and art.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
So where you can sort of like if something didn't,
if you did strike in it and it kind of
did something you didn't quite like, you can change that.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You can restrike it. You can reheat it.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I'm sure there's a lot of trial and error involved
when you're first getting started, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm sure too. And then, you know, as you
keep advancing, you're figuring out new techniques and all that
kind of thing. But like you were saying, the anvil,
it's pretty neat. I didn't realize all the different parts
to it. Anybody who's seen a Wile E. Coyote cartoon
can recognize an anvil and 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
(25:02):
little different details from the point on the front to
the feet of it, all of those serve this kind
of group of purposes that come up pretty frequently in blacksmithing.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, so the anvil is super heavy. It is very hard, obviously.
You don't want the anvil itself to be dented or
start falling apart when you're swinging this heavy hammer on
metal on this thing or on iron. And 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. It can't be breaking. It can't be shattering.
(25:37):
You've got a horn on the front. You talked about
the pointy thing.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
That's what's on the front of it. And usually in
all the anvils I saw when I looked them up
to buy one just to have, although they were way
too expensive, it's got a little dip right before the
horn where the horn juts out. So the horn isn't
exactly level with the regular base of the anvil. It's
down just a bit. And it's not by accident. That's
(26:04):
very much one of the big uses of the horn
is that little step down.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
What about those holes?
Speaker 1 (26:19):
There's like two holes in every anvil pretty much. One's
round and one's square. And the round one is called
a pritchel hole. And it is basically a hole so
that you can punch holes into whatever workpiece you're working on.
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. Punch it on one side, almost
(26:41):
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 pritchel hole. And then that's
when you widen it to the shape you want. So
it just allows you to punch a hole all the
way through without harming the face of your anvil, really.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts of the
video I saw because that was where the axe head
hole went where you would, you know, put the axe handle.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So I was like, how are you going to do that?
And just to see it happen in front of your eyes,
it was pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
And then what's the other hole, the hardy hole?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, the hardy hole is actually square.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
With the D?
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yes, H-A-R-D-Y.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yes, it's not hardy because it's very tough, although it
is very tough. Sure. But it is a square hole,
which sounds counterintuitive, but it's not. And you can put
tools in there that allow you, like you might stick
something in there and then use that to then bend the,
the hot iron around to make different bends and cuts
(27:39):
and shapes and things.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, I saw this one tool in a couple of
different videos that fit into the hardy hole. The hardy
hole is almost like a Dremel tool, right? So like
there's all these different things you can put in that
square hole that hold it in place. But the difference
between them is what tool is attached to that square peg.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Square peg, square, square peg. That's right. And one of
the ones that I saw looked like a tuning fork.
It's like two rods that are very close together.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I saw that.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
And you could put like a hot workpiece in between
them and then, you know, bend it so you can
make like an S hook. It's used for like very tight,
creating very tight curves in the workpiece.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yes. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
You got to have your tongs. Oh, and I think
we should have mentioned, too, the anvil, 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, if you've got something super
sharp and you're hammering away, it's going to make little
creases in the iron. You don't want that.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
I think the step is the sharpest edge of the
whole thing between the horn and the face, the top
of it.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, I think that's where you need it to be sharp.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
One other thing I saw that I thought was really
interesting is when you buy an anvil, you want to
actually fit 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, man, you fasten
it to that wood, that tree stump, and then you
bury the tree stump whenever you can about three feet
(29:10):
into the ground. So that the anvil becomes part of
the tree stump, becomes part of the ground. Yeah. So
it distributes that extra energy 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 make it
so well fastened to the stump that the stump and
(29:30):
the anvil become basically one.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah, it's like the anvil is essentially connected to the
earth at that point.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So nice. This just, man. I just keep thinking of
Thor and Led Zeppelin.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I know all the things J.R.R.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Tolkien yeah the smithy you gotta have those tongs and
these are not like grill tongs that you have on
your back porch these are those big thick metal.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Iron they look like like like Gussied up nail clippers almost.
And that's what you're going to use to put stuff
in the forge and that fire and pull it out.
It's funny here. Ed says that pretty much no one
wears gloves. I didn't see that. I saw plenty of
videos with people wearing gloves.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I saw both.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And I saw some where they didn't. 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.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
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
of heat, but the heat that is there is so hot,
it can turn iron white hot. So yeah, you want
(30:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
We, we never really talked much about the fuel, um,
Like I said, these days they power it with gas mainly.
Back in the day, they would use charcoal. That was
the first thing. And charcoal, apparently, if you're going to
be a Brooklyn hipster, you want to work with charcoal
because that is the superior product and the superior fuel.
(31:13):
But it's really messy.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Very wasteful.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
It's very wasteful. It's expensive. It takes a lot of
wood to make charcoal. So then coal comes rolling around.
And there was a lot of coal, and 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.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah. And even better is if you can get your
hands on coke, which is a derivative of coal, just
like charcoal is a derivative 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 an pure energy-dense form of coal. But both
(32:00):
of them play a really important role in that they
produce really high temperatures, but they also introduce a lot
of that carbon that gets absorbed into the iron at
those high temperatures, which produces better, harder, stronger steel.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Can you cook with that stuff? Can you cook with Coke?
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Cook with Coke? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Like in a Kamada, like egg-type cooker?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know. That's one thing that I saw in
one of these blog posts about different types of fuel.
I think it was like the no BS, but they
spell out the word BS, which I'm not going to
say here. Because they're blacksmiths. The no BS guide to
different kinds of fuel. They said one of the things
to consider is what kind of environmental impact is your
fuel having? Right. So that's a good question. If you're like,
(32:44):
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. 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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
That's right. You do need good ventilation in your workshop,
eye protection. Sometimes if you really want to kick it
old school, you might have one of those leather aprons,
like a leather face. And then your quench. You know,
we talked about 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
(33:24):
plunge it in there just like on TV and in
movies when it makes that great steamy sound and the
steam rises everywhere and they pull out a beautiful battle
axe or long sword.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah. Apparently, so it's not that surprising when you consider samurai,
but the Japanese were really, really good at creating high
carbon steel blades. Yeah. 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 13th century.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So he can throw together a katana, no problem?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
No problem.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
We're going to take a break and talk a little
bit about and get quite a bit wrong probably about
techniques right after this.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Know.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
All right. Let the parade of misinformation begin.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
You know, these worry me more than other episodes that
we do when it's something very technical and very specific.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Because these guys make battle axes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
And 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 Until
you've actually done it, you can't get it 100% right.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I will say, though, the videos help tremendously.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Oh, for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
If, like, this is even remotely interesting to you, and
hopefully it is if you're, you know, this many minutes,
33 minutes or so into this podcast that it is,
go watch some videos. There's a bunch of them on there,
and I think you're going to be like, oh, okay,
I get what they were saying there. Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Forging a bearded axe. That's the one.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
I've got one, Black Bear Forge.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
This giant man with a giant beard and a tiny
little leather cap.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
And his name is Black Bear Forge?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Which is adorable, yeah. 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.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
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 and watch
them do it.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Like, let's see if we can get John Hodgman into it. Yeah, Hodgman.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Although, he's got very strong forearms.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
He does, freakishly, like Popeye.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
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 temperature of the metal 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 gas-powered forge,
(36:31):
you can set that baby on whatever exact temperature you want.
And it's not quite as– 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 temperature because
the metal will turn different colors at different temperatures.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Right. So there's white hot, orange hot, yellow hot, red hot,
different kinds of gradients of orange and yellow and white too.
There's glowing white, which is the hottest.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Those aren't just expressions people say. No.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
And that's, again, that's the etymology of blacksmith lingo, basically,
that has made it into.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
White hot.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Red hot.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Those abs of yours are white hot. Oh, wait, that
was a different episode. Yeah, that's right. 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.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
And how hot is white-hot?
Speaker 1 (37:37):
White-hot, from what I saw, is 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit, which
is super high in Celsius.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Okay. Yellow, I think, is just below that. Yeah. And
then you've got orange. Right. And then you've got lame-o red-hot,
which is only 1,400 degrees.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
760 Celsius.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
And you can't do anything with red-hot.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
That's actually not true. You can do some very limited stuff.
But at that point, the iron is, I mean, it'll
probably bend a little bit. I saw good old Black
Bear Forge was making some chain with what looked to
be red-hot iron at the time. And he was bending
it pretty good. But, I mean, I'm not the best
judge of color.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
He was making chain?
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yes. I'm just going to, I'm not going to wait
any longer. This guy made a chain, a length of chain. Perfect.
Each length was exactly the size of the last. Oh, God.
He was making them like in threes and then connecting
those threes to other threes. And he was using the horse. Chuck,
are you about to.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Climax or something? No, it's just so satisfying. It touches
these parts of my body. You know, it's not sexual
at all.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Oh, I know what you're saying. I know exactly what
you mean.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Although I haven't seen it. You never know what might happen.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Right. But this guy, so you know the horn of
the anvil, right?
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Oh, do I?
Speaker 1 (39:01):
He would make like, he would bend the chain initially
on kind of like a thick, about the middle part
of the horn. And then he would bend it even further,
moving it a little up the horn. And this guy
just so expertly put it exactly where he needed it
to be. 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.
(39:23):
He's not wearing his little leather cap, ironically. He seems
very helpful. He was born in that cap. He's making
these videos to help. Yeah, I think you might be right.
And with a white beard. I think he was born
with a white beard as well.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
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 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
(39:58):
out dough. And then when it came time to actually
make 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
iron and steel, and you're joining these things together in
multiple shapes together. I think that's what was going on
(40:20):
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 that? That's crazy looking.
I thought he messed up. But then he put some
other kind of metal in between and would use this.
And from what I gathered, it's, where is it? Flux?
Is that what it is?
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Flux. Yeah. Like sand. Did it look like sand?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
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, and hammer it until that metal
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 to where you
(41:04):
couldn't even tell. It was just like they became one
with one another.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
He was probably reinforcing the axe head with a stronger...
a stronger type of iron. Totally, yeah. So there's slightly
different carbon content. And then the outside was a harder kind,
so it resisted surface deformities. But the interior stuff was strength,
was strong, so it resisted breaking. Probably, but he was
(41:30):
making these two one. I saw Black Bear Forge do
the same thing with the chains. Yes. He was using
a scarf weld where you make 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.
(41:51):
But he used flux as well. And from what I
could tell, when you use flux like sand or borax,
I think is something you can use, it prevents that
joint from oxidizing, which makes it a stronger... a stronger joint,
a stronger seam rather than kind of a compromised seam.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
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 more detailed work as it became an axe head,
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.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
And he would hammer it for like 10 seconds and
then put it right back in the fire.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And then pull it out and hammer it really fast
for 10 seconds. So whatever he was doing at that
point required a super, super, super hot piece of, what
do you call it, ground piece?
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Work piece.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Work piece.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah. But, I mean, so most blacksmiths, you'll notice in
their shops, they set the forge and the anvil up
within just twisting distance.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
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 out of the fire.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You don't walk across your shop.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
No, you don't stop and like make a sandwich or anything.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
There's 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 lengthening it without flattening it out.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Because you can also flatten it. That's another thing. That's
called peening. Peening.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah. There's also upsetting, 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.
Would you want to talk about making nails here?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah. I mean, we kind of mentioned earlier, you know,
the foundation. I mean, there were things that were built
with dovetail joints and corn cobs to keep logs together.
And there were technologies like that. But If you really
want to talk about the building of the world, you
got to talk about iron nails and how many millions
(44:04):
and tens and millions of iron nails that were made
in the world by hand, by people.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah. I mean, before industrialization, they were all made by hand.
And it's apparently harder to make them than you would think.
I watched a video by a blacksmith named Nick Kimball
on Instructables. And I guess his brother writes for Instructables
and interviewed him. And he's like a blacksmith at one
of the colonial model farms. Yeah. I think maybe Mount Vernon.
(44:33):
They didn't say. No, I met that guy. So he
looks like it too. He looks like a cool dude.
But 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
21st century. And he can make one a minute. Apparently,
(44:55):
blacksmiths of yore could make 10 to a dozen of
them a minute. And it's very involved. You actually have
to make the tool first to make the nails. So
you take an iron bar, flatten that, punch a hole
in it using your pritchel hole and a punch. And
then you take nail rod, little strips of the iron
(45:16):
that's going to be nails, heat it up. hammer a
shoulder into it on the edge of the anvil so
that there's like a, it's narrower for the bulk of it.
And then up top, it just kind of is a
little wider and 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
(45:38):
bunch of times to flatten it. That's what you have
to do to make 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.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
I would have charged so much for nails, it would
have been astronomical. I would have been like, no, I will, like,
let's make you some chain mail instead. What do you
need nails for? Let's do something cool. And they'd say,
you know, I need to build a second story in
my house. I'd be like, all right, it's going to
cost you.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The Josh nail?
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
The Josh Clark special?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Because it would not be fun to make nails, for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
No, but boy, they made a lot of them.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
They did.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
There are also some other techniques. There's bending we've kind
of already talked about when you're creating curves and things.
I mentioned the staircase irons, 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
(46:41):
that square. You basically, sort of like that Dremel you
were talking about, you stick that hot thing into the hole.
And you twist it around and you create those little twists.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah. I mean, every time it's a blacksmith tradition, you say,
et voila. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I don't have anything else. I know we got stuff
not quite right, but hopefully the Smithies, hopefully our enthusiasm
won them over.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah, let's hope so.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Are they coming after us?
Speaker 1 (47:10):
It cloaked our ignorance. 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 that we just tried to do in 45 minutes
and failed at that. But there's a lot to it.
So if you're interested in it, go check it out.
(47:30):
At the very least, go watch some videos. And since
I said go watch some videos, everybody, it's time for
Listener Mail.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
All right, I'm going to call this Olympic Torchbearer.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Hey, guys. I was a torchbearer for the Winter Olympics,
and it was a lot of fun. The amount of
logistical coordination that went into it was incredible. I 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.
(48:04):
I had to be reminded by my handlers to ensure
that I kept it very high, high enough so as
to not light my hat on fire. 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, that could be seen
by the world on the live feed. Didn't even think
about that. One term you didn't use that I thought
(48:27):
you'd appreciate, when one torchbearer passes the flame to another,
it's called a torch kiss. We 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
(48:47):
the starting point, they removed the fuel cell and gave
it back to me.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Broke it in half.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
And that is 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.
He won it through a drawing at his work.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Oh, that's totally great.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
That's great. He might as well have gotten it from
contributing to society, as great as that is. Man, I've
got to thanks for that, Matt. Also, I knew it
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 says you left out this really awesome
(49:26):
fact and I just drop to my knees like the
Liberty Mutual guy in the elevator and go.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
No you know how much that bothers me when that
happens to me.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
How much none man it's like it'll ruin my week
My week's just toast now, thanks to Matt.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
There's the difference between you and I.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Well, if you want to ruin my week and have
a neutral effect on Chuck's week, maybe even make it
more positive, you can email us. Go ahead and type
it out. After that, wrap it up. After that, spank
it on the bottom and then send it off to
stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hi guys, it's Josh, and for this week's Select, I'm
going with our 2020 episode on blacksmiths. Growing up, there
wasn't a lot of smithing going on around me. Pretty
much zero smithing, actually. So I wasn't very familiar with
this topic. But I found very quickly that I really
enjoyed researching it and talking about it, too. And I
(00:23):
came to admire all the blacksmiths. on the videos that
I watched. It's just kind of mesmerizing. And if you
think about it, there are many things that people do
today that are essentially unchanged over the last few thousand years,
which is pretty cool. So I hope you like listening
to this one as much as I liked researching it.
(00:51):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's
Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's out there somewhere,
and this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Did I tell you about my new hobby that started yesterday?
Speaker 1 (01:11):
I'll bet I can guess.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Watching blacksmithing videos.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing, man. Like,
I don't have any desire to blacksmith myself.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I just like watching these videos. There's something really amazing
about them.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, there's one. I don't know if you watched. It's
on YouTube. It's called Blacksmithing Forging a Bearded Axe.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
No, I didn't see that one. Oh, God.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
It just reminds me of the sort of the lulling
of that show, how it's made. But I watched this video,
and most of them have some sped up stuff, too,
because blacksmithing takes so long that a 30-minute video, I mean,
half of it is in fast motion, so it just
goes to show you, and it's edited.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And they always put it to Yakety Sachs.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
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. It just feels like it
was every other person a blacksmith. And did they just
do that 24-7?
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Yeah, I get the impression there is a Walt Whitman
poem about blacksmiths. And he's 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 were so vital that anything they did probably
was worth 10 times what anybody else could do for them.
(02:39):
They seem to have been pretty amazing people on the whole.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Those nails had to be forged.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
Right. Yeah, when you watch some 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.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, amazing.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
To where this was automated and made, converted to mass production.
It just could have never happened before. And it didn't
happen before, but it was up to the lone blacksmith to...
equip their entire communities with all this stuff. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
So are we going to do blacksmith history first or
the metal history first?
Speaker 1 (03:33):
We'll do blacksmith history first, I think. Okay.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I guess we've got to look at the name because
if you look at other smiths, they were all a
little more specific. They were called bronze smiths. Blacksmiths are
not called iron smiths. No.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
No.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Even though they work with iron, and most of the
other smiths were named for the metal that they work with.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Silversmith, that's a good one.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Yeah, oh, God, good silversmith.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
It's worth their weight, and it's gold.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Silver. Don't bring up gold to those guys.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
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 this stuff, these little tiny, chunky scales, thin,
not chunky actually, just little chunks of thin scales are
falling off every time they hammer it. That's the hammer scale.
(04:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Typically, yeah, it's pretty dark. It's dark enough. Especially wrought iron,
it tends to be black. So that's why they think
one of those two reasons is where blacksmith came from.
And the name Smith itself, we actually talk about this
in our book that's coming out, you know, In the
episode on keeping up with the Joneses.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Oh, that's right.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
We talked about. You mean the chapter?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
The chapter. In our book, we talk about how keeping
up with the Joneses could have very easily been keeping
up with the Smiths because the two names are so prevalent.
And in fact, Smith is the most prevalent name in
the United States. And it's all derived from blacksmiths and
just how many blacksmiths there were because every community needed one.
(05:14):
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. And they could only keep up
with a certain size community, you know?
Speaker 2 (05:27):
Yeah. And 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.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And those smithies got to be working around the clock.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah, and they have, like, apprentices and help and all
that kind of stuff. But, yeah, I mean, like, you
get the impression that the community could come to a
standstill when the blacksmith was sick for a week or something.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and there were blacksmiths doing all kinds of work
all over the place, so many that they eventually, and
this makes sense, would become a little more specialized.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And horses were a big deal back then. We still
love horses today, but back then they did a lot
more for humanity. They just look pretty and run around
in fields now. So they had to make horseshoes, and
it was a very specialized set of equipment for making
horseshoes as opposed to just regular blacksmithing. So that was
a very busy job. They were called farriers. And even
(06:34):
when 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.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
So you can't just throw any old shoe that's close
enough on there. You got to make them a la carte, basically,
made to order, I think, in the fashion world. What's
it called?
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Pret-a-porter?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Bespoke.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh, yeah. That's the opposite of pret-a-porter.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And so farriers continue to work for years and years
and years, and I think they're are people that still
do farrier work today, aren't they?
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Sure. Sure. Just to show off.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Right. Sure.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
But I guess you kind of spoiled the ending. Blacksmiths
aren't really around much today because of industrialization. But they were.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
They're around now. They're in Brooklyn, New York. I guarantee it.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Yeah, they are. For about 2000 years, they were extraordinarily
important to society. But, you know, society was around for
a very long time before blacksmiths came around. So there's
this this really important window in the historical development of
of human society that blacksmiths you know existed in um
(07:47):
prior to that you know we had tools but they
were mostly made of stone and then at some point
somebody said hey if you put tin and copper together
you can come up with this stuff called bronze and
it's pretty great you can 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
(08:07):
um 1,742 degrees Fahrenheit, 950 degrees Celsius, which you could
get a hot campfire to that temperature to melt, melt
into molten liquid bronze, which means that you can create
casts and molds and you can pour that molten bronze
(08:28):
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 so that— and these metals were so
important that we go back and call these historical ages
by the name of the metal tools that were being produced.
So you get the Bronze Age, and then that was
(08:50):
eventually followed by the Iron Age. And one thing that
stuck out to me, Chuck, I hadn't realized before, is
that you think of history as progressing, you know, constantly. Yeah.
But the Bronze Age, even though it was followed by
the Iron Age, the Iron Age marked a period of
cultural decline. where the Bronze Age, which had come previously,
(09:10):
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 societies kind of
crumbled at about the same time. They think possibly because
of climate change or mass droughts and starvation, kind of
like the Maya.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, so it's not like the iron caused that, but iron,
like really good bronze is, probably superior to iron in
a lot of ways. I think iron is a little softer.
It might rust a little quicker.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
It depends on what kind of iron you have, for sure. Right.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
But the iron that they were using, basically, they started using, and,
you know, 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.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Was.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
So they just started using iron, basically, and it surpassed bronze.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, the Greeks pin a semi-mythical group called the Chalabes,
who supposedly were absorbed by 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 a dagger made of iron.
(10:24):
And it would have been even more highly prized than
anything made of gold in his entire tomb because iron
was so rare at that time. Yeah. Because the only
source of iron on Earth, as far as humans knew,
came in the form of meteorites.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
So you had to find a meteorite above ground to
find your deposit of iron. Yeah, totally. making a dagger
out of that would have been, that would have been
a very special dagger. And then eventually they say, the
Calabese figured out, no, there's actually iron like in rock
in the earth. And people started figuring out that you
could take that rock and heat it to some pretty
(11:00):
high temperatures considering and then 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 you would consider iron, something called bloom.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, so they just couldn't get the fire hot enough
basically at first to get to the iron point.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
Right.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
But they could make it 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. It had iron, it had slag,
which is sort of a glass-like byproduct that you, you know,
it's so funny that you can just hammer this stuff out.
But bloom would eventually, when they, I mean, it worked okay.
(11:39):
You could heat it up, you could hammer it, and
it would get a lot of the slag out And
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 eventually
allowed them to get that ore to pig iron. And
(12:03):
pig iron was a pretty big advancement because from pig iron,
you could hammer that slag out to eventually get to
wrought iron.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Right. I want to give a shout out to Harold DeSmith, H-A-R-A-L-D.
He wrote an intro to iron smelting that talks all
about making bloom himself with pictures. It's pretty cool. It's
worth checking out for sure.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And the Grabster helped us with this one, right?
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yeah, big time. Thank you, Grabster. But with pig iron,
that was like a, 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
furnace that we were working with. 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
(12:48):
make pig iron into wrought iron, you would take this
pig iron, which is pretty impure, heat it up and
hammer it with a sledgehammer over and over again. Heat it,
hammer it, heat it, hammer it. Very much the same
process as bloom, but at higher temperatures and producing a
much purer iron. And then eventually you would have wrought iron.
(13:08):
And they say that they figured out how to use
water hammers, like water-powered hammers. In part because of the
plague of the 13th century, it killed so many people
that they didn't have the human power any longer that
they needed to hammer pig iron. So it made people
devise water hammers.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, water hammers, steam hammers. You know, if you look
at these videos today, these people and their and their
shops and their sheds that 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
initial work. Like there's still tons of hammer work by
(13:52):
hand because there are many, many, there's a lot more
to it than that initial hammering to get to the
wrought iron stage. But I was, at first I was
kind of like, oh, man, what? They don't like swing
a hammer anymore?
Speaker 1 (14:05):
Right, no. No, there's definitely— It's very smart.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
They don't need to swing a hammer.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Right. It's called work smarter, not harder. But there are
traditionalists who are like, no, I want to use a hammer.
But so the different types of irons that humans have
come up with over the ages— and this is a really
important point I think we should point out here, Chuck.
Like blacksmithing— And all of the information and knowledge and
(14:31):
like ways of working with different types of iron, different
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.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And just more and more people over the ages as
it spread and continued to be around for hundreds and
thousands of years. All the people working with metal contributed
to that body 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
(15:08):
by humanity. You know, not just like a couple of
people who had a really good idea. It was this
group of humans, countless humans all working together over thousands
of years, contributing to one another's knowledge to create this
body of knowledge. And I think that's what makes it
so neat to me.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
So cool. And like such a brute way of doing it.
You know, 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 this really
beautiful finesse work later on in the project.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Really cool. So if we're going to– well, maybe let's
take a break and then talk about the types of iron.
How about that?
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Let's. All right.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
We promised you talk of iron types. There's Iron Maiden.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Sure. There's Take Your Iron Supplement. That's right. What else?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
There's really just Iron Maiden.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
Yeah, I guess so.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
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 that's
like the cool thing that your staircase spindles are made
out of.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
They are not made of wrought iron.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
They aren't made out of wrought iron anymore, at least.
They used to be back in the day.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
But this is also called bar iron. It's about 0.08%
or less carbon. And this is sort of, from what
I saw back in the day, just the main— iron
that they would mainly use for the most part.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
The wrought iron?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Yeah. And the difference, the big difference between wrought iron
and steel is that wrought iron has silicates in it
that kind of ends up as like these fibrous filaments
that get hammered into order, basically, by the blacksmith from
pig iron, which gives it a certain structure. With steel... Steel,
(17:36):
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 these iron silicates that need to be arranged just
so or else it'll make it brittle. Instead, because of
this carbon in it, it forms this kind of crystalline
(17:59):
structure in the iron that makes it hard and durable material.
way harder and more durable than wrought iron. The problem is,
is because that durability and the strength and hardness, it
makes it more difficult for a blacksmith to work with
down the line than it does wrought iron. But it's
also a much more effective, say, battle axe than a
(18:20):
wrought iron battle axe.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yeah. And like you said, it's not what we use
on our staircases and wrought iron these days. It's not
wrought iron and the production of that in like a
big way went out in, you know, the 20th century
pretty much altogether.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Went out with disco.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Oh, gosh, I wish it lasted until the 70s.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
So one thing we should say also, Chuck, is we
tend to think of steel as like a modern invention.
Steel was perfected 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 steel long before that.
It was just the scientific understanding of it was lacking. Instead,
(19:02):
that was replaced by an intuitive understanding among blacksmiths of,
you know, what fuel did what to iron to make
it stronger. They weren't saying like, oh, if I use
charcoal or coke, it's going to make this a better
steel than say, you know, coal or something like that.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
That's right. Then you've also got cast iron. If you
have a nice cast iron collection in your kitchen, it's
going to be 2% carbon or more It's very brittle,
so you're not going to hammer cast iron.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
No.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
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 pour it in there. And it's a great
thing to cook with.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yeah, and we would have never been able to make
anything out of cast iron until those bellows were introduced
to the forge to really bring that temperature up. Yeah, yeah.
has a very high melting point.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, if you're going to pour it, it's got to
be super, super hot. And we'll get to these temperatures
and the different kinds of hot later on, which is
very interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah. So we've got, like, the blacksmiths are working with this.
They're figuring out that if you add, like, carbon or
if you do this, like, if you... Heat the iron
to a certain temperature 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
(20:19):
you do something 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 its
structure is going to form differently. 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.
(20:43):
Like those 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.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Now, do you mean quenching as in how a human
might quench their own thirst?
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Kind of. Kind of, but rather than turning up a
bucket of water and mineral oil, you would plunge the iron,
the hot iron, into that bucket of mineral oil and water.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
That's right. Very cool stuff.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Were you making a joke that I just missed? A reference? No. Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
No, I didn't know if you were saying the etymology
of the word quench was from smithing.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Oh, maybe.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
And that when we quench our thirst, it's taken from that.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Maybe. It's possible. All right. I mean, smite, they think
that the words smite and smith are from the same word.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Right, because smite means very biblical meaning, or not meaning,
but they use a lot in Bible times to hit something, right?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Yeah, to strike it, to smite something.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
That's right, and that's what a smith does.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Smithies.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Should we talk about tools?
Speaker 1 (21:48):
I think so. One of the cool things about blacksmiths
is that when you get good, you just start making
your own tools. Oh, man. Isn't that neat?
Speaker 2 (21:56):
Tools to make tools. You got to start somewhere, though.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
Yeah, you got to lay down a little bit of
money first. But I saw this one blog post by
a blacksmith who's like, look, if you're just starting out,
just get the bare 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. And
then you can just start making your own stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
Right, which is very cool. I did see there was
one YouTube video that was like how to get going
for less than $ 100.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
Oh, I'll bet, yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Some very basic stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
So if you're going to be a smithy, you're going
to need some things. It might be less than $ 100
to start. You're going to need a forge, which is
the heat. There are different kinds. You know, the one
that I saw, the axe, this is sort of a,
I don't know if it's old-timey, but it was actually
using coal. And that's very appealing to the eye if
(22:45):
you're watching on YouTube. It seems like the backyard smithy
these days uses a gas-powered oven, a gas powered forge.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
Were they using coal or charcoal? Because there's a big difference.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
It was coal.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Okay. I didn't know much about charcoal until this. We'll
talk about it later.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
But it seems like these days the gas powered forge
is kind of what you use. They're not very big.
It's sort of like a double size of a bread
box because when you're making something, you're not making, you're
not building a car 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
(23:24):
of stick in there. You're going to have your anvil.
Very key, very key piece. Yeah. You're going to have
a lot of other tools for like the more finesse work,
grinders and files and stuff like that. And you're going
to have a nice collection of hammers, of course.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Yeah, you definitely, there's different hammers for different things. And
like we said, you know, Hammering pig iron into wrought iron,
people don't do that these days. So you're not using
a sledgehammer. And so you're using like a little more
finesse and precision to kind of strike what's called the workpiece.
Whatever you're working on is called the workpiece. That's one
thing that really stood out to me watching some of
(24:01):
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 on video and posting them to YouTube,
your hammer is not missing. It's going exactly where you
want it to every time, which is pretty cool too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
It is, but I also, and this is not to
knock the Smithies, it seems like a bit of a
forgiving craft and art.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
So where you can sort of like if something didn't,
if you did strike in it and it kind of
did something you didn't quite like, you can change that.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
You can restrike it. You can reheat it.
Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
I'm sure there's a lot of trial and error involved
when you're first getting started, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm sure too. And then, you know, as you
keep advancing, you're figuring out new techniques and all that
kind of thing. But like you were saying, the anvil,
it's pretty neat. I didn't realize all the different parts
to it. Anybody who's seen a Wile E. Coyote cartoon
can recognize an anvil and 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
(25:02):
little different details from the point on the front to
the feet of it, all of those serve this kind
of group of purposes that come up pretty frequently in blacksmithing.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, so the anvil is super heavy. It is very hard, obviously.
You don't want the anvil itself to be dented or
start falling apart when you're swinging this heavy hammer on
metal on this thing or on iron. And 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. It can't be breaking. It can't be shattering.
(25:37):
You've got a horn on the front. You talked about
the pointy thing.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
That's what's on the front of it. And usually in
all the anvils I saw when I looked them up
to buy one just to have, although they were way
too expensive, it's got a little dip right before the
horn where the horn juts out. So the horn isn't
exactly level with the regular base of the anvil. It's
down just a bit. And it's not by accident. That's
(26:04):
very much one of the big uses of the horn
is that little step down.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah, 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.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
What about those holes?
Speaker 1 (26:19):
There's like two holes in every anvil pretty much. One's
round and one's square. And the round one is called
a pritchel hole. And it is basically a hole so
that you can punch holes into whatever workpiece you're working on.
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. Punch it on one side, almost
(26:41):
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 pritchel hole. And then that's
when you widen it to the shape you want. So
it just allows you to punch a hole all the
way through without harming the face of your anvil, really.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts of the
video I saw because that was where the axe head
hole went where you would, you know, put the axe handle.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
So I was like, how are you going to do that?
And just to see it happen in front of your eyes,
it was pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
And then what's the other hole, the hardy hole?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, the hardy hole is actually square.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
With the D?
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yes, H-A-R-D-Y.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Yes, it's not hardy because it's very tough, although it
is very tough. Sure. But it is a square hole,
which sounds counterintuitive, but it's not. And you can put
tools in there that allow you, like you might stick
something in there and then use that to then bend the,
the hot iron around to make different bends and cuts
(27:39):
and shapes and things.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
Yeah, I saw this one tool in a couple of
different videos that fit into the hardy hole. The hardy
hole is almost like a Dremel tool, right? So like
there's all these different things you can put in that
square hole that hold it in place. But the difference
between them is what tool is attached to that square peg.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Square peg, square, square peg. That's right. And one of
the ones that I saw looked like a tuning fork.
It's like two rods that are very close together.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
I saw that.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
And you could put like a hot workpiece in between
them and then, you know, bend it so you can
make like an S hook. It's used for like very tight,
creating very tight curves in the workpiece.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yes. Very, very cool.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
You got to have your tongs. Oh, and I think
we should have mentioned, too, the anvil, 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, if you've got something super
sharp and you're hammering away, it's going to make little
creases in the iron. You don't want that.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
I think the step is the sharpest edge of the
whole thing between the horn and the face, the top
of it.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, I think that's where you need it to be sharp.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
One other thing I saw that I thought was really
interesting is when you buy an anvil, you want to
actually fit 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, man, you fasten
it to that wood, that tree stump, and then you
bury the tree stump whenever you can about three feet
(29:10):
into the ground. So that the anvil becomes part of
the tree stump, becomes part of the ground. Yeah. So
it distributes that extra energy 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 make it
so well fastened to the stump that the stump and
(29:30):
the anvil become basically one.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
Yeah, it's like the anvil is essentially connected to the
earth at that point.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
So nice. This just, man. I just keep thinking of
Thor and Led Zeppelin.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
I know all the things J.R.R.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
Tolkien yeah the smithy you gotta have those tongs and
these are not like grill tongs that you have on
your back porch these are those big thick metal.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
Iron they look like like like Gussied up nail clippers almost.
And that's what you're going to use to put stuff
in the forge and that fire and pull it out.
It's funny here. Ed says that pretty much no one
wears gloves. I didn't see that. I saw plenty of
videos with people wearing gloves.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
I saw both.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And I saw some where they didn't. 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.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
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
of heat, but the heat that is there is so hot,
it can turn iron white hot. So yeah, you want
(30:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
We, we never really talked much about the fuel, um,
Like I said, these days they power it with gas mainly.
Back in the day, they would use charcoal. That was
the first thing. And charcoal, apparently, if you're going to
be a Brooklyn hipster, you want to work with charcoal
because that is the superior product and the superior fuel.
(31:13):
But it's really messy.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Very wasteful.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
It's very wasteful. It's expensive. It takes a lot of
wood to make charcoal. So then coal comes rolling around.
And there was a lot of coal, and 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.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Yeah. And even better is if you can get your
hands on coke, which is a derivative of coal, just
like charcoal is a derivative 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 an pure energy-dense form of coal. But both
(32:00):
of them play a really important role in that they
produce really high temperatures, but they also introduce a lot
of that carbon that gets absorbed into the iron at
those high temperatures, which produces better, harder, stronger steel.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
Can you cook with that stuff? Can you cook with Coke?
Speaker 1 (32:15):
Cook with Coke? I don't know.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
Like in a Kamada, like egg-type cooker?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
I don't know. That's one thing that I saw in
one of these blog posts about different types of fuel.
I think it was like the no BS, but they
spell out the word BS, which I'm not going to
say here. Because they're blacksmiths. The no BS guide to
different kinds of fuel. They said one of the things
to consider is what kind of environmental impact is your
fuel having? Right. So that's a good question. If you're like,
(32:44):
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. 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.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
That's right. You do need good ventilation in your workshop,
eye protection. Sometimes if you really want to kick it
old school, you might have one of those leather aprons,
like a leather face. And then your quench. You know,
we talked about 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
(33:24):
plunge it in there just like on TV and in
movies when it makes that great steamy sound and the
steam rises everywhere and they pull out a beautiful battle
axe or long sword.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah. Apparently, so it's not that surprising when you consider samurai,
but the Japanese were really, really good at creating high
carbon steel blades. Yeah. 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 13th century.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
So he can throw together a katana, no problem?
Speaker 1 (33:59):
No problem.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Should we take a break?
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah. All right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
We're going to take a break and talk a little
bit about and get quite a bit wrong probably about
techniques right after this.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Know.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
All right. Let the parade of misinformation begin.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
You know, these worry me more than other episodes that
we do when it's something very technical and very specific.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
Because these guys make battle axes. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
And 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 Until
you've actually done it, you can't get it 100% right.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
I will say, though, the videos help tremendously.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Oh, for sure.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
If, like, this is even remotely interesting to you, and
hopefully it is if you're, you know, this many minutes,
33 minutes or so into this podcast that it is,
go watch some videos. There's a bunch of them on there,
and I think you're going to be like, oh, okay,
I get what they were saying there. Oh, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Forging a bearded axe. That's the one.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
I've got one, Black Bear Forge.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
This giant man with a giant beard and a tiny
little leather cap.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
And his name is Black Bear Forge?
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Which is adorable, yeah. 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.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
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 and watch
them do it.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Like, let's see if we can get John Hodgman into it. Yeah, Hodgman.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Although, he's got very strong forearms.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
He does, freakishly, like Popeye.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
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 temperature of the metal 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 gas-powered forge,
(36:31):
you can set that baby on whatever exact temperature you want.
And it's not quite as– 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 temperature because
the metal will turn different colors at different temperatures.
Speaker 1 (36:54):
Right. So there's white hot, orange hot, yellow hot, red hot,
different kinds of gradients of orange and yellow and white too.
There's glowing white, which is the hottest.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Those aren't just expressions people say. No.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
And that's, again, that's the etymology of blacksmith lingo, basically,
that has made it into.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
White hot.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Red hot.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Those abs of yours are white hot. Oh, wait, that
was a different episode. Yeah, that's right. 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.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
And how hot is white-hot?
Speaker 1 (37:37):
White-hot, from what I saw, is 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit, which
is super high in Celsius.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Okay. Yellow, I think, is just below that. Yeah. And
then you've got orange. Right. And then you've got lame-o red-hot,
which is only 1,400 degrees.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
760 Celsius.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
And you can't do anything with red-hot.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
That's actually not true. You can do some very limited stuff.
But at that point, the iron is, I mean, it'll
probably bend a little bit. I saw good old Black
Bear Forge was making some chain with what looked to
be red-hot iron at the time. And he was bending
it pretty good. But, I mean, I'm not the best
judge of color.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
He was making chain?
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Yes. I'm just going to, I'm not going to wait
any longer. This guy made a chain, a length of chain. Perfect.
Each length was exactly the size of the last. Oh, God.
He was making them like in threes and then connecting
those threes to other threes. And he was using the horse. Chuck,
are you about to.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Climax or something? No, it's just so satisfying. It touches
these parts of my body. You know, it's not sexual
at all.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
You know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1 (38:51):
Oh, I know what you're saying. I know exactly what
you mean.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Although I haven't seen it. You never know what might happen.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
Right. But this guy, so you know the horn of
the anvil, right?
Speaker 2 (39:00):
Oh, do I?
Speaker 1 (39:01):
He would make like, he would bend the chain initially
on kind of like a thick, about the middle part
of the horn. And then he would bend it even further,
moving it a little up the horn. And this guy
just so expertly put it exactly where he needed it
to be. 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.
(39:23):
He's not wearing his little leather cap, ironically. He seems
very helpful. He was born in that cap. He's making
these videos to help. Yeah, I think you might be right.
And with a white beard. I think he was born
with a white beard as well.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
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 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
(39:58):
out dough. And then when it came time to actually
make 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
iron and steel, and you're joining these things together in
multiple shapes together. I think that's what was going on
(40:20):
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 that? That's crazy looking.
I thought he messed up. But then he put some
other kind of metal in between and would use this.
And from what I gathered, it's, where is it? Flux?
Is that what it is?
Speaker 1 (40:41):
Flux. Yeah. Like sand. Did it look like sand?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
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, and hammer it until that metal
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 to where you
(41:04):
couldn't even tell. It was just like they became one
with one another.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
He was probably reinforcing the axe head with a stronger...
a stronger type of iron. Totally, yeah. So there's slightly
different carbon content. And then the outside was a harder kind,
so it resisted surface deformities. But the interior stuff was strength,
was strong, so it resisted breaking. Probably, but he was
(41:30):
making these two one. I saw Black Bear Forge do
the same thing with the chains. Yes. He was using
a scarf weld where you make 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.
(41:51):
But he used flux as well. And from what I
could tell, when you use flux like sand or borax,
I think is something you can use, it prevents that
joint from oxidizing, which makes it a stronger... a stronger joint,
a stronger seam rather than kind of a compromised seam.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
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 more detailed work as it became an axe head,
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.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
And he would hammer it for like 10 seconds and
then put it right back in the fire.
Speaker 1 (42:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And then pull it out and hammer it really fast
for 10 seconds. So whatever he was doing at that
point required a super, super, super hot piece of, what
do you call it, ground piece?
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Work piece.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
Work piece.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
Yeah. But, I mean, so most blacksmiths, you'll notice in
their shops, they set the forge and the anvil up
within just twisting distance.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
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 out of the fire.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
You don't walk across your shop.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
No, you don't stop and like make a sandwich or anything.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
There's 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 lengthening it without flattening it out.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:23):
Because you can also flatten it. That's another thing. That's
called peening. Peening.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
Yeah. There's also upsetting, 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.
Would you want to talk about making nails here?
Speaker 2 (43:42):
Yeah. I mean, we kind of mentioned earlier, you know,
the foundation. I mean, there were things that were built
with dovetail joints and corn cobs to keep logs together.
And there were technologies like that. But If you really
want to talk about the building of the world, you
got to talk about iron nails and how many millions
(44:04):
and tens and millions of iron nails that were made
in the world by hand, by people.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Yeah. I mean, before industrialization, they were all made by hand.
And it's apparently harder to make them than you would think.
I watched a video by a blacksmith named Nick Kimball
on Instructables. And I guess his brother writes for Instructables
and interviewed him. And he's like a blacksmith at one
of the colonial model farms. Yeah. I think maybe Mount Vernon.
(44:33):
They didn't say. No, I met that guy. So he
looks like it too. He looks like a cool dude.
But 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
21st century. And he can make one a minute. Apparently,
(44:55):
blacksmiths of yore could make 10 to a dozen of
them a minute. And it's very involved. You actually have
to make the tool first to make the nails. So
you take an iron bar, flatten that, punch a hole
in it using your pritchel hole and a punch. And
then you take nail rod, little strips of the iron
(45:16):
that's going to be nails, heat it up. hammer a
shoulder into it on the edge of the anvil so
that there's like a, it's narrower for the bulk of it.
And then up top, it just kind of is a
little wider and 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
(45:38):
bunch of times to flatten it. That's what you have
to do to make 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.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (45:51):
I would have charged so much for nails, it would
have been astronomical. I would have been like, no, I will, like,
let's make you some chain mail instead. What do you
need nails for? Let's do something cool. And they'd say,
you know, I need to build a second story in
my house. I'd be like, all right, it's going to
cost you.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
The Josh nail?
Speaker 1 (46:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
The Josh Clark special?
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Because it would not be fun to make nails, for sure.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
No, but boy, they made a lot of them.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
They did.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
There are also some other techniques. There's bending we've kind
of already talked about when you're creating curves and things.
I mentioned the staircase irons, 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
(46:41):
that square. You basically, sort of like that Dremel you
were talking about, you stick that hot thing into the hole.
And you twist it around and you create those little twists.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah. I mean, every time it's a blacksmith tradition, you say,
et voila. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:59):
I don't have anything else. I know we got stuff
not quite right, but hopefully the Smithies, hopefully our enthusiasm
won them over.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah, let's hope so.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Are they coming after us?
Speaker 1 (47:10):
It cloaked our ignorance. 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 that we just tried to do in 45 minutes
and failed at that. But there's a lot to it.
So if you're interested in it, go check it out.
(47:30):
At the very least, go watch some videos. And since
I said go watch some videos, everybody, it's time for
Listener Mail.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
All right, I'm going to call this Olympic Torchbearer.
Speaker 1 (47:39):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Hey, guys. I was a torchbearer for the Winter Olympics,
and it was a lot of fun. The amount of
logistical coordination that went into it was incredible. I 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.
(48:04):
I had to be reminded by my handlers to ensure
that I kept it very high, high enough so as
to not light my hat on fire. 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, that could be seen
by the world on the live feed. Didn't even think
about that. One term you didn't use that I thought
(48:27):
you'd appreciate, when one torchbearer passes the flame to another,
it's called a torch kiss. We 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
(48:47):
the starting point, they removed the fuel cell and gave
it back to me.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
Broke it in half.
Speaker 2 (48:52):
And that is 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.
He won it through a drawing at his work.
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Oh, that's totally great.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
That's great. He might as well have gotten it from
contributing to society, as great as that is. Man, I've
got to thanks for that, Matt. Also, I knew it
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 says you left out this really awesome
(49:26):
fact and I just drop to my knees like the
Liberty Mutual guy in the elevator and go.
Speaker 2 (49:31):
No you know how much that bothers me when that
happens to me.
Speaker 1 (49:34):
How much none man it's like it'll ruin my week
My week's just toast now, thanks to Matt.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
There's the difference between you and I.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
Well, if you want to ruin my week and have
a neutral effect on Chuck's week, maybe even make it
more positive, you can email us. Go ahead and type
it out. After that, wrap it up. After that, spank
it on the bottom and then send it off to
stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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