Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special edition of Beyond Vizcaya. My name is Oldine and I’ll be your host for today.

(00:19)
For those of you that don’t know, Beyond Vizcaya is a community storytelling project that tells the stories of individuals that live or grew up in Miami. We do center those stories around three major themes. They include labor, migration, as well as cultural identity. Today we’ll be focusing on labor. Specifically we will be talking about blacksmithing. Before we get into that, though, I do want to let you know that we are streaming live right outside of our traditional blacksmith shop here at Vizcaya. And we have special guests with us today.

(00:48)
We do have members from The Guild. They are specifically a urban craft and arts school. They specialize in traditional blacksmithing methods. So they’ll be here, showing us a demonstration of some of the work that they do. And then we also have our very own conservator, who’s going to be talking about some of the work that she does here at the Historic Blacksmith Shop, and how the work has evolved. All right. Now, originally we’re supposed to… We promised a live 360 view for you. But in order to ensure that we brought to you the best quality video, we are streaming, as usual, and then later on we will record and send you the 360 special that way. All right. And so we hope that you enjoy. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce to us the co-founder of The Guild we have with us today Sean Williams. So we’ll give him some time. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, Oldine, for having us.

All right. And so Sean, if you can just tell us a little bit of what it is that you do and what specifically we’ll see here today.

Okay. So as you said, I’m a blacksmith, a metal fabricator. The definition of a blacksmith is someone who manipulates steel using heat and tools. Today we’re going to be using what’s called an atmosphere and propane forge. It burns at about 2,200 degrees. It allows us to get the steel to a sufficient temperature so that it becomes malleable, able to be manipulated.

All right. And I remember in a previous conversation we had, you mentioned that there’s a little bit of tie-in with Vizcaya to your background toward and your journey to blacksmithing. Can you share? Tell me about that.

Funny enough, driving around the grounds today, the memory struck me that my journey to metalworking actually started here at Vizcaya in the mid-’80s. I was a young man, 15, 16 years old, learning to… A member of a medieval reenactment group called The Royal Chessmen. And they had their annual Renaissance fair on the grounds at Vizcaya every year doing living chess game and choreographed stage combat. And as a child of a single parent, I’d gone to my grandmother and said, “I’d like to buy a suit of armor.” And my grandmother had laughed at me and told me there was no way she was going to do that.

(02:56)
So I started teaching myself to make armor. I started making chainmail with little links of steel, and then started making plate. And on and off, for two or three decades, it was a hobby, a side gig. Some people like to play golf. I like to get steel hot and hammer it.

Right, right. And that’s really cool. Almost like it’s coming full circle today.

Absolutely.

That’s really interesting. All right. And so thank you for that little bit. And we’ll hear more from you a little bit later.

Okay. Very good.

Right. And so right now we are going to get ready to hear from our conservator. We have Kelly with us today. Before she comes in, I do want to make mention, though, that a lot of our archives right now, we don’t have information pertaining specifically to the work that blacksmiths have done here on site. But Kelly can still share some of what she knows and, like I said earlier, maybe some of how the work has evolved here on site. All right. So Kelly, welcome.

Thank you.

All right. So if you can just maybe tell us what you know about the shop and maybe what you studied, or what you think may have been done here during the time of [inaudible 00:04:02].

Absolutely. We don’t have a lot of information on the specific blacksmith, craftsmen here at Vizcaya right now, which is a common occurrence. A lot of craftsmen historically just wasn’t known for record-keeping. I actually did my master’s thesis on a blacksmith in Charleston, South Carolina. And I was able to do that research because his granddaughter had used his account book as a scrapbook along the line, and so that’s what preserved that particular element. But in general, it just wasn’t treated as something that needed to be kept, those records. And they really let their craft speak for themselves.

Right, right. Because even in the research that I attempted, I only saw a record of one specific blacksmith. His name was Charles Abraham Kelly. And all we know is that he was involved in work that was pretty amazing. I believe he mentioned the Panama Canal. But he did cite that some of his best work was done here at Vizcaya. And then I know you and I had a conversation about the Samuel Yellin gates that are here, and other pieces of work. So definitely a lot of that work’s here.

Yeah. Vizcaya has actually quite a bit of ornamental iron work throughout the property, and a lot of that is Samuel Yellin. Samuel Yellin.

All right. And with the shop being on site, can you maybe tell us what it may have been used for, before today?

Yes. So the Blacksmith shop here would have been for more functional use and would’ve made a lot of everyday items rather than the decorative iron that most people associate with blacksmiths. So at that time period, they would have been maybe helping out with the construction, making brackets, farm equipment, repairing broken elements, and making tools and things like that. So it really would’ve served as a functional space for the entire state.

Okay. And then going to what you do today, if you can tell us about that and if there’s any similarities there.

Yeah, absolutely. So as the conservator for Vizcaya, I’m responsible for the collection here, which includes not just the decorative items that you see throughout the house, but also the property and building itself. So I am responsible for the repair of a lot of these things. As you can imagine, on a 100 year old estate there’s a lot of things that need to get fixed day to day. So when something breaks, it’ll come to my attention and I will set up methodology for repair. And so that’s a lot of what we do out here, is both the repair but also testing and analysis as needed.

Okay. Anything you can tell us as far as what you’re working on specifically right now? Any pieces?

Yeah, absolutely. We actually have in the studio right now, it’s a metal and wood combination lantern that was broken just in the course of daily activities. I had had a previous repair that failed, and that’s where it broke again. And that’s pretty common. The tail of it actually broke off. And so that just came to my studio yesterday. And we’ll be working on getting that repaired and back on display so that it can be enjoyed by the guests.

And I know we also talked about how, until today, there’s still some traditional blacksmith work that takes place. You mentioned maybe using something to work with blacksmiths for certain items [inaudible 00:07:44].

Yeah. It’s very common, actually, for conservators to work with other trades when we need specialized work. Blacksmithing is a very specific skill and it takes a lot of time and energy to perfect that skill. So if there was something that was damaged that is broad iron, we would collaborate with a blacksmith for that repair, and that would really give us the most authentic look.

Awesome. Awesome. And so we can maybe take a look at what’s going on behind us. I know we have some heat. I see that. I can say that much. If you could help us out a bit. Sean can tell us what’s happening.

So what I’m going to be demonstrating are five of the nine traditional blacksmithing techniques. The technique that I just did was cutting the steel from the parent stock. So traditionally, whether it’d been a couple hundred years or 1,000 years ago, the techniques we’re using today are the same techniques that would’ve been used in the Middle Ages, for instance. So in the Middle Ages, if a blacksmith needed to cut a piece of bar off a parent stock, the long, whatever he’d get from his fact… wherever they made the steel. They couldn’t exactly just pull out an angle grinder and cut it off, so what they would do is use different types of tools.

(08:54)
And what we use in this case is what’s called a top-cut. Basically it’s a steel wedge, like a chisel, that is held on top of the steel and struck until the steel is mostly cut. And then in order to control the piece of steel, we put it down in a pritchel hole in an anvil and bent it back and forth until it broke off. So now I’ve gotten another heat. I’m getting ready to demonstrate forging a taper, which is taking the steel from one dimension down to a smaller dimension. And again, traditionally, 1,000 years ago a blacksmith couldn’t necessarily go to a steel supply store and get steel in any dimension that he needed, so oftentimes he would have to make his own dimensions. Move the steel to a dimension that he needed.

(09:28)
And what he would do is he would set his apprentices to forging this steel down to a smaller dimension. So even to this day, if I’ve been ministering what’s called the journeyman’s exam to a blacksmith, I’m going to give them a particular length of steel of a particular dimension and I’m going to ask them to forge it down to a different dimension, and then check that to make sure that they’ve consistently changed the shape of the metal to a new, say for instance from a half inch down to a quarter inch. Forging it down. What I’m going to do is take it from three-eighths inch down to… Three inches of three-eighths. Forge it out to a six-inch taper, which is going to become a decorative scroll.

Okay.

Okay?

All right.

I’ll be right back.

No problem. I’m not sure if we have any visual as he’s doing that, that we can kind of go through.

(10:12)
I know that, for some people, they do find this work to be a bit therapeutic. So even looking at that, a good way to maybe release some tension. I was making mention, in hearing in another interview, some of your students, they actually find the work to be a bit therapeutic.

Absolutely. You definitely get in a Zen zone when you’re working around it. I don’t know if it’s by virtue of the fact that you’re working with a piece of steel that’s glowing hot that causes you to be so focused, but you definitely lose yourself and time flies. It seems like you’ve been working for a few minutes in 11 hours.

Yeah. Okay. And then how long would that need to be in there?

Right now the forge is still coming up to full heat and the piece of steel and the anvil is cold. So the anvil is acting like a heat sink. It’s sucking the heat out of the metal as I’m working. So I’m getting maybe 30 seconds of work time. As the day would progress in my shop, typically the anvil would start to get warmer as they progressed. The forge would be at its full heat. So we’d be working every 30 seconds to a minute. We’d be able to continue pulling our piece out of there. I might have two or three pieces in the fire at the same time, although the expression, too many irons in the fire, can be very true.

Yeah. Okay. And then in the meantime, I don’t know if one of the individuals, one of your teammates… I know you brought in some work as examples to show. I don’t know if maybe someone can grab that as he’s working on that. We can maybe look at that. Some of them are very ornamental pieces. Maybe pieces that visitors would see if they came here at Vizcaya. Just wanted to show you that and just give him some time to be able to work on the pieces. So you can actually come up here. We have Sylvia with us, who’s also a co-founder of The Guild. So if you want to bring it up a little bit more and actually come in.

Do you see it?

Right there? So those are one of the pieces. Do you want to talk about that one?

Sure. This is-

What that is specifically?

This is an ornamental decorative piece. Architectural. It demonstrates many of the fundamental joinery techniques. So as I said earlier, what I’m demonstrating today are five of the traditional techniques to create components, whether it be scrolls, horizontal members, vertical members in a bar, twisting, that kind of thing. This particular piece demonstrates how to take those individual components and then join them together in a finished piece. So we have three different examples of joiner in this piece.

(12:50)
We have what is called mortise and tenon. So these horizontal bars, each one of these horizontal bars was forged out into a peg that goes through a corresponding hole in the next cross-member and then gets mushroomed down to like a rivet head. So the four outside members were joined together. The circular bar in the middle is actually forge-welded. So this bar was heated up sufficiently so that it could be bonded to itself, forge-welded together. And then that was collared into this outside piece to finish this decorative piece.

All right. We’ll go ahead and let you get back to that. And then there is… There’s one more question that I kind of had for Kelly. I don’t know if we can give her some time to come up. And again, I know that we know that a lot of information just wasn’t reported by blacksmiths. However, early 1900s we know that there was a little bit of a decline of blacksmiths during that time. Can you maybe tell us why that was? And maybe some of the occupations they transitioned into?

Sure. Excuse me. Things just started to change. You have a lot of industrial revolution, and cars rather than carriages, and things like that are all happening in the early 20th century. And so it just sort of transitioned into the needs that were available to the people at that time.

Right.

So maybe it was a mechanic instead. And any of those working with your hands sort of skills. Horses have been around forever and always need shoes and things like that as well, so some of that also continued.

Okay. That’s very good to know.

And I think decorative iron work is still being made today. So that craft is still around. Just not as popular as it was at the time.

Why would you say that some people still appreciate that type of work today, though?

I think people just genuinely appreciate craftsmanship, and they can see it. I think it’s that question of beauty. I think people can see craftsmanship when it’s there.

Okay. And then for the viewers, if you have any questions, feel free to start coming in. We know that this is a different format, but we are definitely excited and willing to answer any questions that we can. Sean is still over there doing his work. So this part right here, I don’t know if you want to shout it out, but what’s taking place right now?

So what we’re doing is we’re demonstrating another method. This is a method of finishing the steel that we forged. Rotate. And thank you all for your silence.

(15:46)
To get rid of the individual hammer marks. So I’m using another top tool called a flatter. And the flatter gets rid of the individual hammer marks and gives the steel a really nice, smooth finish. [inaudible 00:15:57]. You want to show them? So at this point we took three inches of steel and we forged it out to a six-inch taper.

Can you all see that? Probably not. You can maybe bring it a little… Okay. And then that stays in for how long?

Just a few minutes now. The forge is really hot, so we’re getting a heat. What’s called taking a heat is putting my piece in the forge, letting it get hot. Steel goes through a very distinct series of color changes as it gets hot. Steel, a lot of people don’t understand. One of the principle safety things that I tell all my students is steel does not provide any radiant color at all, no color at all until it is 1,000 degrees. So that means steel could be that color of the bar that Henry just showed you, like 900 degrees. So a lot of people forget that. You’ve burned yourself on a pan in your oven at home, I’m sure, at 350, 400 degrees. At that temperature it hurts. At 900 degrees, oftentimes you don’t feel it. You hear it and you smell it. It’s so hot.

(17:11)
And so the color changes that we’re concerned with are going to be like dark red, light red, dark orange, light orange, dark yellow, light yellow, and then white hot. Now these forges, in their current configuration, are only going to get into a light orange range, which is 2,100, 2,150, 2,200 degrees. If we wanted to forge-weld, like I showed you the ring in that piece right there, where we want to get two pieces of steel to bond together. We’d need to raise it to like 2,350 degrees, because the melting temperature steel is 2,400 degrees. So you get it really close to that temperature, where it’s just about to melt. The surface actually looks wet, moist. And in the absence of oxygen, if you can hammer the two pieces of steel together, they will actually bond and become one. And that’s a technique that was used 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago to weld steel together.

Okay.

What I’m going to do right now is create an offset or a shoulder. I’m going to isolate a small section of material from the rest of the bar in order to create a tab, a larger, flatter area. This is the same technique I would use if I wanted to do a leaf or an arrowhead or a spear point or anything like that, where I’m taking a narrow round or square piece of stock and spread it wide.

Okay. So we’ll go ahead and take a look at that real quick.

Sure.

There’s obviously a lot of skills needed in order to do this. And as he mentioned, you can’t see the color of the steel change at all.

So what I did is I used the edge of the anvil. I used the edge of the anvil as what we call a fuller. Basically, a fuller tool that’s used to make an impression into steel. So I made an impression to separate a small area of the metal from the rest of the bar so that I can hammer that small area. And that transition that I created first prevents me from accidentally hitting the other piece of the bar. It creates like a border between the two areas so I don’t accidentally manipulate steel that I don’t want to [inaudible 00:19:16].

Right, right. And you mentioned that you definitely have the eye for it. And with technology, it’s created so that you probably won’t see a lot of what you’re seeing right now all around, correct?

Right. Well, one of the advent… Also, my shop is much darker than this, so you’re going to definitely see the color a lot more. What I do know is, from my years of doing this, that a lot of times the steel is much hotter. When I’m outside, I know the steel is much hotter than my eyes are telling me because the ambient light is such.

Okay.

So they use the back part. This hammer right here is called a cross peen hammer. This is a traditional blacksmith’s hammer. It’s got a flat face on one side and it’s got a fuller on the other side. The flat face spreads the material in all directions equally as I’m hammering. One of the things that a blacksmith needs to learn is that you have a limited amount of material that you have to move and manipulate into different areas. So mass is neither created nor destroyed. You’re moving it around.

(20:09)
And steel, when it’s hot, moves in a very similar fashion to clay. Everybody played with Play-Doh when they were a kid, and they’d roll out a snake and then pinch the snake. The snake would get longer as they pinched it. Well, the flat face spreads the material. As I’m compressing the material, spreads the material in width and length at the same time. Okay. Now, if I want to be more efficient in the use of movement of my steel, I want width but I don’t want length, I flip my hammer over and I use the fuller.

(20:32)
The fuller spreads the material exclusively perpendicular to the direction of the fuller. So if my bar is like this and I’m hitting it this way, the bar is going to get wider. If I hit it this way, the bar is going to get longer without getting wider. Okay? And we have a question from the audience.

Okay. So while Sean does that-

Give me a second to take a heat.

Have you ever burned yourself seriously doing this kind of work? Okay. So we’ll ask Sean that when he gets back. And again, feel free. Any other questions that come in, we’ll definitely do our best to answer them.

So you’ll see that I started with a three-eighths-inch square bar and what I’ve done is actually flattened into about half its thickness, but gained more than twice its width. And I’m going to continue to do that one more beat.

And so you can shout out the answer. I did get a question that’d come in.

Okay. So what’s the question?

Just if you’ve ever burned yourself.

I burn myself all the time, almost every day. Not almost every day, but a lot. In fact, when I was telling you the story about how you hear it and smell it, I was teaching a blacksmith class a couple of months ago and I brushed a hot piece of steel on myself and my students heard it and they were like, “You just burned yourself, didn’t you?”

(21:48)
I didn’t even feel it. Not serious burns, but little, tiny… Anybody who’s worked in a kitchen as a chef knows the kind of burns that I deal with. And it’s just something that you don’t even notice at some point. And my students… So we’ve been teaching classes at The Guild for going on 10 years. In those 10 years, we’ve only had one, maybe two people burn themselves enough where it was worth noting. Like somebody basically putting their hand on a 900 degree piece of steel.

(22:15)
It’s happened like once. And one of the things you learn: Everything is hot. And even the tools get hot. Steel is conductive. It transfers heat from one place to another. So you’ll see that I’m frequently cooling my tongs off in the slack tub, the water bucket, because if I don’t the tongs will get soft and then they’ll start to stretch. The jaws will stretch open from the heat and they’ll no longer hold the stock they were designed to hold.

Okay. So as Sean does that, do we have any other questions that came in? All right. Where is The Guild located? All right. I don’t know. Sylvia, would you like to come and take…

Hello.

Yes.

I’m Sylvia. I’m also one of the owners of The Guild. And we’re located in Pompano Beach, just a little bit more from here.

Okay. How long have you been at that location?

We moved to the current location about four years ago. We just had a much smaller location nearby. But we outgrown it really, really fast as blacksmith became more popular and we had to…

I’m curious. What’s made it become more popular? Why do you think?

Well, there is one big thing that’s going on lately is reality TV, right? And there’s Forged in Fire. And we can definitely credit the show with bringing us a lot of students. Other than that, it’s just people want to reconnect with history and doing things with their hands. They need a creative outlet. Especially, it became very clear in 2020, as soon as we reopened. People wanted a place to come and to play and forget about the rest of the world.

Right.

And people wanted the skills to prepare for the apocalypse.

You made mention in a previous conversation. You talked about, okay, there’s this decline happening in the 1900s. But then you talked about, in the ’50s and ’60s something else started going on.

Right. So what happened is, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, mass production, blacksmithing pretty much died out. In fact, the only blacksmithing profession that was still a viable profession was farriers; guys who put horseshoes on horses. Up through the early 20th century, up until the ’50s, ’60s when you had a group of blacksmiths get together and form this organization called the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America. And then every state now has their own chapter of these blacksmith organizations that, their mission is to preserve and spread the knowledge of blacksmithing.

(24:55)
And so a lot of people don’t realize, up until the Industrial Revolution, everything metal in your home, in your business, everything was made by a blacksmith or a subsection of blacksmith. Your wheelwrights were a subsection of blacksmith, your gunsmiths were a subsection of blacksmith, your locksmiths, everything. Mass production pretty much put those professions out of business. They’re coming back. And there’s a huge interest today. Like Sylvia said, this Forged in Fire show, it’s kind of created the misconception that all blacksmiths are bladesmiths, but that’s fine. It’s driven a huge interest. And I’ll have half my students will come to me and say, “I want to learn how to make a knife.”

(25:33)
Well, a year down the road they’re like, “Okay. I made enough knives. I want to learn how to make a railing or a gate or something like that.” And so that’s where we’re going with that.

Okay. Very cool.

Henry, you ready? Okay, so we’re going to punch holes now. Traditional manner of punching holes before drilling. I’m going to use another top tool. I’m going to use a tool called the top punch. Henry’s going to come out of the fire. Shoulder facing down. Yeah. We’ll do it right. Flip it over. Flip it over. There you go. Back to the pitch. There you go. So I’m going to go a third of the way up the piece of stock.

(26:03)
There you go. Flip it over. Flip it over.

Yeah.

[inaudible 00:26:30]. So we’ve punched a little, tiny pellet out. That’s all we lost in terms of material. So what I tell my students is, one of the big advantages of punching a hole over drilling a hole is the fact that if you drill a hole, you’re removing all of that material. Everything that’s in there is gone, so your structure is weakened, whereas if I punch a hole, what I’m doing is I’m compressing the material down, spreading it out, and all I’m losing is a tiny little metal pellet, a tab out of it. With the bar… Okay. I’ll show you guys on the next step. But we’re punching holes that we would use to either… For a method of joinery, like if we wanted to do mortise and tenon joinery, the type of joinery I showed you on this piece. Riveting. Making a pair of pongs, you forge your two arms of your tongs, your reins, and then punch holes in them, and then put a rivet in there. And that’s joining. That’s a typical joinery method right there.

Okay.

So what we’re doing is just making holes for anchoring this to a wall.

Okay.

Okay?

All right. And so any other questions in the meantime? Okay. So where you get your tools? Do you ever have to create your own tools? All right. So do you want to take a stab at that or should we wait?

Well, I’ll…

All right. I appreciate that. This works.

Not a problem. The guys are busy behind us here.

Yeah.

So the question is, where do you get your tools? Or have to-

Create your own?

Well, it’s kind of a rite of passage that every blacksmith makes their own tools. And that’s pretty much the only creative occupation or… where a blacksmith can make all of their own tools. Anybody else, a metal-worker needs to come to us because those tools are made of metal, right?

Right.

So we make about 90% of our tools.

Nice. Nice. Okay. So someone wanted to ask if you make your own tools, and you got the answer to that.

Absolutely.

Yes?

We don’t make all of our own tools, and one of the reasons because it’s not cost-effective. A pair of tongs can be bought for $35, $40. It’s going to take me an hour or two to make a pair of tongs. I make more doing architectural metal work than I do make in a tool. But we do make a lot of tools. And we actually teach tool making classes where we end up… In March I taught a four Monday evening toolmaking class to intermediate to advanced students. They each made a pair of tongs. They made some of the top tools that we’ve been demonstrating. Top punch, top fuller, and they made a couple of other tools.

(29:01)
So as far as holes, I wanted to show this bar as another example of the advantage of holes over drilling. These are five-eighths-inch round and square holes punched in a five-eighth-inch bar. They’d be pass-throughs for a railing, for either top and bottom horizontal bars on a railing, but they are five-eighth-inch holes. You couldn’t drill these holes in this bar because you’d cut the bar in half, but by punching the holes we’re actually able to do that.

Okay. So about how many more steps in order for you to complete that?

We’re done punching these holes, and now what I’m going to demonstrate is twisting, doing a decorative twist in a bar.

So what’s this for?

Yeah. This is called a leg vice. It’s a traditional blacksmith’s vice. After your anvil, this is arguably the next most important tool in a blacksmith’s arsenal. It’s called a leg vice because it has a long leg that goes down to the ground. Also, as opposed to your typical machinist’s vice that you’d find at a hardware store, this is made out of forged steel. So I can do a significant amount of hammering on this and I don’t risk cracking it or chipping it or having it shatter, whereas your cast machinist’s vice that you get a normal hardware store, most of them can’t handle that kind of stress and they’re going to fall apart on you. So this tool is probably close to 100 years old.

(30:42)
I have another, even bigger one at my shop that’s easily as old. My anvil is a 1918 Fisher anvil. It’s a 205-pound Fisher anvil. Interesting little anecdote about Fishers is World War I was going on during when Fisher anvils were invented. What happened, is everybody here typically knows what an anvil ring sounds like, right? It sounds like a bell, right? So about 10 years ago I was hired as a consultant to do a blacksmithing scene in a movie. And they sent the production assistants up to the shop, and the production assistants looked around and decided what equipment they wanted to use in their scene.

(31:18)
Well, of course, my Fisher was the biggest anvil in my shop, and they had to go with Big. One of the things that didn’t occur to me was, Fisher has a very distinct sound, and there’s a reason for that. Fishers do not ring like other anvils. They were made that way. And the reason was because during World War I, the Allies, the good guys, the British, the French, and the Americans figured out that the German artillery officers were aiming their artillery at the sound of anvils behind the lines because, during World War I, the principal method of moving men and equipment from the railway to the battlefield was still horse and cart.

(31:46)
Millions of horses served in World War I. Every one of those horses had to have shoes put on their feet. So you had thousands of farriers behind the lines. The Germans were listening to the sound of the artillery and shooting… or the ringing anvils, and shooting it. So the US War Department contacted Fisher Manufacturing and said, “Can you make us a quiet anvil?” And they sure enough did. And to this day, this anvil is very, very desirable for that reason. If you’re working in a small, one man, 10X20 shop, the ringing of anvils can get very tedious after a while. This guy doesn’t do that.

Wow. Yeah. And obviously you speak with such passion, such enthusiasm in your work. Why do you make it?

I love it. I love it. I’ve always been fascinated with metal.

Okay.

Oh. My… Sorry. Not taking the cues. I love it. I’m fascinated with metal. I always have been. There’s just something magical about manipulating steel and making things out of it. And to this day, my customers, a lot of times my customers will be like, “Sean, can you… ” And I’m like, “You don’t even need to ask. If it’s made out of metal, yes I can.”

Yeah.

It just hasn’t happened. And it is… I don’t want to sound… It’s almost god-like, to be able to manipulate something so powerful and so hard. And especially when you’re doing it at night and there’s sparks flying everywhere. You definitely feel like a sense of power or something like that.

I can sense the passion that you speak with. All right. So do have another question that came in: What is the forge made of? Why doesn’t it melt? Okay. All right, so we’re about to have Sylvia help us out with that question.

Okay. The forge is actually made out of steel, the same way as everything else that we put in there. These particular forges don’t get up to a white hot heat.

They can. They can.

Yes, they can, as Sean just chimed in, but it’s not set to go up that high at the moment so that it wouldn’t melt steel. But the main reason why it doesn’t melt is because it’s insulated, and insulation keeps it from that happening. If you can see, that glowing orange inner layer of the forge is the insulation itself.

Two-inch thick layer of what’s called Kaowool. It’s a type of ceramic fiberglass. They can’t hear me?

Nope.

Okay. So the forges, they’re insulated with a two-inch thick layer of what’s called Kaowool. It’s a type of ceramic fiberglass. And then the Kaowool is then coated with a refractory cement, or a furnace cement, to prevent the fibers from burning off and us breathing them, because that’s not a good thing to be breathing. So there’s a coating of cement on top. And then there’s a couple of fire bricks down the center to give us a flat shelf.

Okay.

So we’re ready to twist. If you guys just… You’ll be fine right where you are.

Okay.

So this decorative twist is a typical decorative feature that you’d find in a piece of steel anywhere, like a railing or a gate, something like that, on a picket. So twisted it with a wrench. So I’m going to go back in the fire. I’m going to straighten this out a little bit and do the last step, which is going to be forging a decorative scroll.

I’m not sure if we got a good shot of that, but that was actually pretty cool to watch. Okay. So you told us why you do this. Can you tell us maybe what you hear from your students? Maybe some testimonies from them?

The vast majority of my students have been watching TV shows like Forged in Fire. They come in wanting to make a sword. I just finished a six-day European long-sword class. Unfortunately there is a misconception, by TV shows, that blacksmithing is a lot easier than it is. So you get a lot of people who come in. And that’s why Sylvia and I have, over the years, developed a strict regimen of what classes to take to progress onto the next level. You’re not forging a four-foot long sword blade if you can’t do three inches to six inches in mild steel. So that’s… But everybody wants to make a sword or everybody wants to make a knife, in the current environment especially.

Okay. And then with things like technology and other advancements, what do you see for the future of blacksmithing?

Okay. One of the things, the distinctions between a blacksmith and a fabricator is that a fabricator is just going to take factory-sourced steel, shape it using presses or machines, and then weld the components together. And if I’m out in public, if I’m in Europe or anywhere else and I can see metalwork, traveling through Miami, I can see metal work at these beautiful luxurious mansions and I can tell whether it’s inexpensive, fabricated work or really well-done, handmade forged metal work. And that’s because of the texturing. It’s because of some minor irregularities in the work. But there are things you can look at that will tell automatically.

(37:13)
Some customers are willing to pay the extra to have a piece that is handmade, that is hand-forged by traditional methods. Many would just rather have it made inexpensively and have it welded together. So that’s always been the dichotomy in the commercial metal work aspect of this. Now, with the advent of 3D printers, a big concern that’s been discussed at many blacksmithing conferences lately is, will 3D printers at some point be able to even emulate the textures, the handwork that goes into… Like I said, I don’t know if you guys can see, but every single inch of this work was touched by a hammer. There is not an area that doesn’t have some type of texturing on it.

(38:01)
The edges are all broken down, rounded out just to hair to give that impression. So you know. When I’m out in public and I see a piece of metal, I know whether it was hand-forged or whether it was fabricated by that. And like I said, some customers are willing to pay the difference to have that, and some aren’t. And with 3D printers coming along, many blacksmiths are afraid that the 3D printer will be able to emulate the texturing, too.

Right.

So that not only are you having a railing water jet cut, but also textured by 3D printers. So hopefully there’ll always be a demand for something that was made by a human hand. That’s all we can hope for.

Yeah. There’s appreciation for it. All right. And so while they’re putting the final touches on that, I assume, do we have any other questions that came in?

Got a couple.

Yes. Okay. So how long does it take to become a blacksmith? All right. I don’t know if there is an easy answer for that, but we’ll find out.

So what was the question? How long does it take to become a blacksmith?

Yes.

It’s going to depend. Like anything, the effort you put in is how long it’s going to take. I don’t see anybody getting to journeyman blacksmith skill level in less than a year without serious effort. Three, four, five years. Your European… In Europe they still do formal apprenticeships to be a blacksmith, and that apprenticeship is five years before you’re a journeyman blacksmith. And then you spend 10 years as a journeyman. Traveling around, working as manual labor in a master blacksmith’s shop until you can call yourself a master. So it’s a long process.

(39:50)
What I tell most of my students is that it’s going to be difficult right out the door to establish a business as a blacksmith. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to have a day job. A welder. Hopefully it’s something that’s compatible, that contributes to what you’re doing as a blacksmith. But working as a welder or working in some other trade like that where you’re making a good living but you’re slowly building your clientele and your business and your skill while you are sustaining yourself financially.

Because you offer something that maybe the average welder would be able to because you have that skillset?

Right.

Right. Okay. Awesome. All right. And we have a question from Charlotte. Do you do this full-time now? I’m not sure of the second part, but do you do this full-time now? All right. So is this a full-time job for you, Sean?

Yes, it is.

Okay. I’m not sure if you heard that but yes, he does it full-time. Okay. And so are we wrapping up this piece?

I’m doing the last step, so I’m doing scroll.

Okay.

So what I’m doing is I’ve taken a long taper that I made. When I teach my class I call this prison survival, because I’m teaching my students how to make a shank. We got Will Ferrell, Get Hard, right? Well, that’s what I teach. Just kidding. Anyways, so we’re taking this long taper that we’ve made. Graceful taper. And we’re going to forge it into a scroll like that, so you guys can see it. So right now what I’m doing is I’m doing the small scroll over the edge of the anvil. Once I have that small scroll established, I’m going to do the larger scroll. And then that piece is basically finished. A decorative hook for… Like I said, these techniques can be made much bigger on a much larger scale, these exact same techniques, to make any architectural feature you’d ever want to make.

[inaudible 00:41:37].

So I’ve done a small scroll, about the size of a dime, and now I’m going to do the large. At this point… An anvil has a lot of different functions. There are parts of the anvil. The pointy end is called the bick or the horn of … The pointy end is called the bick or the horn of an anvil. It’s basically a large mandrel. If anybody’s done any jewelry, if you’re forming rings, if you’re forming any kind of circular shapes, that’s what the bick is for. And it’s also for drawing out large tapers.

(42:30)
When I’m forging larger pieces of metal out to a taper, the flat surface of the hammer, like I said, spreads the material in width and length at the same time. So it’s not going to be the most efficient method of moving steel. If I really want to move steel to town, what I want to do is I want to use a convex face of a hammer and the convex of the horn, which acts like two knuckles or fists pinching the material together and pushing it out much farther in a linear direction.

(42:55)
So that’s what the horn is for. Behind the horn is a small shelf called the chipping block. This is a softened area of the anvil face that we’d normally use chiseling or cutting. However, in order to facilitate it, what I do is I just use a large steel sacrificial plate that will serve as my chipping block on the face of my anvil. You want to do everything possible to prevent damaging the face of your anvil because, like anything, if you have cuts or mars in the face of your anvil, anything you hammer into that mark will then be transferred into your finished piece. Knife-makers, especially if they are working on a nice, flat knife blade, they don’t want to have a bunch of ridges or imperfections in their blade that they’re going to end up having to spend time grinding out.

(43:32)
Got a couple of holes in the anvil. Square hole, it’s called a Hardy hole. It’s H-A-R-D-Y. It’s for holding a lot of these little tools that I have on my anvil stand.

Okay.

And then the pritchel hole, the round hole, is for punching holes, which you saw me use it when we were punching the holes in the tab.

So it all serves work.

Everything serves a purpose. I like to tell my students that, for me, the first rule of blacksmithing is leverage. That if you hammer the material where it is supported by the anvil, you thin the material. If you hammered the material where it unsupported by the anvil, you will bend the material. So that’s what I’m going to do, is I’m going to take that long taper and I’m going to put it on the horn of the anvil, extending off the horn of the anvil, and then use leverage. Use the horn as my fulcrum to bring that curve around and to create that graceful curve of my scroll.

Okay. All right. So we’ll watch as you do that. Any other questions yet? No? Okay. This is honestly the first time I’m witnessing something like this, so it’s an experience for me, too. All right. And that’s really, really neat to watch. I don’t know what types of reactions you get from students on the first day. It’d be nice to know. Do they ever doubt themselves?

Everybody doubts themselves in the beginning. Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

Everybody doubts themselves in the… Well, a lot of people doubt themselves in the beginning. And then sometimes there are some people who probably should doubt themselves who don’t.

Yeah.

The first thing people have to get over is the fear. It’s a hot piece of steel that they’re holding, and most people hold back. Getting somebody to swing a hammer full-on is scary.

Yeah.

A lot of people hesitate. And I’ll watch people, for an hour or so, struggling to… The anvil provides rebound. The anvil will bounce your hammer up. So the way a blacksmith can work all day and not get exhausted is because the only time I’m working is when I’m driving that hammer down. The hammer’s bouncing up off the material. So if you let it rise up, then you don’t have to work. But students will be like this and they’ll be death grip on the hammer, and they’ll be like…

Yeah.

And the range of swing is this.

Yeah.

Well, if you’re only swinging your hammer six to eight inches, you’re not going to get a lot of power going on whereas, if you bring your hammer way up here and drive it down, you’re going to move some material.

Okay.

One last heat to do some adjustments, but at this point stand where you guys can see it.

Okay.

We’ve got a pretty much finished hook.

Really nice. I didn’t know how it was going to end up, but obviously [inaudible 00:47:19]. All right. Any more questions? No? All right. And so we hope that you enjoyed. I know that I did. I don’t know if there’s anything you want to leave our guests with before we go off, maybe about The Guild? About the work in particular? Anything?

Okay. Well, I would just say try something new. Get out and test your limits. Blacksmithing is definitely something that’s going to do that for you. Providing you with a self-confidence that I don’t think too many other activities do. When you’ve forged a 2,000-degree-piece of steel, a lot of other things seem insignificant by comparison, and maybe it makes life easier.

Yeah. Yeah.

We like to think of The Guild as almost like a gym membership, too, because people come and, like I said, they focus. And everybody is physically working very hard. And you have to get out of your comfort zone, because you’re working a 2,000-degree piece of steel in a 125-degree environment. But if you’re willing to try it’s an incredible experience.

Right. We do appreciate the time. And thank you for coming out and showing us something so amazing.

My pleasure.

Yeah. All right. And so we hope you viewers also enjoyed and you learned something about blacksmithing and maybe the history behind it. Maybe some techniques. And we want to continue to hear from you, whether it was about this particular program or maybe from programs that we’ve already shared with you. Maybe any stories that you have yourself. We ask that you would share them on beyondvizcaya.org. Then please place anything in the comments. And just hope that you continue to tune in and follow us. All right. Thank you.