A Song of Fire and Fire

"Are you offering to teach me something?"
"Teach? No. Ain't got the patience for teaching. But I might let you learn."

- Maskerade by Terry Pratchett

Jon Snow was wrong about winter this year and frankly I barely noticed spring either. This I suspect had more to do with our interminable and suspiciously good weather and less to do with time flying by. Indeed time ground by like a millstone being worked by a team of kittens - slow, but ultimately better then a sweaty donkey. Working with the guys at Orion has been really great. I've learned a lot just by being around them, but I understand now why they said they were offering an internship, not an apprenticeship. They're too busy to teach, but they've been kind enough to let me learn around them. Not that I'm complaining, in fact I prefer to flail about in the deep end most especially when there are no life guards on duty, but it sure can be a devil on the ol' biceps.

I also had a chance to help out on a job with Joe over at Dry Canyon Forge, and he loaned me a few books to learn from. And of course I've learned a lot from the internet and the library books, and the COMAG (Central Oregon Metal Arts Guild) meetings every month. I want to say that being autodidactic isn't as wonderful as it sounds, but that sounds like a thinly veiled humblebrag way of saying that I'm inventing blacksmithing which - to your great surprise I'm sure - I am not. More like polydidact (not to be confused with a polydactyl, which would be way cooler, but probably not nearly as cool as being an autodactyl, which, in my mind, is a category that includes Wolverine and Inspector Gadget) - trying to learn from everyone and everything except myself because I certainly have very little helpful advice to offer myself. 

Anyways, the good news is that at this point nothing is particularly holding me back in my shop! I've got the forge tuned pretty well (it's at least not oxidizing too terribly now), the anvil has a sexy stump to rest upon, the post vice is pretty well rooted, I've got the welder just about figured out so as to be useful, the floor is mostly level and satisfactorily covered in dirt but not made of it, and I've made a healthy array of tongs, bending forks, twisters, chisels, punches, drifts, slitters, etc. I don't mind saying that I've come a hell of a long way from where I started, and in fact it puts a smile on my face every time I see the place and how much it's filled out since the beginning. Plus look at all this stock material I've got lying about now!

Ok, it's not that impressive compared to some of the blacksmith's shops I've seen, but most blacksmiths have piles of metal that screw with airplane compasses and would make the most dedicated of hoarders blush and I will never be like that. Nope. Never.

Finishing the "build a forge" project and beginning the "make a living using your new forge" has been a challenging experience. This definitely didn't come as a surprise like, "Woah, what?! I thought starting a small business with no prior experience was supposed to be as easy as finding my belly button! Thanks Obama." It isn't as if I'm going into cobbling where as soon as your shop is set up the elves move in and start cranking out shoes (I'm pretty sure). Even still, I guess I had hoped I'd have more sooty, muscular shoulders to lean on by the time I reached this leg of the journey. Not that the COMAG crew et al aren't supremely helpful, but I feel like I can lean on them to the same degree that one might lean on one's proverbial neighbor for a hypothetical cup of sugar (but of course would never actually, I mean really metaphorical Safeway is just down the road). 

Being your own task master and teacher can be really frustrating sometimes. How do you gauge whether you're doing well for your skill level or if you're just not cut out for the job? How do you judge your technique and give tips to yourself? How do you give rousing motivational speeches to yourself when you're looking at the product of a whole day's labor and it's redefining ineptitude? Where do you draw the discipline to go back to work every day when you feel like you haven't been successful at anything for weeks? How can you tell if the pain you're in is normal or doctor-worthy? How do you discern when an expense is worth the investment and when you're trying to paper-mâché over your lack of experience with dollars?

Sometimes I think I wax a little too dramatical-like about the hardships of this admittedly self-inflicted project here, but then again the whole point of this blog is kind of a spillway for catharsis when Bucket is already working at capacity; yes, despite what I may have led you to believe with all my insightful and informative posts on such thrilling topics as charcoal and Papers I Have Made. 

Despite my struggle for objective clarity, I can tell just by looking at what I've made that I've made at least a little progress in the past few months. Hindsight is a better optometrist than the present for putting things in perspective.

Left - February sadness; Right - May gladness

I've gotten a lot better at planning, drawing, and measuring before acting, knowing what tools I'll need and how to use them, and knowing how to make the metal look like what I see in my head. I've also become a lot more realistic about my capabilities so early on in the game. I am not ready to forge very complicated things, and it has been really humbling to realize that the hard way. I've started to set much smaller goals for my days that end with products that might not be super exciting (e.g. Make Five Wall Hooks Today!) but that I can do successfully. When you don't have anyone around to give you feedback on your work, your work itself becomes a primary source of feedback. By tackling projects that are too difficult for me now, I'm making things that say, "You majorly suck at this. Probably you should be making sandwiches for people instead of this," all day long.

Making piles of basket hangers all day may not be as intellectually stimulating or challenging as pattern welded candelabras might be, but I've had to be more respectful of my emotional limitations when it comes to accepting abject failures as Valuable Learning Experiences.

A major motivator for me recently has been talking to a manager at a local garden center who said he'd buy such things as basket hangers and trellises from me if I brought them, so I have at least one market besides Etsy to lean on now! Which is great news as I am also celebrating my two-thousandth dollar spent on blacksmithing! Hooray!? Does it count as a business if it spends more money than it makes? Probably. For example, take my bank...PLEASE! *mic drop*

BLB

Nail Forge...ASSEMBLE

They say you can't make a cake without breaking a few eggs, and if that's true then I'm absolutely doing it right. I'm crackin' eggs like the rapture's hot on my tail. There's certainly something to be said for taking the scenic route on your way to a goal. You can learn a lot by asking yourself, "Can I figure out how to make this?" Unfortunately, it's easy to forget what you were doing in the first place while you agonize over a specific component.

Things have been a little up and down the past few days. I've finally successfully produced a batch of (EXTREMELY) concentrated water glass, which was a major confidence boost, and a big step forwards to getting a forge in place. In case you're curious, my efforts to make it from some local silicate didn't work out. At the last COMAG meeting, I talked to a lovely geologist and she told me I should hunt down some diatomite, which is a more rock-like form of diatomaceous earth and similarly composed of trillions of bitty critters of yesteryear. I then left town for a week and then it promptly dumped a foot and a half of snow on all my hopes and dreams. So I conceded to buying some flower drying silica from Michaels just so I could move forward with the project.

I've been throwing a lot of money at some of these miscellaneous projects like that, and it's become a little frustrating. Lots of DIY sites/YouTubers like to brag about how cheap it was for them to throw together something that would have cost them a pretty penny at a box store, but a lot of times they sidestep the cost of not being established and networked. They throw out things like, "I have these 5 lb sacks of silica gel lying around so I used them as..." or "I borrowed my buddy's welder to..." What starts as a $10 forge burner quadruples in price when you realize you don't have the tap you need to thread that one vital piece. It'd be nice if Bend had a tool library like Portland's.

Anyway, now that I have the water glass made up, I've spent about the whole day experimenting with it and the pumice I collected back in the fall. My goal today has been to make a nail forge. My Paw told me about this guy he met who was taking duplex nails and flattening them out into little swords. I thought that'd be a swell reason to make a forge in miniature to test some of the components I've been assembling.

So as I write this, I've got a tomato sauce can full of home-brewed refractory speed-curing in the oven. I made one earlier today which set up beautifully. A little too beautifully in fact - it practically melded to the tube form, and I ended up destroying it just trying to get it out. I took the advice of ye venerable internet and coated the form pieces with vegetable oil this time around, but so far this seems to be having the effect of making the water glass bubble into a sort of glass meringue. Probably I will not eat it.

Lord almighty, if our landlord could see what's going on in here right now, his head would probably explode. Anyhow, we'll see how this all shakes down (or at least I will - I realize that I may be the only one reading this anymore). Fingers crossed. Big money, no whammies.

BLB

Shopping Day

Well, today has been both productive and frustrating. I did manage to find a 1 lb. bottle of 100% lye right off the bat, and that will help a lot with the experimentation.

I have some leftover sodium carbonate that I made in the oven for my cyanotype project, and my pH test strips have clocked it at 11 (almost 12 even!), but I'm worried it won't be strong enough. I feel confident that the lye will work even if my homebrewed Na2CO3 doesn't. Four bucks was a little steep for such a small bottle, but worth it for the piece of mind...

Outside of that, I spent a lot of time wandering around different farm supply/hardware stores looking for perlite (without fertilizer, which is apparently impossible), diatomaceous earth, limestone, etc. to little avail. Lowes had this:

GREAT DEAL, RITE?!

I was pretty excited when I found it, but then I checked the ingredients.

I'm not totally sure, but I think this is too many things. Also, I'm no math expert, but those numbers don't seem to add up right. Anyway, I also found this pretty sweet shed at Lowes marked down from either $900 or $2300 depending on which of these you believe.

Wait...so it's...how much for what exactly?

If I had a place to put this, I feel like it would be stupid not to get it, but I guess not having the option has conveniently reduced the complexity of the problem for me!

Here's a quick look at some of the other fun things I picked up today!

This blower might end up proving too powerful for the forge, even with a damper flap, but it was only like $10, and will find a way to be useful for something.

By a stroke of luck, this package deal saved me a lot of money in brass.

No science project is complete without huge PVC gloves.

Stainless bowls and tools to get messy with.

That's all for now! A mercifully short update.

BLB