Shop tips and tools: the reference page

A forge is a small number of expensive objects and a large number of cheap ones, and most of the cheap ones are made in the shop itself. Chisels, punches, bending forks, fullers and tongs are bars of steel shaped by the same operations they will later perform. This page collects the shop practice: which tool comes first, where the anvil stands, what color the heat must be, and what finish a working tool deserves.

Which tool has to be made first?

Tongs hold what the hand cannot, and a classical Jewish text, the Pirkei Avot, makes them a creation puzzle: since a smith needs tongs to hold the iron while making a new pair, the first pair must have been created by God, after the rest of the seventh day. Tongs were known to the ancient Egyptians, wood first and then bronze bars from as early as 3000 BC, and a wall painting from 1450 BCE shows a crucible carried between two metal bars. Blacksmith tongs pivot close to the jaws, the geometry that suits hard, heavy stock. Until the skill to make a proper pair arrives, heavy locking pliers hold the work, and the way tongs fit the work is its own subject.

The hammer that forges the hammer

The clearest case of a tool making itself is the cross-peen hammer head. The smith starts with a bar roughly the diameter of the intended face. The handle hole is punched, then drifted, widened by driving a larger tool through it. The head is cut with a wedge; the peen is drawn out to a wedge; the face is dressed by upsetting, hammered shorter and thicker until it spreads to size. A rougher second hammer earns its place: engineer’s hammers carry softer faces meant for striking cold metal, and using one on a cold chisel spares the face of the good hammer. The heaviest blows once took two people, a striker answering the smith’s small tapping hammer with a sledge, a role powered hammers have been absorbing ever since.

Where the anvil stands, and what it holds

The anvil sits as close to the forge as convenience allows, generally no more than one step away, because every extra step is heat lost from the work. The traditional base was a hardwood log or timber buried several feet into the shop floor, and later bases ranged from cast iron, which added stabilizing weight, to I-beam sections, steel drums of oil-saturated sand chosen for damping, and fabricated tripods. The anvil body anchors tooling: the square hardy hole holds hardy tools, among them shop-made bending forks, while the round pritchel hole serves mostly for punching. Where no anvil is to be had, lengths of railroad rail have stood in for amateur work.

Why a chisel gets turned on its side

The seven basic operations a smith can perform on a bar, as the Wikipedia article on the blacksmith lists them, are drawing, shrinking, bending, upsetting, swaging, punching and forge welding. Drawing a bar out makes it longer, but the metal also spreads sideways, and uncontrolled spread ruins the width. So the smith working a chisel blank turns it on its side and hammers it back down, upsetting it just enough to hold the width, then draws again. Thick stock draws faster under a fuller: indentations hammered across the piece leave wave-shaped ridges, and flattening those ridges with the hammer face forces the metal to lengthen far faster than flat blows alone.

What color is the right heat?

Iron announces its temperature by glowing: red first, then orange, then yellow, finally white, and most forging happens at the bright yellow-orange that indicates forging heat. The shop wants lighting that is consistent but not too bright, and never direct sun, so the colors stay readable. Fuels range from coal, coke and charcoal to propane, natural gas and oil, with oxyacetylene gear for localized heating and induction gaining ground; the page about the forge fire returns to each of them. A reducing fire, hot at the heart and low in oxygen, matters most for welding. Near welding heat a smith can probe the joint with a thin steel wire: when the wire sticks, a small weld has formed and the temperature is right.

A short finish, and the rules in writing

Finishing scales with purpose. A jig the smith will use a few times gets the minimum: a rap on the anvil to break off scale and a pass with a wire brush. Files bring a piece to final shape, and heat treatment or case-hardening sets hardness where a tool will cut or strike. Paint, varnish, bluing, browning, oil and wax are for work that leaves the shop. United States standard 1910.133 requires eye and face protection around flying particles and molten metal, and 1910.252 requires combustibles moved or guarded during welding and cutting, extinguishing equipment kept ready, and a fire watch for at least half an hour after the hot work ends. The rest belongs to training at someone’s elbow, and this journal invents nothing there.

Read one tool backwards

Take down a chisel, a bending fork or a pair of tongs and read it backwards: find the punched hole, the drawn taper, the upset shoulder, the weld if there is one, and list the operations in the order they were likely done. Then sketch the next tool the shop needs at full scale, mark the hole it must fit and the face it must meet, and keep the list beside the drawing before any steel goes into the fire.

Reference note: the English Wikipedia article on the blacksmith is the general encyclopedia entry for the trade. It sets out the seven basic forging operations, the materials sorted by carbon content, the striker’s role, forge welding, finishing, and a history running from the Hittites to Wayland Smith. The page carries a notice that it needs more citations, reason to check its figures.