THE FORGE

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Issue # 178 - February/March 2000

by John Vivian

The Village Blacksmith (redacted)

Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;...

Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,...

Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Alas both the village smithy and the spreading chestnut tree are gone, done in by what passed for progress in its day but sounds depressingly familiar in this one. Industrial mechanization replaced a thousand smithies "large and sinewy hands" with a single water-powered trip hammer, while a blight, unwittingly imported with expanded global trade, decimated the proud chestnut to a few stump sprouts. Along with these disappeared the tinsmiths, whitesmiths, cutlers, coopers and a dozen more metal trades of our handcrafted, preindustrial past. And, in this writer's view, along with the handworking trades went much of the attitude of sturdy, independent self-reliance that made America great.

Yet, the very idea of working metal leaves most of us as cold as the steel itself. Few of us are brought up anymore realizing that we have the latitude to form metal; metal has become the exclusive medium of the mass manufacturer. Odd, this, since any country person who maintains a house and barn learns basic woodworking,. like it or not. Granted, warm once-living wood is intuitively more inviting than cold, unyielding metal. But the fact is you work metal the same as you work wood, only metals are harder. The processes of measuring, cutting, fitting, fastening and finishing are essentially the same, whether you're building a wooden potato-storage crate or a sheet-metal maple-sap evaporating tray. You need different tools and techniques is all.

It's a major step in genuine country self-sufficiency to become as much of a metalsmith as time, talent, cash and inclination allow.

METALS

Metal is classified as either ferrous (or ferrum in Latin), which means it contains iron, nonferrous or precious. Nonferrous metals include copper and its alloys - brass and bronze - plus aluminum and its alloys. All are softer than iron and its alloys - gray iron, wrought iron and malleable iron - and the many types of steel. (We won't get into the precious metals here.)

Around the farm we use copper, lead and aluminum in sheets for roof flashing around chimneys and in roof valleys to keep water out of the house; in a few shop uses, such as forming copper plate into jaws for the vise to hold scratchable chrome-plate and polished metal; and in specialty nail, and bolts.

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