Forging with ALEC STEELE: Hammer Technique, How To Forge for the First Time

Description

In this episode I went to see Blacksmith Alec Steele so he could give me some tips on forging for beginners. Not only did Alec teach me how to forge, but he also went through Hammer Technique, and by the end I learnt how to forge a flint striker!

Check out ALEC STEELE: https://www.youtube.com/alecsteele

Real Engineering Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jQ4y0LK1kY&t=2s

I've always admired Blacksmith's, and being a Blacksmith is something I have often thought of getting into. But as I am a complete beginner, I needed some help so I could learn how to forge. So I thought who better to ask then Alec Steele? Alec has an incredible knowledge about blacksmithing, and he has built up quite the fanbase on his epic youtube channel!

For this first blacksmith project, we were going to forge a flint striker which I could use for Bushcraft when lighting a natural tinder bundle such as dried grass. The way you light a fire by flint and steel is to use a steel striker, and strike it down onto a piece of flint whilst holding a piece of char cloth on top of the flint. Although the technique is not primitive technology as such, it is an old fire lighting technique that has been used for hundreds of years.

I stayed with Alec for a couple of days and together he is helping me make a Bushcraft knife! Keep an eye out for the episode coming soon.

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Tags: forging,alec steele,forging for beginners,blacksmith,hammer,forge,forging a flint striker,how to forge,blacksmith projects,forging projects,blacksmithing,bushcraft,survival,knife,bushcraft knife,natural tinder,steel striker,primitive technology,TA Outdoors,fire,iron,steel,survival knife,bear grylls,blacksmith forge

Video Transcription

tá outdoors I'm here at Alex Steel's workshop Alec thanks very much fun thank you so much for coming it's great to be in your video it's just as incredible his workshop as it is in his videos I'll pop a link to Alex channel in the video description below for those of you that are watching I've never done blacksmithing before at all we're changing that today I've done absolutely nothing so for you beginners out there this is going to be a really sort of informative basic tip video on blacksmithing here's a quick snippet before Alec does [Music]

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so first things first so you need to be able to heat up your steel blacksmithing is all about taking metal heating it up to the point that it's hot and malleable and then hitting it when it is on malleable first things first we've got to get stuff hot this is a propane fire Forge you have to refer to it as a gas forge what happens is propane comes through this line it gets shot out of a very small jet this gap here on the choke control seam out of an air but then gets sucked in so that makes it very hot flame heats up this entire thing means that if we can put the steel in it and get it hot enough to hit with a hammer move arrows the hitting big pieces of steel it don't really need to be this complex with heating up mr. steel you can have a much smaller propane or gas forge you can even use coke you can use coal these are very very often used in forges you supply an air-blast into it that extra air brings you the oxygen that means that the coke or the coal gets hot enough to actually heat up the metal you're aiming for like 1,400 degrees Celsius so it's some serious serious Heat

you can also use charcoal that you can make yourself and if you're you know if you're into bushcrafting you're probably pretty aware of how to actually make your own charcoal from wood that you can even find yourself the next thing to think about is something to hit upon this is an anvil this is a 51 kilo about 110 hundred and fifteen pound cast steel Brooks London pattern anvil this is a very kind of traditional shape of an ball right here you got a one single form here this is the heel of the animal here's your Hardy haul this is a pretty or hole these allowed what kind of tooling options and an anvil looks pretty confusing if you're new to it or it looks like you really need every bit of it the reality is the most important thing about an animal is that it is heavy it is securely mounted and it's not gonna dent too much when you hit it with hot metal because that's the key remember is you're mostly hitting a hot metal onto the anvil not hard things that means and if you wanted to get cracking you can take just a lump of mild steel like this you can set this in the ground on the ground and you can sit here and you can use this as an anvil in the dirt sat on the dirt it'll work you can put this in a routed hole in a stump epoxies the thing in there and bring it to a little bit better of a working height about knuckle height and you can work on just a piece of round steel it just wants to be heavy

it wants to be securely mounted ideally you can get away with something a lot simpler than a normal animal of course we need something to hit and a hammer is very very important for that and again a hammer you don't have to do too crazy with the complexities of the thing this is a rounding hammer that I made but a simple lump hammer that you're gonna find from the hardware store that people used to drive masonry chisels it's gonna be just completely adequate in the two and a half to three and a half pound you're going to be flying and you'll be able to be pretty much everything that it is that we're going to be doing here today tongs and all of this equipment that you see around me machining equipment how I hammers this big equipment but the great thing about blacksmithing is you can really really start from very little and slowly build your way up in terms of the tooling are you ready to get cracking start hammering on some metal let's do it great you go there we go tilt it forward more yep there you go beautiful Hey now a little cold so we're gonna heat it back up nice nice nice keep working on the end of the material and then just come like this and give it a slight little kind of slight little Peck right there to straighten it the more give you a little bit of a rundown about how it is that I like to hold the hammer I like to have the hammer held kind of you know a couple inches away from the head or so sometimes lower down sometimes close to the head it gives me lots of good control I'm holding the hammer slightly in my fingertips I was noticing you work having a little more kind of stuck into your palm

it doesn't quite give you the control to be able to adjust your angle to a very fine degree and in your fingertips much like a percussionist when they swing their drumstick they can use their fingers to whip it back down you want to be doing the same with your hammer blow you're gonna get tired with it and the reason you're getting tired is likely because you're not having the confidence to hit hard enough to let the anvil bounce it back because the animal is gonna give you a lot of the blow back and it's gonna take away 75% of the lifting of the hammer in addition when our hammer is out here we're putting a lot of rotational force on our risk however when it bounces off the anvil right you can let that hammer come straight above the point of rotation at your wrist which means that it's a lot easier to lift up like this you're not talking your wrists and tiring out your forearm because as soon as it hits that hammer is in a vertical position putting a lot less leverage on your wrist making it a lot easier to lift up so the key really is you relaxed to the point that you swing hard enough that you get the bounce back to lift the hammer up in a way that's not kind of talking on yourself quite so much gonna keep that material level so that we're on the shoulder perfect here we go Full Tilt there we go outstanding you guys very nice so now what we want to do is we wanna straighten it all out I can't turn rotate the bar 90 degrees and come in just like this it's a fishtail to the flat side of your hammer you're gonna need to tilt it back down so that you match the angle perfect and then you shake it back like this okay now we rotated 180 degrees but as you do you want to be taking note of any events using a justice serving others absolutely

so now

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lighten up I'm just trying to establish a nice kind of clean surface what we can do to help us give it a brush here and you just want to gently Pat across it now we're gonna measure it we see we've got about the length that we want yep so we good you just have another look at it we want to just make it as clean as possible I'm gonna measure off three inches

we're gonna make a mock where that is yeah thank you good oh we got a problem check that out we have a crack running all the way down here this is oh one tool steel so it's a high carbon steel and it's pretty pre susceptible to getting damaged with like overheating and stuff like that sorry not too critical or not too much of a problem because she's gonna cut that off and we're gonna get back to this step and then you can kind of continue on

now turn her over 180 degrees but come to the near side of the animal and we're gonna go right about cha and smack her down we're about there on off off follow the tailor then turn it upside down and as you do it see what you've got a hip see where the high points are that you need to have your do you want to really examine it and ask yourself what do you need to do to bring that closer in absolutely correct lovely that's looking that needs a little bit more work probably guys we've got it back in the forward I had no idea really quite how intricate you have to be with a hammer because it's not although it seems like a fairly simple tool Alec's been telling me that there's different little angles of stuff that you can do just help tweak the metal because it's quite difficult isn't it [Music]

it's a constant balance between hitting really really hard yeah and then hitting really really gently and then having to do the both at the exact same time it can it can get a little bit difficult it's it's a real skill to learn it is it's I hope to find people find it a little more difficult than they initially thought oh definitely I agree just take building the muscle memory taking it more and more and you pick it up and also have noticed you don't really know you you don't take into account how much your other hand that's supporting the steel with the tongs how much you need to be aware of it because we focus so much on the hammer you're not really focusing on the angle they're still on the anvil itself so it must to think about but that's all part of the fun let's just explain what giving it the brush does so when we're heating it up so you see all these flaky bits that happen on the surface that occur on the surface that's essentially rust it's iron oxide because it's so hard it reacts with the oxygen really really fast and but it doesn't become part of the steel when you hammer it in so you often want to get it off of there so that you're not putting divots into the metal so it's tweaking this bit yeah just give a little tweak now just flatten it off nice and cleanly right then another little tweak and straighten and then now we're gonna be ready to cut that off and then we can start bending it oh there we go now you can take a pair of tongs and break it off wanna hit cut there we go cool so now we're gonna flip it around just clean up this end here there we go and a hammer over the edge yep keep going go go go go go okay now with this left hand drop this left hand as you hammer but still you see you're hammering at this angle here come over like this drop in if you drop and if you drop and it keeps up and lighter lighter lighter lighter lighter keep dropping this that's more curved is we've just been working like this it's difficult to work all the way under like this yeah instead however we can turn that around and work like this okay wonderful that tenant sideways have a look at it wouldn't you know that have a look at material so to make that bend you were using these tongs here which fit on that little flat stock but now as we flip this around there's no way these are gonna hold on to it so now you can take these bad boys right here hold on them in sideways I'm going to do the same thing on the other side end it around same again cut all that little tippy tip there and there we go strike over the edge outstanding you see it's still twisting that over so you need to cover like that with your hammer now a way that we can now close it over yeah is if we let it straight on top of any so I see you can now just cinch it straight down a little bit see what we need to do it should stay there someone's done that that curve needs to come across more okay it may be hitting it further down something that we could do is if you heat up just this end here yeah you can take this like that as I pop it down on here get it closer to this exactly look if you just clamp this like this okay boom we can regrip that no problem and then now you can give you that light glowed like a little bit by little bit no now let's good have a look at it yeah it's a little better down here but we need to open that up yeah so if you change the grip back to how it is that we were initially gripping it [Music]

believe it see much yep that's pretty much I'm quite happy that great next heat we're gonna go into device I'm gonna straighten it out with a pair of tongs [Music]

look at that that looks like a that looks like a pretty striking to me it does yeah I'm pretty pleased so we're gonna let it cool down and then we're gonna grime it and then we can heat treat it so guys there's my finished striker hope you can see that they're curled up the edges just like Alex won and speaking to him now I need to head over to the grinder just to get through that oxide layer so I can get to the steel itself so you're gonna be using this this is a belt grinder I'm gonna start off with a sixty grit belt this is going to be cost enough to take down the bulk of the material that we need to take down until it - true steel true metal past the oxides we're gonna run this thing really really fast very loud so you're gonna want to make sure that we wear a respirator to filter out all that dust it doesn't end up in your lungs so that's now gonna get put in the Forge we're gonna heat it up till it's red that's often called critical temperature it's where it becomes non-magnetic cooling it down very rapidly pinch my ears off battle then harden the steel and for some reason flint strikers like to be hard metal so we're gonna harden it alright so what you're gonna do is you're gonna take it with the tongs into the oil shake it up and down slightly but make sure it always stays below right so now they've hardened it I'm gonna take this hot piece of steel you can just drop that right on there we're gonna conduct the heat from the hot piece of steel into the cold piece of steel we're gonna bring it up to about 250 300 degrees Celsius this is gonna give it a nice temper so after hardening it's SuperDuper brittle yeah it's hard but it's brittle okay here we're gonna retain a decent amount of that hardness but we're gonna give it toughness and the ability to flex and not break by tempering it make sure you guys check out there's an awesome video on my channel and also real engineering's channel that kind of shows this stuff a little better go check it out guys link in the description but what's gonna happen is is we're swimming to see the colors change on this piece it'll start off as a light straw and then it'll become a dark purple and then we're gonna cool it off in the oil but you can see the blue color now look how beautiful that looks so now beautiful blue color we can now put it in the oil stop the demo so guys here is the finished article let me put my hand behind it so you can see it let me know what you think first that's the first thing I've ever forged in my life steel striker

same as Alex with those curves if you want to see Alex one go and check out his youtube channel but obviously we've got to give it a test so we've got a bit Flint here

she picked from the ground by Alec just now on his bike so there we go look at that as said in Alex video all you need now is a bit of tinder and you can get a fire going that's insane and Alex Steele and Alex Steele still know are you talking about that's your that is mine indeed today go guys that is how you forge your own steel striker Alec thanks so much well that's been my pleasure having you here I'm back here tomorrow it's a much bigger project oh yeah [Music]

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[Applause]

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can't you think go what you told me don't know what of it was true now the smoke is cleared and I see but all that sitting there with fancy paper and I pretty face my seemed a lot more and safer once I [Music]