Tim's Motorcycle Diaries: blacksmithing

I've been wanting to refamiliarize myself with metal work for some time. I don't like farming out work that I'm capable of doing myself and there was a point early in my working life when I was welding weekly as part of my millwright apprenticeship, but I haven't joined metal in over three decades. It's amazing how the time flies when quantum cyber research gets in the way.

Finding opportunities to develop these DIY technical skills in Canada where people don't like to DIY is a challenge. The only welding courses I could find were full-bore certificate courses for professionals, but then my wife found the Haliburton School of Art & Design. HSAD takes place in Haliburton, which you'll have heard about on TMD before because it's one of my favourite places to go for a ride in Ontario. It's also only about three hours from home.

HSAD offers piles of course options ranging from visual arts to technical crafts. If you're reading this you'll probably be interested in the blacksmithing course, not necessarily for the smithing but because it offers you access to expert metal workers in a fully tooled shop that will make you hands-on familiar with not only the hot forging of metal but also various other related technologies such as welding, grinding, polishing and plasma cutting. The three of us went up for the week with me doing the smithing, my son glass blowing and my wife water colour painting.

We were asked to bring a project, but what you really need to do for this is to start amassing ideas so when you're in the forge you've got a list to go after, that way you're not wasting time in front of a hot forge wondering what to do next. I showed up with my copy of the Rudge Book of the Road and an idea to build a metal sculpture of the line art in the front of the book.

My blacksmithing experience consists of an afternoon, so I thought this would take me the week, but by the end of day one I'd already worked out the rider in hot steel and started worrying that I'd run out of project.

I figured getting handy with welding would take a some time, but I forgot to take into account technological progression. Back in the day (in the late 1980s) when I was learning how to weld it was all stick (and no MIG carrot). It took about 15 minutes for Amie to talk me through the MIG process and ten minutes later I was tacking pieces together to get my layout right. No sparking a rod to see where you are either with modern instantly darkening welding helmets. Early efforts at joining pieces were messy but by Thursday I was knocking together pieces at will with clean welds. It's now just a matter of practice to get back to a point where my joins are a point of pride.

Monday was a real hot-box with temps in the mid-thirties. In the forge it was well into the forties and I was drenched when I left. I should have shown up with better heat management methods and was very dehydrated when I left. I recovered as best I could overnight. The next morning I was still not feeling well but got myself in, got a handle on welding and put the rest of the design together.

I woke up Wednesday properly sick with the mother of all summer colds, but the only thing I needed to do to finish was the rider's scarf. With a bit more hot forming of steel and welding I had my 1920s art deco styled Rudge metalwork sculpture done.

On a side note - the propane forges aren't very big and don't work for long, complicated pieces, but the shop had dual coal forges with four working sides in the back room that let you heat longer pieces. The only trick with the coal forge is that it can get so hot it'll burn the steel (which looks like sparklers when it goes). The propane forges are set to not get that hot, but the coal forge can, so in addition to feeding the beast you also have to be careful it doesn't burn your steel. I ended up leaving the scarf in too long and it burned through at the back, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing as I wasn't able to create the creases I was looking for in the ends. After burning it in half I was able to make the creases and weld the two sides back together, making it better than it would have been otherwise.

Old school, but it does offer some advantages along with some challenges...

I then got a primer on how the grinding room worked. The temperatures were dropping from Monday but when you're wearing face protection, a leather apron, long trousers, steel toe boots, leather gloves and a respirator, it's hot anyway. Even with all that and feeling right rotten I enjoyed getting a feel for grinding and cleaning up finished pieces. I get the sense that grinding is another one of those hands-on skills that can go surprisingly deep.

The end result was hung outside and I got given a spray on chemical that would prevent it from rusting while showing off the ground metal finish.

The finished piece looked so nice I got a clean image of it and then updated the logo on the site with it, and began the process of moving away from TMD logos focused on what I'm riding at the moment.

Amie Botelho was our instructor and she is all about hands-on learning. Most mornings we
did a 15-20 minute demo of tools and techniques that you could immediately find a use for. Any time you needed other equipment you'd do one on one safety and how-to training and be let at it. On the forge (and everywhere else in the shop) Amie is incredibly efficient and that teaches you all sorts of lessons if you watch closely.

It isn't about how hard you hit, it's about how efficiently you get get hot steel out of the forge and under the hammer. It's also about turning your project over and looking at it closely as you work it. Smithing isn't about brute force, it's about attention and precision, but watching a master smith do it is infinitely better than reading about it in a book or hearing someone drone on about it in in a lecture.

Every demo was immediately followed by the suggestion to 'just do it', complete with lots of support in a class of 16 from Amie and shop-tech John. But the best part is that most of the 'students' are actually experienced smiths themselves. The ones around me had all done the four month certificate program at Fleming, so you're surrounded with experienced metal workers who are very free with support and advice (if you want it - you're left to your own devices if that's your jam).

If you're looking to hone your metalworking skills, or want to jumpstart them from scratch, this is a great place to start. Just make sure you show up with lots of ideas if you don't want to be cranking out spoons and bottle openers all week (unless that's your jam) - they're totally open to whatever you want to tackle. We had students working on everything from building a barrel forge of their own involving big industrial pieces, to yard art metal work using the small stuff. Those experienced smiths in many cases were churning out all the smithing they needed for the year. One told me he'd make the $700 fee for attending for the week every day in what he was producing, making it well worth the cost.

Why come at it like this? Canada being Canada makes it very difficult for you to do things like forging or doing metal work on your own property without hanging you out to dry with insurance and infinite municipal, provincial and federal paperwork. Coming at it this way gives you access to a full service metal shop with all the tech and consumables, and with the safety and insurance challenges all taken care of. The bonus is you also get to hang with an interesting group of like-minded DIYers for the week, which is worth the price of admission alone.

The bandsaws looked like they were older than I am, and I'm feeling old this week!

Once I had the Rudge line art metalwork done I had a go at plasma cutting. I was originally thinking of making a variation on the Isle of Man TT trophy, but symmetrical wings are well out of my wheelhouse without more practice, so I turned it into an absurd door stop with a vaguely Honda theme.