What if you need to make your own weapon? Can you do it on your own? This is one of the skills for men that is very important, especially when there’s an emergency. Blacksmithing is a great skill that a man should know. You might say, well, there are a lot of stores that sell weapons. But why not give it a try?
Work Your Body
Men are best when they work physically. Great skills are those that work both the mind and the body. Here are some of the basics on blacksmithing.
Heating
This is the first stage in making a weapon. You cannot shape your bar stock (the metal), if you don’t heat it up. So, to build fire you need wood or charcoal. The heating needs to reach 700 degrees in order to shape metal.
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Shaping
You need tools when shaping. Here are the different tools and their functions for blacksmithing:
- The anvil: This is a heavy steel iron block, on which metal can be hammered and shaped. An anvil has two holes on it, the pritchel and the hardy (hardie). The pritchel is used for punching through a piece of metal for the slug to go to after you finish a piece. The hardy holds cool tools. It can hold a number of them like the V-block that is used to put a bend and/or making curvature on the bar stock. It can also hold a swage in putting an edge on the bar stock, or in making a notch in a piece of flat bar stock. Another feature of an anvil is the horn (the pointy part at the back side) that is mainly used for curving metal.
- The hammer: Blacksmithing cannot be complete without the hammer. This is used in pounding the heated metal.
- The forge: In the old fashioned way, they used charcoal and wood to build a fire, but now, there is an easier way to heat the metal. Forges require fuel and air. Small forges are better because you’ll need a lot of heat, so if heat is in a small space you can make the most out of it.
- Tongs, vises, and clamps: They are needed to hold your work. There are also different sizes of tongs that can hold different shapes of metal.
In shaping metal, you also need to know about the fundamental ways to pound the metal into shape. Drawing out, upsetting and peining are the fundamental steps in shaping your metal.
Indeed, blacksmithing is a really tough job. It requires a lot of skill and strength to be able to get the metal into shape. It’s really a manly thing to do; it can even save your life down the line, when chaos takes over the world.
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