This is a very early attempt at Blacksmithing on my part, it is something we have recently started experimenting with at Re-Enactment meetings now that the forge is fully functional. We use charcoal as fuel and force air into this to make it burn hotter with a hand cranked blower.

Here is a picture of the forge in use:



We first started by making up some Viking style tent pegs for our period tents as a little extra touch of authenticity for our encampment. I have some pictures of this, ideally I would like some additional process photos, hard to remeber to take photos when pounding hot metal.

Hopefully the tent pegs will eventually get their own article either for here or for the Hodegon newsletter, I may just link to the article on this site since this is basically a group activity, but it is a project I am involved in



The Fire Striker started of as an experiment to see if I could do anything with those decking spikes that were purchased to make rivets from but proved to not be very useful, several 203mm lengths of some rather hard steel alloy had to be useful for something, why not heat them up and see if they could be pounded into something useful. but first I had to leave them in the forge for the plating to burn off while we had a coffee break.

A refresher pic for those that havent seen the decking spikes:



For those that don't know a fire striker is the steel component of a 'flint and steel' tinder box. It is a hand gripped impliment used to hit against the edge of a piece of flint and make sparks the sparks are aimed at an easily flamable substance such as chared cloth once it starts to smolder a bit of blowing produced a flame not unlike a match, this can then be used to light things. There is a real knack to it but once one gets the technique right it becomes a viable way to make flame.

In order to make a good amount of sparks a square edge seems to help, this also make it quite a good tool for scraping the junk off horns. To do this I needed the nails to be a square bar instead of a round rod, this was the first part and took far longer than the actual shaping. Below is a picture of a squared off nail, it still looks vaguely nail like, a bit more work on the one I actually used had it looking like a little square bar in no time.



After actually getting it square, hitting it around the horn of the anvil curved the sides in, and then it was a case of adjusting the curve and hitting it flat again on the face of the anvil until it was pretty much right before quenching.

Its pretty rough, but I am fairly happy how it turned out at this point. It now does not look like a nail at ant rate, nice spot of re-cycling



Some research on various blacksmithing sites around the net seem to indicate that grinding the striking surface clean and making sure it is square (on square style strikers) will improve performance. I have had this done, and here is the photograph:



I may need to heat in in the forge again and re-quench to get a bit of a bluing effect on the surface again, don't know if shiney is quite right, the roughness has its charms and the shineyness dosen't sit too well with this.

I'd like to taper the ends some and try to make a fancy little curls in the handle section of the next one when I use one of the other decking spikes.



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Article last updated 23/05/2004