Between the hammer and the anvil...

June 15, 2007 7:57 PM

A birthday present for someone into blacksmithing?

This individual is very hard to shop for, because the only recent interest of his that I know of is blacksmithing. He built his own gas furnace recently. A real engineering, DIY, tweaker type. Any thoughts what I might be able to get him from, say, $100-200-300 that would help him with his hobby?

posted by Blazecock Pileon to shopping (6 comments total)

This is cool and not something he'd be likely to buy for himself right away - it's used for pounding out ladle and spoon shapes from heated metal. Here are some more swages.

You can never have enough nice hammers.
posted by davey_darling at 8:09 PM on June 15, 2007

Yeah, swages, hammer and tongs, plus a hardie.
posted by X4ster at 8:34 PM on June 15, 2007

This is going to sound corny, but maybe a chestnut sapling and some nicely done up Longfellow?
posted by pupdog at 6:26 AM on June 16, 2007

Take a look around Anvilfire.com
Blacksmith's depot was listed above, also check out Pieh Tool Company and the HIGHLY recomended Centaur Forge. Perhaps one of the many strange Peddinghaus hammers listed there?
posted by agentofselection at 2:08 PM on June 16, 2007

protective leathers
posted by Max Power at 3:25 PM on June 16, 2007

Blacksmiths used to gauge temperature by color, and steel mills used to have special employees who monitored streams of molten metal for the (absolutely essential) proper temperature the same way.

Those steelworkers often retired in their forties or early fifties barely able to distinguish light and dark, they had cooked their retinas so bad, and they had a very much higher risk of cataracts, too. I don't know of comparable information for blacksmiths, but glassblowers and enamel artists are much more subject to lens cataracts than the general population, and the culprit seems to be IR radiation for all these problems.

So I would consider getting him a good pair of IR blocking glasses, and maybe a thermocouple gauge to measure his furnace and work temperatures.
posted by jamjam at 4:21 PM on June 16, 2007