Fire and Steel
I fired up the forge in the
blacksmith shop the other day. I was trying to fashion a turnbuckle and swivel
contraption such that I could tether two goats to the same stake without them
being able to tangle their ropes.
I have an assortment of old steel
that I gathered from old farmsteads. Most of this steel were parts of old farm equipment
some time ago, vintage, late eighteen hundreds to the nineteen fifties. In fashioning
hinges, latches, hangers and suchlike from this old steel, I can at times retain
some of the original design of the steel and carry it into the new design I am constructing, thereby
incorporating some of the old beauty into the new functionality.
There is a challenge to this though, as
I don’t always know what other alloy metals have been added to the iron that make up
the ingredients of the particular piece of steel I choose. Metallurgists allay many different
metals into iron to give it different desired characteristics. Adding carbon, silicon,
manganese and a host of others at different proportions can change the
ductility, hardness and wearability considerably.
The consequence is that when I heat
up my selected steel, I never quite know how it will act. It may act quite
differently than any other.
But I heat it, and hammer it. Cool
it, and harden it. I heat, mold, and quench it. Then I hold it up for
inspection. I then crank the blower again. I get a hot fire, heat the steel up again,
to white orangeish hot, carry it to the anvil, pound some more; forge, forge,
forge, and then back to the fire.
And that’s what I did with this
piece of steel in making my goat tethering invention. In this case though there
was a little difference that gave me pause. When heated to forging temperature,
there appeared a bluish color to the flame that told me there was an unusual
metal in this alloy. I had to be prepared for surprises. Well, it forged fine
so I continued and in fact was very happy with the shape I coaxed it into.
Pleased with myself, I placed it
into my peg leg vise. I needed to give it one last little tweak of a twist and
I would be a happy craftsman indeed. So I twisted, but with the very unhappy consequence
of it shattering in my hand. By heating and pounding this particular piece of
steel in this manner, and quenching it to harden it, it indeed hardened, but it
also changed the crystalline structure so radically that the steel became brittle.
Disappointed, I gazed into the hot
bed of coals in the forge and mused a bit. That little blue flame was telling
me what kind of metal I had taken up. And it hadn’t been up to the job. It wasn’t
of the right kind of metal.
As I poked around in the coals this
thought came to mind;
As for
us, we walk in the furnace of life and am tried by fire. Will it make us
brittle and worthless or purify us into precious metal? We don’t know yet. The
Craftsman isn’t done. But into the fire and out again, we are forged into what
He wants.
Sure
hope I don’t shatter. I have to leave it at that though, I must hie into the house
for the dinner that calls, as the perfect roast just emerged from the hot oven.
Have a great day!
David Cools
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