IronFest 2003

Here are a few photos with comments from IronFest 2003, held in Grapevine TX May 30th - Jun 1st, 2003. This report represents only a portion of what I saw at IronFest....and it is therefore far from a complete summary. -- Scott Little

The major demonstrators were:

Toby Hickman

Susan Hutchison

Mark Pearce

William Roan

Here's Toby Hickman explaining one of the finer points of die-making.   Toby did a lot of power-hammer work and talked a lot about how to use dies to speed up production smithing projects.

Susan Hutchison is a very capable smith.  She demonstrated a nice forge weld (in the rectangular frame that's in the fire) and then showed some of the techniques used to produce the wonderful curlicues and "squiggles" that often adorn her work.

But this guy, Mark Pearce, got the majority of my attention.  Mark is a British smith who learned smithing in British trade school and then apprenticed with a master smith doing restoration work on stately British homes and then attended the reknowned COSIRA school for blacksmithing.  Man does he know his stuff!

He started with a pair of square-stock tongs and got them nicely completed in about an hour...while talking constantly about the process and showing off all the stages.

Here Mark is splitting open the jaw with a chisel to create the "socket" that holds one corner of the square stock.

Here are the finished tongs holding a piece of 1/2" square stock.   Interestingly Mark didn't make any efforts to create the usual offset in the pieces where they cross each other.  He simply twisted the completed tongs until the jaws and reins were lined up properly.   The result is that the hinge itself is slightly twisted w.r.t. the operating plane of the tongs...a very simple solution to a sometimes-troublesome problem in tong-making.

Then came The Forge Weld.

Have you ever read the passages in those old British blacksmithing books where they talk about forge welding as if it was a simple, reproducible process that results in perfect joining of the pieces?  Well Mark Pearce was like a living page out of one of those books.    His demonstration of forge welding was simply astounding.  Without using any flux, he welded two pieces of 1/2" square stock together and dressed the weld down so nicely that it....well, just look at it:

I made sure that this welded piece got into the auction Saturday night and bought it for $25.  The auctioneer got a big kick out of me paying that much for a 3' long piece of 1/2" square stock.....he just didn't appreciate what had gone into it.   I'll bring it to the next Balcones Forge meeting and show it off.

Next Mark made a decorative horse head.  He used 1/2" square stock, flattened the end to form the mane, then folding the bar back upon itself and forge welded it together to form a mass sufficient for the head.   After forming the snout and punching in the nostrils and eyes, and chiseling in the mouth and eyebrows, he used a hacksaw to slit the mane into about 10 straight blades.

Here he's forging one of the mane "blades" to a point.  Because of the general curve of the mane, he was able to pry out each blade in turn, forge it to a point and then curl it into final position.

Here he's curling one of the pointed mane parts into position.

And this is the beautiful finished product.

I regret that I had to leave Grapevine early Sunday morning and therefore did not get to see what Mark Pearce did Sunday morning.  Rumor has it that he attempted to break his existing record of making a ram's head in 13 minutes!  Can anybody fill me in?

Somehow I never made to any of William Roan's demonstrations... that's really the only bad thing about IronFest....you can't be in 4 places at once!

Finally, here's our own John Crouchet extoling the virtures of the flypress (using his nicely-restored Republic #2) in the public demonstration area (which was in the shade this time!).  Gerald Pollard and Mark Pearce were among the spellbound spectators.

The thing that impressed me most about it was the way it shoved his nice-looking "2003" date stamp into hot iron.

A deep, perfect impression every time....far superior to any hammer-blow stamping I've ever seen.