It's just a moment. (Patreon)

It's a lot harder than woodwork because hot iron is a plastic material. It's very malleable, so whatever you do to it has unintended effects. Hit a piece to make it flatter and you also make it wider. Make a piece thinner and you also make it longer. This isn't like wood, where you can do one operation and have the rest of the piece stay the same. Plane the surface of a wooden beam and the rest of the beam is unchanged. I never realized how convenient rigid materials are. 

Anyway, I suck at smithing.  It's fine. I've learned a lot of things in my life and I'm comfortable with being bad while I put in the time. 

I smith at a local club. You throw a few bucks in the beer fund and the experienced smiths will show you stuff. They're basically teaching a class every week for no pay.  

But how can I describe balcksmiths as a group? Prickly and standoffish? Maybe a bit. There's also just the nature of the open-forge sessions I go to. Any random person can show up. You get kids and grandparents, middle-aged ladies. Kind of everybody. TV shows like Forged in Fire have made smithing very hip. Everyone wants to bang on some hot metal. Most of them only come out once or twice. 

So I can't blame the smiths for being a little reserved. You don't really engage with people until you know if they have some game. You also want to know they're going to stick around and put in the work. Until then, why bother? 

So, even though everyone is perfectly polite, I've felt kind of on the outside for the 3 months I've been smithing. People are warming up to me, but it's a slow process. I'm a pretty friendly guy and I'm used to integrating with other craftspeople pretty fast. But this is a new craft. These guys aren't woodworkers. Any let's be honest: being able to take a red-hot piece of steel and beat it into any shape you want with nothing but a hammer and your own muscle, well that might give you some enlarged gonads. You might feel just the tiniest bit superior towards people who don't even have the basics down. It's understandable. 

But I know how to handle this: keep showing up, work hard, ask lots of questions. Wait. 

And then, last week, something happened. The other smiths were taking apart the power-hammer. It hasn't worked in years. Needs a bit of a rebuild. 

The machine obviously used to run on a line-shaft. There's an enormous pulley and a flat belt that disappears up into the rafters. You can't really see what powers the thing and I was curious. While they were taking a break, asked one of them, "Hey, what do you guys have powering this thing?"

He said, "Oh, it's just an AC motor. And it's we."

I thought I misheard him. "I'm sorry, Mike, what did you say?"

He took a bite of his burrito and said: "It's an AC motor, and it's 'we,' not 'you guys.' You're a member of this club. It's we."

It was a little thing, and I don't mean to make too much of it, but I went back to the totally mediocre tongs I was making and worked a little harder, a little more carefully. I worked like I had a tiny bit more reason to stick around. 

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.