Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.

org [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this episode, Producer Randy Cadwell takes us to Itasca State Park for a class and a conference with the Northern Minnesota Metalsmiths.

This event is the spring conference for the Northern Minnesota Metalsmiths organization.

It's a time for all of us metalsmiths to get together and we have a demonstrators come so it's a time for fellowship and time of learning from other experts in the field.

We have a core group of people that meet once a month down at the Lake Itasca Regional Pioneer Farmers grounds of about 15 to 20, but our membership is around 185 people that come.

So not everybody makes the meeting but a lot of the members make the conference due to the fact that we have some very spectacular guests that show up and experts in their field to show us some of the new things they're doing and the old things as well.

Iron was just as important as fire as far as the development of the Industrial Age.

Blacksmiths could use iron to make tools, and of course weapons were the first thing.

It changed our history right there, the trajectory of our species.

The blacksmith was like almost looked at as some type of magician.

They were held in high regards cuz it's not something that everybody can do, it takes some practice to be able to know what you're doing.

But, you know, we didn't have welders and drill presses and angle grinders.

And then during the Industrial Revolution time, the blacksmith was kind of faded away.

Once you started having hardware stores and places where you could go buy a nail or a screwdriver or a hammer, the blacksmith was more relegated to like doing some repair work, restoration type work and then it died out into the 70's to be almost non-existent except for a few.

But it started to resurge again in the early two thousands and then of course when you had the TV shows come on about forged in fire well then everybody and their brother wanted to be a knife maker.

So we've seen an explosion in attendance at our meetings from the past few years alone.

And then hammer your end down there a little bit, it'll make more of a curl.

Oh, I like that.

There you go.

I think the artistic blacksmiths back in the day were building items for churches and castles.

And rich people wanted very ornate metal work to be done.

So this blacksmithing evolved into, I almost don't even want to use the term artistic blacksmith, but artisan blacksmith work is probably a better way to term it.

There's smiths out there today that still specialize in that work and you can't ever hardly get them to do anything for you because they're very busy because it's still a hammer in a hand, hitting on an anvil a piece of hot steel.

It's slow, so anything in metal work is usually slow.

So if you're looking for any kind of special work to be done have a lot of patience.

And so I'll be using the round side of it cuz I'm working on that inner one.

We have, usually we always have, two demonstrators, one in the field of knife making, which is very popular these days and the other is more of a traditional blacksmith, more of an ornamental type blacksmith.

Cody Hofsommer is a knifemaker, his profession's a ferrier, and Cody is just amazing.

He's been a demonstrator for us twice and I think it was four or five years ago he's demonstrated for us and it's amazing to see the work he's doing now.

He's branching off into doing custom folding knives as well, which are fabulous because that's a whole other level of knifemaking and his Damascus patterns are unmatched.

I don't know anybody that can do the work that he does better than him.

I kind of say jokingly we love to hate him because he's so good.

We love him, he's a great guy, he's personable, he's a fantastic demonstrator.

But at the same time when you look at his work, he makes it look so easy.

Knifemakers come in two varieties.

We're bladesmiths and we are knifemakers or stock removal knifemakers So a stock removal person takes a sheet of steel, grinds, cuts and grinds off everything that they don't want.

A bladesmith takes fire and manipulates and forges the blade out.

So we have a few advantages and we can take non-traditional stock, we can take round stock or a ball bearing even and forge it into a blade.

So we have a few more options.

We also have a lot more options to mess up the steel in doing so.

Where a stock removal person has to start with a big sheet, especially if there's a curve in something they'd have to start with a large sheet and end up wasting a bunch of that steel.

So today for the most part my talk's going to be on guards and handles, at least that's where we're going to start.

If you guys have questions ask.

I'm here for you guys more than anything so whatever I can do to help you guys out is why I'm here.

We're going to kind of base today's talk on this, a knife like this.

This is my wrangler pattern.

This particular one is in a Gorgon Flower Damascus, it has ring on the handle, the guard is stainless.

So the class that we did was on guards and handles and it was more on the maybe some of the nuances of guards and handles on especially hidden tang knives.

We took some of the nuances of turning a square piece of steel into slotting it and you run this a few times you'll make a, you'll cut a little bit of a line in there and then with a fairly sharp center punch you should be able to feel that just a little bit.

So it might take a little bit more, but that would be one way to get a true line that you can drill your 1/8 inch holes or whatever closer to.

Drill from the backside with a bigger hole just to make life a lot easier so you're removing a lot less.

I hate filing, it just sucks, especially with the 1/8 inch tool.

So it's like those cooking shows where they put it in the oven and then they pull out the one that's already done.

Boom, there it is.

So see how easy that was when you scratch that line in there.

So this one was actually done on the mill.

A mill is great.

Then fitting it to the tang of the knife, fitting it to here, then shaping the guard and contouring it.

Again, my opinion, my rules, my knife.

I do not want this face straight.

I see a lot of good knifemakers do that.

I don't like it.

It's just it shouldn't be flat in my mind.

It has to be through the blade, but anything that sticks out below I want that broken and rounded back just a little bit.

A lot of knifemakers a lot better than me do this flat and I see why it's a lot easier.

Eventually gluing it and how I glue it to a blade and using this little press to hold it in place as the glue dries.

Then we moved on to actually handle shaping and fitting and I do a deal where I bed the tang and I can take the blade on the handle on and off the blade, which not everyone does, so it's a little bit unique.

So this guard has been glued on.

The handle was fit.

You can see my scribe lines, poured it in, waxed the tang, poured it in.

This one has not ever been out, I did this I think yesterday morning I glued it.

It doesn't really matter if it sits a day or a week.

So we'll just put this on.

Sometimes they come off.

There she goes just like that.

So that's cuz you waxed it.

I waxed it.

So I don't try to take it all the way across the face, I just try to watch my line, knock the corner off, do that on all four lines that I put on there.

The handle should have a slight curve to it.

This is going to come in here, it's going to connect down here like that.

In the end I'm going to end up carving this in just a little bit like that.

Put it back on every once in a while and just look at it and just see if everything is lining up.

That line across the blade to the handle really makes the knife, that continuous line there.

I've made them before where they look like they've been broke.

They kind of come up and then they peak and again it's that one I didn't even see until it was in a photograph from the guy who bought it, you know, and you're like he didn't see it but I saw it in the picture later, you know, and nothing to do about it now but so just, you know, check that out.

So I'm going to come to about here and I'm going to come to here and I'm going to take, I'm going make a straight line there to there, and then I'm going to come through and I'm going to make a little cut like this.

I'm getting pretty close to going to files on the back half of it.

And eventually it will finish out to look something like this.

That is what is called a broken back seax blade.

We got Lars Morch from Denmark to come over this year.

We worked with the Viking Connection out of Fargo and the North House Folk School to bring Lars over here just to put him to work for about a month doing demonstrations and that guy likes to work.

He's more of a traditional blacksmith focusing on the Viking Age of metallurgy and also the history of metal working in the Viking Age.

He is just more of a, I want to even call him a professor of Viking Age blacksmithing.

He knows the history, he knows everything and there's pretty much not a question that he can't answer.

While we're waiting for the rest I have some knife blades that are typical Viking style and you're more than welcome to come and have a look at it.

Some of it is sharp and some of it's definitely sharp.

So in the Viking era, iron was very, very big.

It was still a tiring and a long process to make.

Making the material very, very expensive, but it was the best they could so they were willing to put all this time and resources into making iron because it was superior to everything else.

During industrialization and especially the immigration period that you have here, iron played an enormous important part of this building of the society.

Everything was built by hand up till like 1850 or 1900's and iron to make tools of anything was completely dominant and the making of these process were quite often a little bit primitive.

A forge like this could be brought out into the middle of nowhere with a hand crank or a foot pump or whatever you could heat up this sturdy material and shape it into the tool you wanted without having to bring it to a modern machine shop facility.

The class that I'm doing here was going to be all about Viking techniques, demonstrating some of these forge welding techniques that the Viking used and with some of the materials they had in hand.

A lot of forge welding today relies on borax as a flux, the Vikings didn't have that, so what did they use?

They used sand.

So I showed a number of different ways to utilize the sand as a flux.

Right.

Let's do some proper demonstration.

I'm going to take it from the very start and just move it slowly so that everybody gets a chance to see what it looks like.

What I'm doing now is simply just thinning out this piece of, in my world it's 10 by 10 but it probably isn't.

It's probably... is that called 3/8 by 3/8, that's probably what it is then, smaller than half inch.

Very, very few business still do restoration work on some of the preserved buildings and stuff like that railings and things like that and a small market that I'm trying to fill where people have an interest in original tools, shape, and sizes, but for many blacksmiths, not unlike the metalsmith guild here it's a hobby, it's a hobby that they will, people will spend a lot of time on, but it's really not a hobby that will ever make them get the sales that will bring back the money they invested in it.

So for a lot of people blacksmithing today is much more a passion and a fun thing to do.

You could call it a craft, basically.

What I'm trying to do is just prepare the materials.

I've prepared the mild steel and now I'm preparing that small bit of carbon steel that's going to go in there.

But I think there's something deeply embedded in mankind that heating things up, I mean the fire has always been something that will provide mankind with warmth and hot food and coziness and I've seen quite a lot of people come to watch me forge or watch other people forge.

They would just stand there and stare into those flames and then at some point when the blacksmith is pulling out this red hot iron everybody knows that iron is difficult to work with and for a lot of people just drilling a hole through a piece of iron is almost impossible but this blacksmith can just heat it up and all of a sudden it's like play dough kind of consistency and you can shape it and do, well you can do whatever you want with it, if you have the skills to do it.

I think that is always something that will intrigue people You really need to try some of the techniques that the Vikings had in order to appreciate the skills they had.

And everybody is always interested in knowing about their roots, whether it's their roots from the 1800's or it's craft roots.

Something like this it doesn't have to be, if you're looking at the original finds they were not much sharper than this, which for a modern bladesmith is quite rough work.

Yeah.

You'll have to think that most of the knives in the Viking era were just plain tools.

Yeah.

I mean they didn't, I mean most of them had a knife because that was the one tool that they all needed for anything, eating or anything really.

But most of it were very, very simple tools and most of the people that owned them were very, very poor, couldn't afford making anything fancy stuff.

Let's see which side is which.

Now this is the tricky part.

It's already thin and you really shouldn't try and reweld this, but I'm going to have to.

If not we'll just have to start over again.

Now what I'm going to try and do now is I'm going to try and forge it so it's tapered because the Vikings, as I already mentioned, they didn't have grinders so they didn't make knives like this right because that there is a grind bevel.

They didn't have the option of doing that so all their blades would be triangular shape like this and that is a little bit different when you forge it.

If it was going to be ground you can just basically leave it like that and then shape a tip on it.

But in order for it to become triangular shaped, you need to forge that.

The Vikings used a file or a stone or maybe a scraper to finish the blade off prior to heat treatment.

That means that they actually had to forge much closer to the finished shape of the blade.

Now I like to use a little bit more light hammer for that, but just personal preference.

Now this is going to be the edge.

It doesn't look like it but that is going to be the edge because when I forge that in a triangular shape that tip there is going to come up.

There are a few Norwegian swords that are that we think is made in Norway because the Norwegian sword technology were a little bit behind.

This may come as a shock but Norwegians are in general a little bit behind.

[Laughter] From a Danish point of view anyway.

They liked the one-sided swords for a very long time.

This was quite a common weapon in the Iron Age leading up to the Viking Age, but in southern Scandinavia the double-edged sword took over quite early.

Those are the ones that I mentioned, the Roman swords that were found in the bogs with very, very lovely patterns.

They were double-edged made by the Romans, but the Norwegians seem to be holding on to the single-edged sword for a little bit longer.

So we know that they made Viking swords in the Viking era, not area, the Viking era in Norway, with only one edge and they were made locally, some of them with patterns like this, but in a sword length right.

Some of them even find with handles on quite big beasty sort of machete-like weapons, weird stuff.

At our function one of my favorite things we do is we have an auction.

It's not a silent auction, it's an auction, and it's the highlight of the event where all our members bring things to donate to the auction, which raises money for our organization.

And you never know what's going to be on that auction, anywhere from old blacksmithing equipment, knives, and tools that other smiths have made which is my favorite.

And also just a lot of things that people bring in that they're not using anymore.

We have a lot of our older members who are bringing in items for the auction and they just donate it rather than try to sell it on eBay or something like that, so you can find some treasures.

We opened up the first Monday of every month, we did this about four years ago, the first Monday of every month was open forge.

You did not need to be a member of our organization, you just need to come on out and try us out, see if you like it.

And our attendance grew and grew and grew, mostly with young kids, young men, and young women were showing up to do this, and that was really inspiring for the rest of us.

I'm probably one of the younger members.

When I started out with the group about 2010 I was in my 40's and now it's fun to see teenagers there with it.

So I think it's going to grow and I do think we're moving into a repair economy again.

You know our nation goes in cycles for economics and once we hit a little bit of a downturn in our economy people want to repair instead of buy and I think blacksmith and the metal worker and the metalsmith, I guess I should just call them, is just the right person to fill that role.

I was doing this on my own in about the 2009 time frame.

YouTube was pretty limited at that time and I was, you know you can tell my age, I did a lot of reading and DVDs to learn the craft.

But I had a gentleman who'd been with the club a long time stop by my house and said hey, why don't you come to the club, and I said there's a club?

I didn't know.

But what it did for me is once I got around a lot of these old cranky cantankerous looking fellas I realized that they wanted me to be successful and once they realized I was serious about my craft they were pouring knowledge out at my footsteps to make me successful.

There's no secrets in blacksmithing right now.

It used to be like that in the old age where the blacksmiths kept their secrets about heat treating and metallurgy, but now I find that the older generation, you know, it's the shoulders of the people I stand on.

They want me to be successful and they're a phone call away at all times.

These guys that come to this conference taught me a lot.

It's like a big family, you know, nobody has secrets or it's like everybody's willing to share their craft and teach what they know to anybody else so it's as long as they're willing to learn and listen.

You want to tick off a blacksmith when he's trying to teach you, don't listen to his advice or don't do what he's trying to teach you.

That little area at the end.

You're doing good.

I always tell people if you want a good addiction get into metal work, but it's also a long path of seeing other demonstrators, seeking out classes for yourself, and then you're going to find your tribe if you get a hold of a metalsmithing organization around your local area.

I didn't realize there was a tribe of people as probably as crazy as I was I suppose that were thinking about doing this for a profession.

They call it percussion therapy I've heard it said.

I think it quite quickly it went from a hobby or a general interest, combining craft and history into something that my wife will call an obsession, and we talked about that with some of the other guys from the guild here last night.

And this said look, once you're hooked, you're hooked.

That feeling of hitting the iron with a hammer once it's at the right temperature and it goes really soft and smooth and that joy when things are just working just the way you want it.

And I think you get that kind of very grounded feeling when you go to the workshop.

You're actually producing something.

I talked to a couple of guys up there who are, they've got office jobs during the day, and then they go to the shop because there they can, over a couple hours, they can without any cooperative responsibilities or any bosses looking over the shoulders, they can just be there for themselves, do something, and when they're closing up there it is.

Very, very sort of down to earth and kind of simple really.

Thanks for watching.

Join us again on Common Ground.

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Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

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