(upbeat music) - Welcome to "A Shot of AG", my name is Rob Sharkey.

I'm a farmer, fifth generation, from just outside of Bradford, Illinois.

I started a podcast which led into an XM Radio show, which led into a national television show, which led into me being right here today.

But today is not about me.

Today is about Bud Harvey.

How are you doing Bud?

- I'm doing good Rob.

- Are you?

- Yeah.

- I'm glad to have you here.

- Yeah, this is a nice break into a winter day, son.

- It is.

Yes Harvey.

(Rob laughs) We had you on the XM show, - Right, that's been a couple of weeks ago, it was all.

- Right after that, Emily hit you up to be on this, didn't she?

- Sounds like a good deal.

- She sneaky that way.

- You can't... You gotta watch out, watch your backside.

- We actually had your son on the show.

He was, Luke Harvey for the beekeeping.

- Right, yeah, he kind of, yeah.

He said, "Hey, you should be talking to Rob."

You know.

Remember he said that to you.

You should be talking to me.

I'm not sure which way it went.

- Well, it's fascinating because we're gonna talk a lot of blacksmithing and that, but first let's get a little bit of background.

- Okay.

- So you're from the area, from Chillicothe.

- Right.

Just north of Peoria, south of Chillicothe, about halfway in between on the Illinois river.

- Like, right on the river.

- The right backyard fence is right on the riverbank.

You're right.

- So you can walk out your back door right into the river.

- Step right over the edge of the retaining wall drop down about eight feet and I'm right on the river.

- Really?

- Yep.

- In other words, are you from this area originally?

- From state of Oregon.

- Okay, so no would be the answer.

- No.

The answer is no, it's a little bit further away.

- Yeah, how did you end up here?

- Well, I came here for two years back in 1967.

- Mm-hmm - And graduate out of Oregon State University as an engineer, and come to work for Caterpillar, talked my wife into coming here for two years, then we'd go back home after two years, and here we are.

- Is your wife from Oregon too?

- Yeah.

She and I were married out there, and made our way through college, and come back, came out here.

Yeah, so we're working for Cat got me here and I stayed here.

- So you had a career at Caterpillar.

- 37 years, yeah.

- Okay.

- Part-time, yeah.

- And what were you doing there?

Engineer?

- Yeah, I'm an engineer.

I got degrees in mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering, material sciences, and sort of work there in engineering design, and supplier development, supplier quality work.

Worked in Japan for six years designing hydraulic excavators.

A little bit of everything really, yeah.

- Did you live in Japan for six years?

- Six years.

- Wow, what part?

- Near Osaka.

Kobe is the biggest city and we're were a little suburb off of Kobe.

- Did you have a sushi over there?

The sushi?

- Akashi, Akashi was the name of the- - No, the sushi!

The raw fish!

- Oh, the sushi.

- Have you eaten the sushi over there?

Oh, we ate everything.

Right.

- The food is amazing, isn't it?

- Well, my wife hated it, but... (Rob laughs) It's amazingly bad or amazingly good.

However way you like it.

Right, yeah.

- So, you retired from Caterpillar.

Now when did you get into the blacksmithing?

- Well, few years before I retired, I retired in 2002, and a friend talked me into taking a blacksmithing class at a new school down in Missouri called The Ozark School of Blacksmithing.

And they'd just started the school, and they had a blacksmith instructor that came over from Israel, his name is Uri Hofi, a long time, good friend of mine now, and he's still blacksmithing and he's in his mid-80's, and so, you know, my friend and I went down there and took a week long class there at south of St. Louis, about 70 miles out in Potosi, Missouri, which is out in the nowhere, and I came back after a week and told my wife, you know, if I'd been born 100 years earlier and still been an engineer, I'd probably have been a blacksmith cause I really liked what I was doing, blacksmithing.

- So went down to this class?

- Right.

- And this this was before like the TV shows.

This was- - Oh, way.

This is 1997.

- So this was like almost the dawn of the internet.

So, I mean, how'd you even hear about this?

- Well, my friend had heard about it cause he was taking some part-time classes occasionally here in the Peoria area, and he'd heard about it.

and he'd actually been...

He took a class similar to it the year before, down in the same area, same instructor actually, and before the school was built, so he heard about it, and he knew they were starting up the school and the class and he'd come over and talk to me.

He says, "Buddy, you should come down here and do this."

- Why?

I mean, was this- - Well, because of my background in engineering and materials, - Okay.

- And he said, you know, just some of the things that you do (crosstalk) - But you'd never done any of this?

- I had not done it.

I did not have any tools, I actually had an anvil I forgotten that I owned.

it was stuck underneath one of my benches, you know, in one of my garages.

- That's heavy.

- And I'd had it for 20 years.

And it had been collecting spider webs forever.

- It's still good?

- Well, it was only 100 years old, and now it's 150 years old.

(both laugh) - Those things are worth some coin, aren't they?

The old big ones.

- Any of them now, the price is...

It used to be $1 a pound was kind of the going rate for anvils.

Now it's more like $7 a pound, it's ridiculous.

- I would have thought they would actually gone down in value now that they aren't using them on cartoons as much.

- Yeah, they dig them back up, all their, you know, get the save the coyotes and all that.

- Would you do the thing where they blow it up... Have you seen that thing where they blow the anvils up and send them in the air.

- Well there is a, you do it or you don't do it on that thing.

Some people in the nation that absolutely, if you ever blew up an anvil, you would be completely ostracized from the blacksmithing community, and there's other people that say, "Yeah, that's just one of the things that's always been done."

So it's like a yes or no.

There's no between.

- Well, it doesn't hurt the anvil does it?

- No, but it hurts the people when they fall back down on top of them, you know.

(both laugh) That's the danger more than anything else.

- Yes, Bugs Bunny did teach us that.

Allright, so you go down to this class, and when you left, did you know that you were, you were hooked?

- I knew I was hooked.

There was no doubt about it.

And so I came back and I started looking for tools and equipment.

Yeah.

- Mm-hmm.

- It was one of those typical late May days in Missouri, you know, when it's so hot and humid, and you can't, you know, and you're sweating in between everything you do, and you're hanging your clothes on the tree to dry out in between.

(Rob laughs) It was 125 degrees inside the shop where we're working, got a thermometer on the wall, and I said, "Man, this is really neat, isn't it?

I just love it."

(Rob laughs) So, yeah.

So that's where it got started.

And so I came back and started accumulating tools and equipment and I have a few now.

- Yeah, how'd that go?

With the, you know, you come back and say, "Hey honey, I'm going to buy a bunch of stuff."

- She's pretty good with that.

Yeah.

- I mean, it's better than the alternative.

- Right, yeah.

- It's better than other, yeah.

She's fine with it.

Yeah.

We spent a lot of time doing advance and, and we used to do riverfront market and sell the products that we made, you know.

Cause you can only make so many things for yourself and pretty soon you, you gotta do something with them, you know.

so then you have to look for an outlet or, okay, I made an S hook, you know, and now I got 20 of them, what do I do with the 19 that I don't need, you know, so we started selling them and looking for a place- - Let me ask you about that, because all right, Let's take something like this, right?

- That's called an S-hook - This is the S-hook, right?

- Yeah.

I imagine this takes some time, talent, all the tools and that' and then you go to sell it and people were just like, "Well, it's cool, but I'm not going to pay that for that."

Does that bother you?

- So you double the price, and it makes it seem more reasonable then.

- That's a smart man right there.

(both laugh) Does it get to you though?

- You say, you could have bought it for 15, now I'm going to charge you 30, so- - These people don't understand that what went into this.

- That's right, they don't.

It's really part of the problem.

And that I think applies to any art type of activity or product or anything that people don't understand the amount of time it takes to do it.

And you know, I teach classes now, and the common response I get from my students is "We didn't think it was going to be this hard."

- Yeah.

- You know, it was like, this is a lot harder than we thought, you know.

- I see on TV and in a half hour, they do like this Samurai sword.

- Yeah, right.

Just knock it, there's nothing to it, right?

- Do you like those shows?

- I like to critique them.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, because I... Not the participants because I understand how difficult it is to be a participant on something and be judged and timed and all that.

I like to critique the judges because they think they know a lot, you know, with my background in metallurgy, it's like, you guys are a little bit off base.

- They're cocky, huh?

- And they're cocky, and they don't...

They think they know more than they do- - What's the word, meta-, metal?

- Metallurgy.

- Metallurgy.

- Right.

- How long does that take to learn to say?

- It took me about five years of school to improve.

When I graduated I have to finally say it.

That's a requirement to graduate.

- Well, with the TV shows though, but I mean, it's brought a lot of popularity to this "Forged In Fire" the other ones, and now what you're doing for fun, all of a sudden is hip and cool.

- Yeah.

- The "Forged In Fire" program, I wrote 'em letter to...

They were looking for participants, and I wrote them a letter, and I said, "I'm really not asking to be considered as a participant, but I want to thank you as a program for bringing to the attention of the American public what blacksmithing is, and the, the art of metalworking like that."

And I said, "I have a lot of students," and I said, "two thirds of the students that I have that come for classes, come because of watching 'Forged In Fire.'

And so that's really supported the, the craft."

And so they got back to me.

They didn't offer me an opportunity to go on there.

I'm not sure if I'd said yes or no, but they said, you know, if you have any ladies that are taking your classes that are interested, we would like to have them.

- They'd like to have them on.

- They like to diversify their clientele or their students or participants, I mean.

- I don't remember you writing an email to this show.

(Bud laughs) - Well, it must have been my oversight, I guess.

(Both laugh) - All right.

So you, you mentioned that you're not just doing this, but you're teaching this.

- I've been teaching this.

I started teaching, I'd say four or five years after I took my first class.

But I was doing it just sort of on a special program with Bradley University, with their engineering program.

So some of the engineering students would come out to my shop on a Saturday and I'd have him work at the forge, and make something simple during the day.

- So is this something simple?

- Mm-hmm.

That's something simple, you're right.

- Doesn't look that simple.

- It's uh, yeah.

- Kind of all twisted up.

- Once you, once you learn how to do it, it's quite simple.

Only takes, you know, a few times.

- It would take me more than a few times to do this.

(Rob laughs) - So I was working with a Bradley engineering professor, and he was substituting a laboratory class for a day at my shop for the students- - Oh, that's cool.

- So they would come out and they thought that was great.

- Yeah.

- And unfortunately he retired and things kinda changed.

The curriculum changed a little bit at Bradley, so I'm not able to do that, but I segued then into offering classes for the public.

And I started that, as near as I can tell, by first public class for people that weren't tied into either engineering that I had worked with, or tied into Bradley or something like that, it was about 2015.

And I had some guys that kept bugging me to teach 'em how to blacksmith, and they said, "We'll pay you to do that."

And I said, "Oh, okay.

All right."

Finally I organized three or four guys together and had them come out, and so that's kind of what I would consider the first opportunity for teaching the public, it's when I started that and- - How many students?

- Now?

- Yeah.

- Probably around 400.

- Okay.

It's, I mean, it's Peoria.

I mean, it's not New York, it's not Chicago.

- I get students from, I'll say Rockford, Quad Cities- - They drive that far?

- Champagne area frequently.

- I've had people come up from St. Louis, Springfield is quite common.

So, I'll say the Rockford, you know, Quad City, Champagne, Springfield is kind of my area of clientele coming in for students.

- Well, like competition, say, I want to do this, but I don't like you, how far would I have to go to find somebody else?

- Central, Missouri.

- Really?

(Rob laughs) - Somewhere in Indiana, maybe.

Up north in Central Wisconsin, there is a guy.

- Gotcha.

So you're drawing in from a big area.

- Mm-hmm.

- Do you enjoy it?

- I must.

I keep doing it.

- I mean the teaching.

- I'm not a teacher, I'm an engineer, you know, so I think I'm not a teacher, but I enjoy sharing.

- It says right here you are.

(both laugh) I know you enjoy this, the making it part.

Do you enjoy seeing other people learn how to do it?

- I do.

I just keep coming back to it.

And I say, "It's a pleasure to see somebody go from knowing nothing at all, to be able to actually with a hammer, and the forage, and the piece of metal, make something that they're really proud of when they go home.

- Gotcha.

- And I'm thinking, wow, you know, that's, a payback for me.

You know, I don't have to do it, but it's a payback from people I learned from, and it's a challenge to try to teach.

It challenges me to learn... As a teacher, you got to know more than you do as a just to a do-it-yourself.

So you have to be able to realize what the people, the students are doing that are maybe not the best, or need some help with, and when to step in and when to keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way, all that.

So, you know, I've had enough students come through that I can pretty well walk through and tell are they in trouble or are they gonna make it, you know.

- You can probably tell like the ones that are just having a good time or whatever, and the ones that were like you, that they're gonna be hooked, and this is gonna be their thing.

- Pretty much can tell that.

I've changed my program a little bit because I found out that maybe two thirds of the people find out that it is too much work, that it is too hard, or they don't really have the facilities, or capability to have their own shop, or do their own thing, and so the other third are probably more serious, and they're the ones who are likely to come back more often.

And I kind of restructured my introduction program and teaching in order to accommodate that difference in needs, I'll say on the on the program, needs.

- Let's talk about what you got.

So we got good old railroad spike, right?

- That's a railroad spike, yeah.

- Did you steal this from the railroad?

- I was actually... No, actually I bought those.

- Really?

I've taken them.

You walk along there (indistinct) just pick one up.

- Yeah, that one's not so rusty.

The ones you walk along are all rusted out and everything.

I like to have them nice and sharp and clean.

- But you have turned this into this.

- I have.

- How long does that take?

- For me?

- Yeah.

- You know, the shaping and making the blade, making the handle and all that, maybe an hour and a half- - Really?

- The polishing, shining, sharping, finishing of the blade, another couple of hours.

So, I mean, a half a day, and I sell those for about $100 a piece, so my wages are down below minimum wage now.

(both laugh) - That goes back to it though.

I'm sure people see this, "Oh, that's cool.

But I only want to pay 20 bucks for it."

You tell 'em to go pound sand?

- Mm-hmm.

- Yeah, I would too.

- Yeah, I don't have... Like I say, I don't have to sell them.

If I had to make a living selling, I'd be pretty hungry all the time.

- Tell me about this one.

- Okay, that one is made out of a piece of construction cable, one inch diameter piece of cable.

- Okay.

I didn't know you could make cable into a knife.

- So you take the cable, then you have to weld the cable, all the fibers of the cable, you have to weld that together into what you call a billet, and now you have a solid piece that doesn't have the fibers, but if you can...

I don't know if the camera will pick that up or not, but there's actually fibers that you can see in the shiny surface on that knife, remains from the cable.

And so, once you get into a billet, then you can start making it into something that looks like a knife.

and forge it back and forge it out.

Same as what you would forge the railroad spike.

But the hard part is making it into something solid- Taking all those fibers- - That's pretty solid.

- And weld them together.

Yeah, It's solid.

It's welded.

- That's better than you get at the old Walmart, I can tell tell you that.

- Yeah.

- You've talked about like being born 100 years ago, I mean, this is, this is how they used to do it.

They didn't go to Menards and buy a bunch of nails.

- You had to have 'em made.

- Yeah, you had 'em made.

And they were so valuable.

I understand, the story is, that they could be part of a ladies dowry.

- Nails?

- Nails could be part of the dowry, you know, at that time, back in the, you know, 1700's or so, you know, the lady had to kind of provide some something for her suitor, you know, to... And nails were part of the dowry.

- That'd be, kinda- - So you got five pounds of nails, maybe, you know, whatever else she had with her.

- That should be embarrassing, right?

"How'd your daughter do?"

She was only worth a pound of nails.

- A pound of nails, right.

- We've come a long way.

- We've come a long way.

So those are all individually hand forged.

And I teach that in my second day of class, the first day I don't bother with that.

It could take some really heavy hammering to make that.

So I teach that as the second day to get people started into learning how to hit something hard.

Get it hot, hit it hard.

- Yeah.

So I make nails or have them make nails.

- This is your hook.

- Right.

That's called of heart hook.

- And it's just for hooking.

- For hanging things.

Yeah, there's a hole through the middle, We make that, we don't drill it, we punch that with a punch through hot steel, punch the hole and the first screw to go through there and hanging on the wall and then put your keys on there, your beer bottle opener or whatever you might want to hang on there.

And so that's a nice, challenging project.

I do that in the second day also.

- What's like, what is your go-to, what's one of the things you're good at and you enjoy making?

- Oh, wow.

That's hard to say because I make hundreds of different kinds of things, and I guess I don't have a specialty thing.

Somebody will say, "What's your biggest project?"

I'll say, "Biggest project is the railing around my house."

- Oh, you did that?

- Right.

You know, there's about 300 feet of it.

And they say, 'How long did it take you to make it?"

I say, "It took me 20 years."

(Rob laughs) And they say, "20 years!"

And I say, "Well, yeah, I started off, I only needed 40 feet of it to start with, and I kept buying more property, so I had to have more railing and over 20 years-" - Well, that's on you, honestly.

- The question was, "How long did it take?"

It took me 20 years to make it.

So that was the biggest project.

And it took the longest amount of time.

- So that's gotta be pretty cool to see that though.

I mean, when you're at your house, looking out at all that work.

- It is nice.

And for me, it's kind of intimidating in a way, because I can see the progression of my skill level.

Cause I started 20 years ago, - You're one of those guys.

- And I look at it and I say, "Wow, that was really pretty bad."

You know.

And then I look at this other one, you know, that I made 20 years later, I see it's getting better.

(Rob laughs) So, it works.

- So, maybe a lost art, blacksmithing?

- People say it's a lost art.

I say, it's an art that's being recovered.

I'd say in the mid 1970s, we were losing the experts, the old blacksmiths, their shops were closed up.

The guys that knew how to do things were kind of, you know, passing away.

So there was a resurgence of the arts and crafts, you know, in the 70s.

And blacksmithing was one of them, and so there was a lot of books and publications that came out, starting in that timeframe, to try to capture some of the skills and techniques and record them, and then teaching programs started up, and there's a program, a national program, actually, it's international now, it's called "The Artist-Blacksmith's Association of North America", it's shortened to ABANA, and they sponsor worldwide in the arts of blacksmithing.

Then they have conferences every couple of years.

I just returned from one out in Johnstown, Pennsylvania last month.

So that's one of them, and then locally in Illinois, the affiliate of that organization is the Illinois Valley Blacksmith Association.

It was initiated here in Peoria, and then spread throughout the state of Illinois.

- Do you have meetings?

- we have about 400 members.

And so we have events.

Meetings are probably not the right term.

We have what's called Hammer-ins.

So everybody gets together, and plays in the fire and at the anvil, and hits the big stuff, right?

And stands around and talks and tells stories about, you know, things, you know, a lot of time- - Keep bragging.

- A lot of FaceTime with each other, that's good.

- Well, that's fun.

- It's fun.

Right, yeah.

- Were you into this when you lived in Japan?

- Unfortunately not.

I wish I was.

- Yeah cause that's a whole different ball game over there now.

Because it's a whole different thing, and I actually met a blacksmith from the Kobe area in Japan where we were at, they were studying blacksmithing, he was an American, and he was studying under the support of a Japanese sword maker.

And he's now living up in state of Washington.

But I wished I had realized that this is where my life was going at the time we lived there, then I would have been able to learn from that, but- - It's never too late.

- Ah, that's true.

- Yeah.

- I like Japan.

- See.

This will be the Samurai master of chili coffee.

(Bud laughs) - Right.

Yeah.

People want to make knives, and I say, I'm really not a knife maker.

I mean, I make sharp, shiny objects like this, but I'm really not a knife maker, especially a Samurai sword, you know.

This may be a 30 inches long or something like that- - So if somebody is watching this, they're like, you know, I wanna try it.

How do they go about it?

- Well, the best thing is to contact me.

I think starting on your own, and trying to do it by yourself is really trying to paddle upstream.

It's it's really hard.

You're a lot better off to have a little bit of instruction, give you some direction, learn how to manage the coal-fire that we use for heating the steel, and learn how to hammer and anvil and the process and stuff.

Just a little bit of fundamentals goes a long ways, rather than, you can watch YouTube all you want, and you find out that when it comes to reality, you know, it's different.

- Yeah.

And the first stuff you're gonna make, it's probably not gonna be that good?

- It's going to be the best you ever made.

- Well that's... (Bud laughs) In fact it gets better from there.

- Thank you, Bud.

(both laugh) This from the guy who's looking at his fence 30 years ago- - Progress is progress.

Keep practicing.

I'm still...

I've learned.

You know, I admit I'm still on the beginning learning curve with blacksmithing.

- How long you been doing it?

- Now, I've been doing it 25 years.

So.

- And you think you're still on the beginning curve?

- Absolutely.

Absolutely.

- Okay.

I go to these conferences and I see some of the products that some of the people bring in for like a gallery, and I walk away, I think, oh my gosh, I haven't even started learning yet.

There's so much talent out there in...

The talent oftentimes is very specific in an area that maybe I haven't ever even tried too, so that...

Cause the field is quite large, you know, from the arts, from- - They're probably cheating.

Probably their parents are helping 'em, you know how that used to go in school.

- Yeah.

- It's not that, it's just there's so many- - You could tell the 4-H things, that probably their parents did that.

That's probably what's going on.

- You think that somebody else did it for 'em?

- Probably.

- I doubt it.

(laughing) So that's why that really kinda sets you back in your place and says, you know, you got long ways to go to learn, and I'm actually taking a program now to become a nationally certified instructor for blacksmithing through the ABANA program to a certify instructors.

So, that's put me back in my place a little bit finding out that, okay, I've been teaching for quite a few years now, but I've got to learn how to be even a better instructor.

- So someone's going to start out, Bud Harvey is the guy to contact.

I've enjoyed talking to you on radio show.

I enjoy talking to you... To see the stuff that you do is incredible.

I think it's a bit of a lost art, but I'm glad it's coming back, and I'm glad there's people like you that are willing to do it.

- Thanks Rob.

- So, very cool.

This guy on the Illinois River, Bud Harvey, thank you very much.

And everybody else, we hope you catch us next week.

- Good.

(upbeat music)