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Starvard University · Blacksmithing
Shape glowing steel with a hammer, after William L. Ilgen, forging instructor in the American school shop tradition, whose 1912 Forge Work teaches the craft operation by operation, with modern safety taught first and taught plainly.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Steel looks cold and stubborn, but heat it in a fire until it glows orange and it turns soft enough to stretch, bend, twist, and join with a hammer. A teacher named William Ilgen taught this in school workshops, one clear operation at a time. In this course you will follow him, safely: learn the fire and the anvil, draw out a point, bend a hook, and forge three real things to keep.
Think of hot steel as very stiff clay. Cold, it defeats you. At the right glow, it moves a little with every hammer blow, and the whole craft is learning to put the blows in the right places while the heat lasts, then going back to the fire before you make the metal sulky and cold. Ilgen builds the skill in the order a good teacher should: tools first, then the single operations, drawing, bending, upsetting, twisting, welding, and only then whole objects, so a beginner is never asked to do two new things at once.
One honest warning belongs at the front. This is the highest risk course in this wave: real fire, real hammers, real hot metal. Ilgen wrote in 1912 for a supervised school shop, and his book is quiet about protections we now treat as non negotiable. This course teaches the modern standard throughout: eye and hearing protection, natural fibre clothing, a quench bucket always within reach, ventilation, and learning in a proper class with an experienced smith and adult supervision for younger students. The old book supplies the craft. Modern practice supplies the safety, and where they differ, the lessons say so.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Safety comes first in this course, before any fire is lit, and the standard taught here is the modern one. Work in a proper class setting with an experienced smith when you are a beginner, and younger students work only with adult supervision. Wear safety glasses at all times in the shop, and hearing protection during hammering. Wear natural fibre clothing, cotton or wool, never synthetics, which melt; wear sturdy closed boots, tie back long hair, and remove rings and loose sleeves. Modern teaching is to wear no gloves while hammering at the anvil, because a gloved hand grips the handle less surely and feels the work less well; gloves are for handling stock away from the hammering, not a substitute for attention.
Set the shop up before the work starts. A quench bucket of clean water stands within reach, always, for cooling work and for first aid: cool a burn in clean running water or the bucket at once, and seek medical help for anything more than a small, mild burn. The forge needs real ventilation, because coal and gas fires fill a closed room with fumes and carbon monoxide. Know where the fire extinguisher and first aid kit live. Treat every piece of steel in the shop as if it were hot: much of it gives no warning by color, and smiths develop the habit of never grabbing stock bare handed without thinking.
Know your metal, because some stock is dangerous however skilled you are. Never forge galvanized or coated metal: its zinc coating makes fumes that cause metal fume fever. Never forge lead, painted or plated scrap, or unknown mystery metal from a junk pile; old alloys and coatings can carry lead, cadmium, and other poisons, so beginners forge known, plain mild steel bought for the purpose. Ilgen describes the forge itself clearly: an open hearth with a hood to carry smoke to the flue, a blast through the tuyere iron beneath the fire, a coal box at hand, and the water tub, which he calls the slack tub, standing by. Beside the forge stands the anvil, on a solid stump or stand at about knuckle height, its flat face for general work, its horn for curves, and its hardy hole for tools. Ilgen wrote for a supervised school shop in 1912 and says little about eye or hearing protection, so follow the modern list in this lesson, not the silence of the old book.
Lesson 2
A forge fire is a tool you build, not a bonfire you light. Ilgen kindles the fire on the hearth under the hood, over the tuyere where the blast enters, and he dampens the coal around the fire with water so the fire stays small, concentrated, and intense instead of spreading across the hearth. That is still the way of it in a coal forge: a tight, deep fire pot of glowing coke, new coal banked at the edges to cook slowly into coke, and the work buried in the heart of the fire, not laid on top of it, so the blast does not blast straight onto your steel and burn it.
Keep the fire clean. Clinker, the glassy melted ash that forms in the bottom of the fire, chokes the blast and steals heat, so it gets fished out when the fire sulks. In a gas forge the same principles wear different clothes: a steady, neutral flame, the work fully inside the chamber, and patience while the whole piece comes up to an even heat. Either way, heat only the part you intend to work. Steel left soaking in the fire wastes away in scale, and steel hammered too cold cracks and tires your arm for nothing.
You judge heat by color, the smiths thermometer for a thousand years, and Ilgen prints the chart. In his table, cherry red by daylight is about 1450 degrees Fahrenheit, bright cherry red about 1650, light cherry red about 1800, then orange at 2000, yellow at 2150, white heat at 2350, and white welding heat at 2600. Most forging in this course happens between bright cherry and light orange. One caution the old chart cannot give you: colors lie under different lights, so learn them in your own shop, in its own light, and treat the chart as a guide, not gospel. And the standing warning from Lesson 1 rides on every heat: if you do not know what a piece of metal is, or if it shines with a zinc or paint coating, it does not go in the fire at all.
Lesson 3
Drawing out is the first true forging operation: making a bar longer and thinner. Ilgen defines drawing as "spreading or extending metal in a desired direction", done by hammering, or by pressing the metal between tools such as swages and fullers. Every point, taper, blade, and hook in this course begins here, so it is worth learning slowly, at a good orange heat, with the bar held firmly in tongs and your eye on the shape, not the hammer.
Work the steel down in stages. A square bar is forged first on its flat faces, turned a quarter turn often, so it stays square and does not drift into a diamond. As it lengthens it will want to spread sideways as much as it thins; that sideways spread is controlled by turning the bar onto its edge and forging the width back in, alternating faces so length grows faster than width. Light, placed blows beat wild heavy ones: each blow should move the metal where you intend, and a blow struck after the color has faded to dull red moves nothing but your temper and can crack the steel.
A taper is drawing with a slope. Decide the length of the point before the steel goes in the fire, mark it in your mind, and work from the tip back toward the shoulder, or from the shoulder out, keeping each face even so the point ends centred. Check constantly by eye down the length of the bar. A point that leans is corrected now, with two small blows, not later with ten big ones. When the taper is even, refine it at a lower heat with lighter blows, wire brush the scale away, and you have the skill that makes the hook and the poker in Lesson 8 possible.
Lesson 4
Bending hot steel sounds simple, and at a full heat it is, provided the heat is where the bend belongs. Heat only the section you want to move, use the quench bucket to cool the parts that must stay straight, and bend over the right part of the anvil: the flat face gives a sharpish corner, the horn gives a smooth curve whose radius changes along its length, so you can match almost any curve by choosing where on the horn you work. Ilgen lists bending among the core forging operations in Forge Work, and his practice exercises lean on it again and again: the S hook, the pipe hook, the gate hook are all drawing and bending wearing different names.
Plan the bend before the heat. Chalk or soapstone lines survive heat long enough to guide you, and stock calculations matter more than beginners expect: a bend consumes length, and a hook forged from a bar measured without allowing for its curves comes out short. Work the bend a little, look, correct, and reheat rather than forcing cold steel, which thins the outside of the bend and can start cracks. Keep the bar from twisting accidentally as you bend: a flat section that arrives at the hook eye already corkscrewed will fight you for the rest of the project.
Twisting is bending disciplined into decoration and strength. Heat an even length, clamp one end in the vise or hold it with tongs, and turn the other end with a twisting wrench or second pair of tongs, counting your turns so the twist stays even. A twist made at an uneven heat twists unevenly, bunching where the steel was hottest, so slide the work through the fire until the whole length shows one color, then twist in one calm motion. A quarter turn or a half turn on a square bar gives the classic barley twist light catching edges that make a plain poker or hook handle look like the work of a smith who meant it.
Lesson 5
Upsetting runs drawing in reverse: it makes steel thicker and shorter in one chosen place. Ilgen defines it as "the operation of enlarging metal at some desired point or place", done by hammering, ramming, or jarring, with the metal hot only where the upsetting is required, and the rest cooled if needed to keep the thickening where it belongs. You upset the end of a bar to make a bolt head, the middle of a strap to strengthen a hole, or the end of a poker blank to give its handle end some comfortable weight.
The technique is end hammering: stand the hot end down on the anvil face and strike the cold end, or hold the bar vertical and ram its hot end against the anvil, so the blows travel along the bar and swell the hot zone. The great enemy is buckling. The moment the bar starts to bend instead of swell, stop, straighten it while it is still hot, and only then upset further. Short heats and smaller bites win: upset a little, true it up, reheat, upset again. Ilgen warns plainly that upsetting goes well only while the metal is kept perfectly straight, and long experience says he understated it.
Punching makes holes without removing the metal a drill would waste, and it belongs to the same family of controlled displacement. Heat the spot to a bright orange, lay the work over the pritchel or hardy hole so the slug has somewhere to go, and drive the punch most of the way through from one side. Then flip the work, centre the punch on the dark spot the first blows leave, and finish from the back, knocking the slug out clean. Keep the punch cool: dip it in the quench bucket often, because a hot punch softens, sticks, and mushrooms.
Lesson 6
Fire welding joins two pieces of steel into one, with no filler and no thread, and for many students it is the moment blacksmithing turns into something like magic. It rests on a simple fact Ilgen builds his welding chapter on: at a welding heat, near white, clean steel surfaces pressed together unite. The catch is the word clean. At those temperatures steel grows scale, a crust of oxide, almost instantly, and scale between the faces makes a weld that looks joined and fails under the first real strain.
Preparation does most of the work. The ends to be joined are scarfed, tapered into shallow overlapping tongues, and usually upset a little first, because welding burns away some metal and a joint forged without spare stock finishes thin. Ilgen walks through the family of welds in turn: the lap weld, the cleft weld, the butt weld, the jump weld, and the V weld, and the lap weld is the right first weld for a beginner, with the two scarfed faces laid over each other. Flux is your cleaning crew: Ilgen tells the student to cover the hot faces thoroughly with borax, and borax is still the standard flux today, melting early, sealing the surface from the air, and dissolving scale so the faces can meet as bare, clean steel. Sprinkle it on as the steel passes red heat, and let it bubble and glass over the joint.
Then comes the heat itself, the highest in this course: Ilgen lists white welding heat at about 2600 degrees Fahrenheit, a heat at which the steel looks almost liquid on the surface and throws a few bright, bursting sparks. Work quickly and calmly: out of the fire, a light tap first to set the joint and squeeze out flux, then firmer blows working from the middle outward, at a heat that vanishes fast, as Ilgen warns, so reheating for a second pass is normal and no disgrace. Two standing warnings. First, the modern one: weld only known, clean steel, and never galvanized, plated, or painted stock, because welding heat makes the worst fumes of all, and no weld is worth zinc poisoning. Second, test your weld by working it; a weld that survives forging at heat and a bend test when cold has earned your trust.
Lesson 7
Mild steel, the friendly steel of this course, does not harden; it has too little carbon. Tool steel does, and Ilgen treats the subject as the crown of his course, in his chapter on the treatment of tool steel. Hardening and tempering are two different operations, he insists, often performed in one heating but opposite in effect: hardening makes steel glass hard and brittle, and tempering gives back toughness by trading a little of that hardness away. Confuse them and you get tools that snap, or tools that will not hold an edge.
Hardening, in his method: heat the tool steel evenly to its hardening heat, lower than its forging heat, only as high as needed, in his chart about 1200 to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit for tool steel, a cherry red, then quench it, plunge and keep it moving in water or oil as the tool requires, so it cools evenly without warping or cracking. The steel is now as hard as it can be, and as fragile, and it must be tempered before it is used.
Tempering is reheating the hardened steel gently and watching those colors travel: Ilgen prints the table every smith once knew by heart, very pale yellow at about 430 degrees, straw yellow at 460, dark straw at 480, bronze at 500, dark purple near 530 to 540, and dark blue near 550, with springs taken to about 570, a very dark blue. When the right color reaches the edge, quench and stop it there. A punch for striking takes a tougher, bluer temper; a fine cutting edge keeps a straw. Modern note, stated honestly: Ilgen worked by eye and color alone, and smiths still do for simple tools, but a modern shop may also use a tempering oven or a thermometer for repeatability, which is good practice, not cheating.
Lesson 8
The final project follows his own teaching pattern, three useful objects that between them use every operation in this course. Begin with the hook, his classic practice exercise. Draw a taper on one end of a mild steel bar for the point of the hook, bend the tip back into a small safety curl, then bend the main curve over the horn to your chalk line, flatten and punch the other end for a screw hole, and finish with a half twist in the shank if you want it to look like it came from a real forge, because it did. Hang something on it before you call it done.
The poker asks for length and control. Draw a long, gradual taper from a heavier bar, keeping it straight over a metre of steel, which teaches the long, honest heats and the constant turning that drawing a short point never does. Upset the handle end slightly or forge a loop or a twist into it, so the hand end is comfortable and stays cooler to hold, and leave the working end a plain, sturdy point. Forge it from plain mild steel, and dress its point back to shape when hard use softens it.
The striker is the hardening lesson made useful: the steel loop or C shape struck against flint to make sparks for fire lighting, a tool older than the forge itself. Forge it from known high carbon steel, never from an unknown file or spring of doubtful history when you are a beginner, because cracked, mystery steel under hardening can spit and fail. Shape it, harden it, and leave it hard: a striker is one of the few tools used nearly untempered, since its job is to shave sparks from flint, though many smiths draw its temper just slightly for safety against chipping. Test it against flint in the dark of the shop. Few things feel as powerful as shaping glowing steel with a hammer, and fewer still than striking fire from a piece of it that you forged yourself.
Sources
This course is taught from a classic text that is free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to this book.
Graduation
You started with safety, a bucket of water, and a healthy respect for the fire, and you finished with a hook on the wall, a poker by the hearth, and a striker that throws real sparks, plus the operations behind all of them: drawing, bending, twisting, upsetting, punching, welding, hardening, and tempering. Forge in company, keep your glasses on and your steel known and clean, and let the fire teach you at its own pace. Congratulations, smith.
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This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
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