How Much Do You Know About Blacksmithing?

Pig iron comes out of smelting or blast furnace. It's a crude, brittle high-carbon form on iron and the name comes from the fact that when it's poured into sand molds, it looks a bit like a little pig.

Slag is the unwanted byproduct of smelting and is sometimes called "dross" or "tailings."

Quenching metal involves cooling it down after it's been heated. Quenching can involve several different liquids from water to oils, and the purpose is generally to make the finished product harder.

Annealed metal is heated to not quite melting then allowed to cool naturally. It makes the metal softer and much more easy to work with and removes stresses.

A blast furnace raises the temperature by allowing compressed air to blast through the bottom. These furnaces are remarkably old and date back to the first century BC.

An arbor press is a hand-operated press that's pretty small and can be used for tasks like riveting as well as staking or pressing pins into holes.

A Pritchel hole is the rounded hole on the top of an anvil that can be used with a Pritchel, a kind of punch, to punch holes in metal, like a horseshoe.

Scale is the oxide coating that forms when steel is heated. It's black and flaky and will come off pretty easily as the steel is hammered.

Unlike cast iron, which has a high carbon content, wrought iron is low carbon and is usually best used for rolling rather than casting. This is why you see so much fence work made from wrought iron and not many pans.

The hardie hole is the name of the square hole found on top of an anvil. It's used for tooling, punching square-shaped holes and such inside the metal you may be working on.

Flux is any compound that you put on the metal to keep oxygen from getting to it, which in turn stops it from oxidizing. You can buy fancy flux compounds to do this or even use something simple like charcoal or borax.

A crucible is a container that holds metal as it melts. Back in the day, these were simple clay pots. As time went on they, of course, became a little more complex. Essentially all it needs to be is something that can withstand the heat.

A farrier is a smith that works with horses. Farriers make horseshoes and fir them to the horses and will also care for the horse's feet by trimming and balancing their hooves.

Cold forging is sometimes called room-temperature forging, mostly because it doesn't involve adding any heat. How does that work? Rather than shaping by melting and manipulating, extremely powerful tools are used to just bend and shape the metal.

A brightsmith chiefly works with bright metals. While a tinsmith works with tin and a silversmith with silver, a brightsmith will use any bright metals to make jewelry, cookware or whatever lends itself to that kind of material.

The Catalan Forge was invented in the 8th century in Catalonia, Spain. Also called a "bloomery" it forced air into the bottom of the furnace to heat the fuel and was essentially a rudimentary version of a modern blast furnace.

The Bessemer Process was the first inexpensive process to mass produce steel from molten pig iron. Air blown through the molten iron would remove impurities and you'd end up with a fairly decent quality product when it was all said and done.

Swaging is what you call it when you hammer a section of metal into a hole and force it through to make it smaller or maybe reshape it from round to square.

A bellfounder is what you call someone who makes bells in a foundry. It's an art form that dates back to at least 2000 BC and is separate from normal blacksmithing as the process of creating a bell that produces the proper sound and is also strong takes a bit of skill.

It may not be the most clever name ever, but an anglesmith is what you call a smith who specifically bends and joins metal at angles.

Sometimes called a beak or a horn, the bick of an anvil is the section that looks a bit like a cone. It's used for shaping and hammering curved pieces.

Clinker is the catchall name for all the junk that can form near where the air is blown into the forge. Slag, charcoal, coke and other junk forms in the forge. It can be recycled for use in things like paving footpaths.

An armorer may also repair guns but a gunsmith repairs, creates and modifies firearms, making them a much more in-depth kind of a smith.

A forging press is often a massive, hydraulic machine that will bend and shape metal into fairly complex shapes that would be extremely hard to create by hand.

Blanking is what you call using a machine press to punch out a piece of the metal you're working with. The punched out piece, usually made in a specific shape like a circle, is called a blank.

Austenitic steel is non-magnetic and forged with high chromium and nickel to produce very shiny steel that is resistant to corrosion. This is pretty much the most popular kind of stainless steel on the market.

Brinell Hardness is the name given for the measurement of metal's hardness as determined by a specific process. A steel ball will be pressed into the metal at a specific pressure and the dent it makes is measured to determine the Brinell Hardness Number.

Ferrous metal refers to metals mostly made from iron while non-ferrous metals are those that are not chiefly made up of iron. On the periodic table, "Fe" is the symbol for iron as it comes from the Latin word for iron which is "Ferrum."

Puddlers worked pig iron into wrought iron in a process that was actually very dangerous. Because they were working the iron in a reverberatory furnace, the heat and toxic fumes would often greatly lower a puddler's life expectancy.

Tinkers were not full blacksmiths, making things like weapons or wrought iron, but they could work with tin and do simple repairs for everyday people, especially out in rural areas where there may not have been a smith handy.

Shot blasting is very similar to sandblasting only the process obviously doesn't use sand. Instead, balls of abrasive steel are forced against the metal surface to clean and polish it.

If your job was to stoke the fires, you were a stoker. These workers were sometimes called firemen or furnacemen, and their job could have even been on a steamship or any other place that required the use of a large furnace.

Tempering is the process of making metal stronger. When iron is heated and then cooled down, the hardness of the metal increases, making a stronger finished product. You can also temper chocolate to make it smooth and shiny, too.

Soldering is a pretty common method of bonding metal where a soft metal filler called solder is heated until it's molten hot and then melts between two pieces of metal, bonding them together. There are various kinds of solder that offer different strengths, but some like brazing require much higher temperatures.

The seven metals of antiquity were the oldest metals that humans identified and made use of, as far as anyone can tell. Products made from these metals date back to prehistory and serve as examples of the earliest acts of blacksmithing.