ON THE TOOLS

At Kowhai Forge in Waikato you can learn the old-school skill of blacksmithing, but you will need to put the arm-breaking work in, as Gerhard Uys discovers.

With each strike the glowing steel changes shape. Before long you start seeing life. The action is mesmerising. The tiniest flick of Pinkney’s hand guides you to an end result.

The molten steel glows hot. The rhythmic ting-tang, ting-tang, ting-tang, of two hammers striking steel echoes off the forge walls. I count “one-two, onetwo, one-two”, under my breath. When you swing a sledgehammer long enough you manage to find an arm-aching rhythm. The piece of steel I began working on a few minutes ago looked like something you’d throw away, but now, a red glowing axe head is taking shape.

Now it is something I can chop a tree down with, or use if an angry Viking happens to attack me.

My arm aches, but it’s glorious.

I am at Kowhai Forge in Te Awamutu, Waikato, and I am making an axe the old-school way, with fire and sweat.

Rob Pinkney and wife Arja began the forge when they realised the art of blacksmithing would disappear if someone did not pick up the banner to keep the skills alive.

Pinkney began his career as a farrier, shoeing horses in local towns such as Taupō. He also practised the art as far afield as Japan.

It was during his early days as farrier that he was exposed to skills such as fire welding, a process of merging two separate pieces of molten steel. These skills are now disappearing, he says.

He also worked with a blacksmith who created gun barrels from damascus steel. This steel is known for its strength and recognised by a wavy pattern.

Five years ago Pinkney and Arja realised that by passing the skills on to others the art could survive. He left horseshoeing and started Kowhai Forge.

Now the average Jane or Joe can visit the forge, put on a leather apron, pick up a hammer, and come for a few hours or days of blacksmith work, and a fair bit of sweat, flames and aching arms.

The average day visitor can make an axe head, Japanese-style kitchen knives or hunting knives. But you could make anything you envision, if time allowed.

A day at the forge starts with a languid coffee and cake, and a discussion on what you would like to forge. Each attendee comes with some sort of plan. On the day I visited I first wanted to make a knife, but examples of Viking bush axes swayed me. One attendee wanted to make a lizard to use as a door handle.

Pinkney starts by using chalk to sketch mockups of knives or axe heads on a steel work table, until he and an attendee agree on a design.

Then the work starts. Pinkney takes the lead on forging. A piece of steel is heated until it glows so bright it is hard to look at directly.

Pinkney plucks it from the fire with a pair of tongs, settles it on an anvil, and with the strike of a small hammer shows you where the piece of steel needs to be hit to shape it. You then use a sledgehammer to strike where he indicates.

He strikes to show you where to hit, and you bring that sledgehammer down with full force. Then you repeat. And repeat.

With each strike the glowing steel changes shape. Before long you start seeing life. The action is mesmerising. The tiniest flick of Pinkney’s hand guides you to an end result.

Throughout the class Pinkney makes small adjustments to how you stand or swing a sledgehammer.

“Stand like this, hands further apart, harder!”

Every change he makes to how you approach striking makes a clear difference to how effective you are with a sledgehammer, and how much energy you save or not. There are many things that make or break the forging process. Coal is one of the most important ones, Pinkney says.

“Luckily, Stockton Mine on the West Coast produces some of the highest-grade coal in the world,” he says.

This coal is mostly exported for use in the steel industry, but Pinkney buys it to use at Kowhai.

“The coal is extremely efficient, meaning it produces a lot of heat from a small amount of coal,” he says.

He uses three shovels full for an entire day’s work, and says it produces more energy than any other coal he has ever worked with.

To become adept as a blacksmith, one of the building blocks for an apprentice is to learn how to make chains, Pinkney says.

“Making the links in a chain teaches an apprentice to fire weld and is an integral learning phase for a blacksmith,” he says.

“The constant merging of molten metal is critical because a bad weld means a chain is useless. Some apprentices make chains stretching for kilometres and get the basics of the craft figured out by the constant repetition,” Pinkney says.

“Another important process to master is tempering.”

Steel that is not treated in the right way becomes brittle. Heating and cooling steel intermittently will make it both hard and flexible. This is the tempering process. If a hot piece of steel is quenched in water it loses heat very quickly. If it is quenched in oil, it loses heat slower. Understanding this process is key.

Done right steel can harden into a sword blade, done wrong it is as brittle as a cookie.

Pinkney takes the art side of blacksmithing very seriously.

“All art needs balance,” Pinkney says. He applies Fibonacci’s theory of the golden ratio to bring balance to all his work.

The golden ratio is a ratio of approximately . . There are many who believe this mathematical ratio is found in nature, and that art that uses this equation to determine the proportions of each piece of art work, and how it fits together, is in balance and beautiful to look at.

In this theory all things in nature follow a rule that brings balance.

Pinkney uses golden mean calipers to see if, for example, the handle and blade on a knife will be in balance and fits one’s hand. Or if the blade of an axe and where the wooden handle fits in are in proportion, which would mean it is balanced when used.

If Pinkney can help it, this art won’t die.