This past Saturday, I headed out to Efland, NC, where Dick Snow was teaching blacksmithing. It was another meeting with the Alamance Makers Guild (the same group that visited Roy Underhill’s shop last week). I’ve done various metalworking projects before, but never straight-up blacksmithing.
Dick tends the fire
Dick had his coal forge fired up that morning. He also has a propane forge. He was telling us that while a propane forge does not need tending like a coal forge, a coal forge can get much hotter. You need that extra heat if you ever want to forge weld. We weren’t doing any of that, though; our lesson that day was making nails.
Cutting the rod on a hot-cut hardy
Dick teaches nail-making to new blacksmithers because it encompasses three of the basic techniques used in almost every blacksmithing project; drawing the steel out into a taper, cutting it to length and hammering it to give it a head. In the photograph above, you can see him cutting a red-hot rod on a hot-cut hardy. Sometimes called just the “hardy”, this tool is basically a wide cold chisel that sits in the anvil’s hardy hole. The tool sitting on the left of the anvil is the nail header. Because the nail is tapered, it only fits through that square hole to a certain point. You cut the rod a little above that point, then smash it down with the hammer into a mushroom-shaped head.
Dick teaches Ben proper hammer technique
I would say the trickiest part of blacksmithing is all of it. I usually think of metal as the material you use for precision machining, and other materials are used for more organic and artistic construction. Blacksmithing, on the other hand, is where metal is used like a fluid, sculptural material. Even something as simple as making a nail is difficult to do consistently, at least at the beginning. I made about 6 or 8 nails, and none of them matched each other.
Refreshing the fire
I’ve often thought it would be cool to use hand-forged nails in the furniture I build. You can find plenty of plans to make your own forges online, all the way down to a tiny brick-sized forge which can only make nails.
These are so cool: US bread wrappers of the 40s and 50s. Besides being tons of fun, the pictures are good enough to print out if you need to make period wrapped bread. Incidentally, the site this is from, How to be a Retronaut, is chock-full of the most wonderful vintage and historical pictures. You can waste hours of time on this site while rationalizing that you are “doing research.”
I’ve pointed to the Early Office Museum site before, but I just found this gallery of Really Big Stuff. It’s photographs of early office equipment, like typewriters and rubber stamps, constructed at large scales (think “parade float” size). It’s also a good opportunity to check out the site if you haven’t heard of it before.
The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards is an extremely useful source of information for the hundreds of chemicals listed as “hazardous” by OSHA and found in the stuff we build props out of. Rather than serve as an exhaustive guide to all information, it lists key information about each chemical relevant to work. You can view it online or download the whole thing as a PDF; I’m also throwing the link up in the sidebar of this site so you can find it every time you visit.
The Historic Naval Ships Association has a 1949 training manual titled Engine Room Tools presented in full on their website. It illustrates and describes the tools one would find on a ship at the time, namely metal-working hand tools. They are surprisingly similar to the metal-working tools you would find in a props shop, and the illustrations demonstrating their use are very cool.
I made this decorative Yoruban sword back in 2004, when I was attending Ohio University and had a lot more beard.
Yoruban sword from "The Gods are Not to Blame"
The show was called “The Gods are Not to Blame”, and it is a Yoruban retelling of the Oedipus Rex tale from Ancient Greece (the Yoruba people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Western Africa, with a cultural history of hundreds, if not thousands, of years). My future wife was the set designer on this show, and nearly all the props had to be constructed to be completely authentic; her design involved extensive research into Yoruban artifacts, furniture, and design.
This sword, while appearing like a tradition sword, was built using very modern methods. It’s actually a fairly simple construction, although it has a few hidden tricks. I carved the handle from a piece of poplar, while the blade is taken from a sheet of steel plate. I traced the shape onto the steel and used a plasma cutter to cut it out. I also cut the cross shape out with the plasma.
Pieces of the sword
Now for the hidden fun part. I took a steel rod and sharpened one end to a point. On the end of the tang of the blade, I notched a “V” shape. This is where the sharpened end of the rod went, and I welded the two pieces together; the reason for the sharpening and the notching was to give me a lot of surface area to attach my welds to.
I then had to drill a hole all the way through my carved figurine for the rod to slide into. I needed an extra-long drill bit for this part. I also notched the bottom for the tang to slide into. It was like cutting a mortise for a metal tenon. This step was necessary to keep the handle from spinning around the rod.
I threaded the end of the rod which was sticking out of the top of the figurines head, and tightened a nut down; this is how the handle remained attached to the blade. For one final little touch, I drilled out the top of the head so the nut could fit down inside, and then filled the whole thing over with some Bondo auto-body filler. The nut was now hidden within the top of the handle–with the unfortunate side effect that the handle was now permanently attached. Since this was a decorative sword and not a stage combat weapon (the blade was mild steel, and not to0l-hardened like a weapon’s blade), it would hopefully not need routine maintenance and tightening.
A collection of Yoruban swords
I traced the designs onto the blade from my full-scale drawing and engraved them with a Dremel tool. For my final step, I stained and sealed the handle.
It was a very hefty sword and a lot of fun to swing around. One day, I wasn’t paying attention while swinging it around, and I accidentally cut all my facial hair off. And that, my friends, is the secret origin of “Clean-Shaven Eric”.
Happy Spring everyone! I’d like to say that in the week since I’ve returned from USITT, I’ve found time to write even with tech rehearsals for the new Tony Kushner play and prepping for rehearsals of Shakespeare in the Park, but I haven’t. To paraphrase a great quote I heard in Charlotte, I’ve been busy making fake houses for fake people. Nonetheless, I have some links for you to spend your time reading and filling your head. With knowledge.
The Restraints Blog is a whole blog dedicated to historical means of restraints, such as handcuffs, padlocks and the like.
Last month, Popular Woodworking ran an important article entitled, “How Not to Hurt Yourself on a Table Saw“. It was the culmination of a series of posts looking at recently released data on the number of table saw injuries in the US (also worth reading). It is a good read for anyone who uses a table saw, beginners and seasoned pros alike.
Toolmonger asked the question, “What’s the best book for a N00b machinist?” The readers’ comments are filled with a number of great book (and video) suggestions for getting started in using machine tools for shaping and milling metal.
The Prop Blog features a number of auctions of screen-used film props. Though I do not talk about buying and collecting props on my site, I do love the pictures at The Prop Blog; quality photographs of cinema props can be hard to find, but this site has them in spades!
Back in 2007 when I was working at the Santa Fe Opera, we were mounting a new opera called Tea: A Mirror of Soul. It had a heavy Asian influence, with scenes taking place both in Japan and in China. I was given a drawing of a chair, which they needed nine copies of.
drafting of a prop chair
If you study the drawing, you’d notice a few things. First, it’s rather small. Normally, a chair is eighteen inches off the ground; this is only twelve. Second, the back stiles for the circular back are offset from the back legs (if you don’t know what a stile is, check out my “parts of a chair” diagram). Â Wooden chairs usually have a single piece of wood running from top to bottom in the back for strength. Where the back meets the seat is the point where a lot of stress is placed on the chair, so relying on the strength of a joint rather than a solid length of wood is inviting trouble. Finally, you may notice that the back has pieces floating in the air. That’s always an engineering challenge.
attaching the back stiles
The seat of the chair was two and a quarter inches thick. I decided to skin the top with a piece of quarter-inch plywood and the bottom with eighth-inch lauan, so the interior frame had to be one and seven-eighths inches thick. That gave me a nice big chunk in the back to attach my back stiles to. I also added some bolts through the joint for extra reinforcement.
Bottom of the chair
The rest of the joints were glued and doweled.
Next came the fun part: the back. We (the props master, master carpenter, and I) needed to figure out a way to make the back pieces appear to be floating. As I mentioned above, I was making nine of these chairs, so the process had to be repeatable as well. The master carpenter was also making a throne with this same cut-out design in it, so he began developing a jig so we could rout the design out of a solid piece of wood. We had discussed using plexiglass in the middle so the pieces would actually look like they were floating, but that would not be strong enough. Instead, we would hide a steel frame inside and have small pieces of steel connecting the pieces. Between the distance of the audience, the sightlines, and the smallness of the gaps, a few pieces of quarter-inch rod steel painted black would be as close to invisible as we could make it.
Dave making a routing jig
The photograph above shows David Levine, the master carpenter, working out the jig. Note that he’s not actually cutting yet, which is why his dust mask and goggles are off. It was a complicated, multi-piece jig with several steps involved, but the results were beautiful and consistent.
For the back ring, I sandwiched poplar boards on either side of a piece of quarter-inch plywood, with the grain of each side running perpendicularly to the other. In other words, I made a giant Oreo cookie out of poplar, with a creamy plywood center. The interior back pieces were cut out of a solid piece of poplar, Â made by gluing several boards together. I put this in the jig and cut my design out.
steel reinforcement in the back
Before I had cut out the back pieces, I had routed the channels in where I would hide the steel rod. The channels were as deep as the diameter of the rod, so once they were in, the whole back could get a coat of Bondo and be sanded smooth, and no one would be the wiser. The steel rod continued sown into the stiles and up into the “horn” at the top so the whole back could be tied together with the same steel structure.
I cut the top horn piece out of a solid chunk of poplar, which I made by laminating two boards with their grains running in different directions.
finished chair for Tea
Looking back, even as I write this article, I see a number of things I would do differently, or at least experiment with to see the results. As with any complicated prop, you learn a lot just by building it, but because you will never build the exact same prop again, it can be hard to assimilate that learning into your overall experience. As it turned out with this prop, I had only finished three of the nine chairs by the time they were cut from the show. It seems the stage was getting too cluttered, and the chairs were one of the more extraneous elements, so away they went.
That meant I got to keep two of the chairs, which let me test just how long my construction would actually hold up. The back on one of them did eventually break away from the seat, though not where I thought it would. I contemplated building more of a steel structure, but worried that the extra weight would either make it too heavy to carry, or even make it more likely to break; picture using a crowbar versus a stick of wood. The crowbar is extremely good at separating two pieces of wood from each other, where a stick of wood is just as likely to break itself before pulling the wood apart. Now look at a chair. The point where the back meets the seat is the focal point of a lever formed by somebody leaning back in the chair. If the stiles were metal (like a crowbar), it might tear the seat apart if you leaned back too hard.
But I digress and ruminate too much. Enjoy the pictures of the chair.
Making and finding props for theatre, film, and hobbies
It was a very hefty sword and a lot of fun to swing around. One day, I wasn’t paying attention while swinging it around, and I accidentally cut all my facial hair off. And that, my friends, is the secret origin of “Clean-Shaven Eric”.
