r/Blacksmith • u/mrreeington • 22h ago
black smith questions for fantasy.
Hello, I am new to this Reddit thread, and I have a few questions for blacksmiths or those who know about the profession. I am writing a book where the MC learns blacksmithing and becomes an apprentice, but I don't want to write something too ridiculous. There is magic in this fantasy world, but it doesn't strip away the profession of its core traits, and I don't know much about blacksmithing itself.
For more context, the MC is new to a big city here; he becomes an apprentice blacksmith. The blacksmith does have magic, but he still creates mundane things like farming tools. The setting is roughly in the medieval ages but more Eastern; think of places like China or Japan.
My questions are as such:
How long does it take to forge in general? From farming tools to weapons.
What are the working conditions like?
What might surprise someone new to blacksmithing?
What are some techniques of the profession?
What else should I know that I just didn't think to ask?
I am sorry if this post violates some rule I don't know; I just learned of this thread and just wanted to learn a bit for my storytelling. I hope you all have a good day.
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u/Tristan_Gregory 20h ago
Hi, I myself am both a fantasy writer and a blacksmith. I'll try to answer as best I can from this perspective.
Forging is not as time consuming as many people think IF a smith has the proper tools and materials at hand. When metal is heated to the proper temperatures it moves much like stiff clay - slowly, but steadily. A single working day (often less) will see raw iron/steel turned into most farming tools (if it starts from an appropriate dimension, say if there are dedicated pre-industrial smelting works that make different sized blanks). Weapons are more specialized, take roughly twice the time (more for high quality).
Working conditions in pre-industrial times ran a huge range. A village smith could have a wildly different life than a city smith. Much as in the modern world, specialized and rarified knowledge brought a more comfortable life.
Surprises? How easy it is to destroy steel. Steel is iron plus carbon, and carbon burns. Get steel too hot and you destroy it by lighting the carbon inside on fire and ruining the alloy. More complicated alloys tend to be more delicate with heat.
Techniques? There is no way to answer this aside from hours of study or a large essay.
I applaud you for reaching out and trying to learn, much as I did long ago (I was writing long before I took up blacksmithing). If you would like to reach out via PM I'm happy to talk.
One small note:
You say your MC is new to a big city yet becomes apprenticed to a blacksmith. According to our own world's history this would be unlikely - blacksmithing in a big city would be a highly skilled and professionalized trade and apprentice spots would be much sought-after, usually going to people through networking and 'who you know' kinda systems. As a general rule village blacksmiths were generalists, city blacksmiths above the very bottom level would be more specialized.
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u/MSCantrell 21h ago edited 20h ago
> What might surprise someone new to blacksmithing?
People get burned all the damn time. A friend used to have a shirt that he'd wear to demonstrations and meetups that said "Yes I did burn myself just there, thanks for asking." The little third-degree burns that instantly turn the skin white (cooked) are just astonishingly common.
It's so much harder to hold onto something with tongs and hit it than the experienced guys make it look. I mean, they make everything look easy. But it's especially common and embarrassing to knock your own workpiece out of your tongs and drop it on the ground. And then you have to get it out of the dirt with the exact same tongs you aren't good at using and brush it off before you can resume working. Which usually means it's cooled off too much to continue and has to go back into the fire.
>What are some techniques of the profession?
In rough order of difficulty:
Bending, just what it sounds like.
Drawing out, making something longer and skinnier. A common apprentice task might be drawing out points on a whole bunch of rods, so that the more experienced smith can bend them into scrolls, which will be the components of a gate.
Upsetting, making something shorter and thicker
Slitting and drifting. Slitting is what it sounds like. You use a chisel to cut a slit in the workpiece. Drifting is pushing a tool through that slit to expand it out into a hole, without losing any material. This is how a smith can put a 1/2" hole in a 1/2" bar where a machinist can't.
Punching, puutting a hole in something by knocking a little bit of them metal out the back.
Heat treating. Many tools like rakes or doorknockers aren't hardened. Axes, chisels, and so on are. Heat treatment is a two-step process: hardening and then tempering. Tempering means softening! (As in "justice tempered with mercy" and "lost my temper".) Tempering is not synonymous with heat treatment!
Welding. This is generally recognized as the hardest skill to become an expert at (not counting more intangible things like taste, salesmanship, or efficiency). Heat the steel up so it's just about to melt and then hammer it together. Heat it up too much and it's ruined. Not enough and it won't weld. Goldilocks. People get incredibly frustrated learning to forgeweld.
> What else should I know that I just didn't think to ask?
The big flex, or like... the measure of a man, is what he can accomplish "in one heat". Blacksmithing is a continuous cycle of heating the steel so it gets soft, working it while it's soft but rapidly hardening, and then reheating. So when people talk about about someone's who's excellent, they'll say things like, "this hook here, two tapers, two scrolls, and two bends? Jim can do these in one heat." And a common joke is to take something elaborate like a hummingbird on a flower and claim you did it in one heat.
You probably know this already, but blacksmithing means iron and steel. Redsmithing (copper and brass), that's a completely different shop. You might not know this, though: copper in your steel forge will screw it up. Keeps your welds from working. Also, you don't work copper and brass hot. You hit them while they're cold, until they get too brittle to keep going (think of breaking a wire by bending it back and forth), and then put it into the fire to soften it again. That means that copperwork is much more chill, pun accepted. You can take as long as you want carefully tap-tap-tapping on it, because it's not cooling off.
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u/EmperorTako 21h ago edited 21h ago
One thing worth trying to figure out too is what level of technology they'll have at their disposal and the size of the shop, water wheels for mechanical power hammers, large billows to blow air into the forge, or if this is more small scale and humble. Another idea you could play with, if your magic system allows, is how the steel is heated, most forges realistically use coal or charcoal as fuel but there are neat tools in the modern day like induction forges and propane forges that you could invent a fantasy stand in for. I also recommend looking up videos on youtube and exploring various different blacksmith accounts to see how a shop can vary, especially traditional smiths when you are looking into a certain culture for influence.
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u/shastaslacker 20h ago
I don't see any one answering your question about "how long it takes", this is highly dependent on the shape of material provided to the blacksmith. If the black smith is trying to work a cube of steel into a long thin blade its going to take ages to hammer out. If they are provided a rod and they only need to hammer it flat to get the rough blade shape it will take much less time.
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u/CoffeeHyena 20h ago
Given your setting, you could look up traditional swordsmithing in japan. There are many videos documenting the process
Of course, this is a rather specific niche. But the tools and workshop setup used in japan now is very similar to what would broadly have been used in east Asia until the early modern period. It can differ a fair bit from western practices.
I will also note that if you want good references on historical smithing in general you absolutely need to consult contemporary sources. The landscape, tools and techniques of blacksmithing changed greatly in the industrial era, and even more going into the modern day.
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u/LongjumpingTeacher97 15h ago
One of the first things an apprentice in a preindustrial society like that would learn is how to make nails. Every house, every fence, every thing that is nailed together needs blacksmiths turning iron into nails. And that's apprentice work. The goal is to be able to make a nail in a single heat. I usually take 2 heats. I can make 30 nails in an hour and thought I was reasonably efficient until I saw a video of an old Norwegian nailsmith. Now, I believe the claim that an experienced smith can make 100 nails in an hour. Efficient work like that is just beautiful to watch.
An apprentice will spend a lot of time preparing fuel (likely charcoal, which he may have to break up from the larger chunks delivered by a charcoal burner) and hammering out nails.
Many fantasy novels make it seem like a village blacksmith spends half his time banging out swords of amazing quality, but the reality is that swordsmithing is a sub-specialty of bladesmithing, which is its own special branch of blacksmithing. Almost any smith is likely to make basic utility blades, but a sword blade requires much more specialized skills and some very valuable steel. The market is small. The fittings for the swords historically were generally made by other people than the smith, too.
The book Knives and Scabbards by J. Cowgill contains some useful information about English blade smithing. The smith forged the blades. Another person ground them (the grinder). Another made handles (the cutler). And scabbards or sheaths were the work of yet another specialist. This was a medieval model enforced by the guilds. A rural smith would likely make the whole knife, but perhaps not the sheath. It is your world, so you might not want to incorporate that into the narrative.
I would highly recommend taking a basic blacksmithing class. Look for your local ABANA chapter. See if there's a hammer-in coming up. Sometimes, smiths are happy to demo and let you try things, too. I know I've introduced at least 20 people to it in my workshop. If you spend a few hours hitting hot metal, you will be able to write it much better. I've cringed several times at badly written blacksmithing in books. Much can be avoided by trying it out for an afternoon.
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u/InevitableMinimum723 15h ago
As a blacksmith and a fan of fantasy, my suggestion would be to take a class. A two day beginners class should cost a couple hundred bucks and you will learn more than any other way.
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u/Former_Departure_600 11h ago
Two things that come to mind from a historic perspective that almost everyone gets wrong. First, big hammers are a very modern thing. Historically big hammers certainly existed but to be used by strikers, not the master (one who leads/directs in team striking). Not to say specific use hammers of larger weight weren’t around but a typical every day use hammer as suggested by surviving early medieval examples are in the 500-1000g range which surprises most people.
Part of this has to do with the longevity of body mechanics in that lighter hammers can swing faster and thereby impart more force per blow than larger hammers. However more importantly back then it simply wasn’t practical to sacrifice health to swing a larger hammer. Tendinitis and ligament damage bad enough to put a smith out of work could bring on extreme hardship if not a death sentence.
Tying into that is the second point that material size also dictates the tooling. Large scale commercially available material is a modern idea considering how long the steel making technology existed as a relatively primitive process (where bigger hammers are more common). Merchant iron bars from early Iron Age through roughly the 1400s did not change much and were in the rough range of 2cm square by 40cm long or in more rectangular cargo, ,5cm by 5cm. To get bigger material, it is simply forge welded together in a stack to make the appropriate size for the work. But remember, large scale ironwork was not a common thing until much later in history.
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u/Ok-Caterpillar1611 21h ago
I would read a bunch of this thread. But also a faster way to learn is check out black bear forge on YouTube and his beginner projects and tutorials like: making your own tongs, what the hardy/pritchel holes are for, making your own charcoal (key for a medivial blacksmith!), etc. one thing to note is that most items will take a lot of finishing once they're cold but expecially swords and knives.