Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith

Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith”.
Blacksmithing has long been loved by hobbyists and tradesmen, whose efforts keep handwork skills alive connected by internet communities. Blacksmithing has seen a massive resurgence of popularity. Facebook, reddit and standalone forums like iforge iron have brought visibility to an art that was otherwise relegated to renaissance fairs or period historic towns. James austin is a blacksmith from the california bay area and, despite his humble nature, is among the most talented metal workers in the state.

His knowledge of working metal, combined with his proficiency at teaching these skills to newcomers and his passion for reconstructing traditional techniques, make him an asset to the art and trade of smithing. I got started in forging because my dad was an engineer who loved to complex home projects and although the family didn’t seem to think i should go in that direction. When i was young and steered me into sciences, eventually, it came out as me deciding to give up a career in chemistry and go into hand work, and it just so happened that at about the same time, i made a big break from the phd.

I was working on. I got a chance to go to germany and do an apprenticeship. I knew a certain amount of handwork metal work to begin with, but i didn’t know anything about blacksmithing and i also found myself surrounded by really beautiful old metal work. If i would ever get on my bicycle and go out and visit chapels or towns around the around my area, i would i could see the most amazing handwork from two three hundred years ago. As a blacksmith, it is my job to take a piece of cold metal and heat it up and beat it into shape, with a lot of different tools and techniques to get my vision out of that piece of metal, and so over the years i’ve taken care To collect a lot of techniques and either made or collected a lot of tools to help me do that my favorite aspects of blacksmithing usually revolve around techniques, and the tools are just the means to get there. One of my favorite techniques is piercing. I’Ve done a lot of grills in germany that involved piercing one bar of metal opening it up and letting the other bar pass through it that can reach extreme levels of complication and was actually the basis for my journeyman’s piece in 1985.. If you tackle a project where you know about two-thirds of the techniques that you need to use, but you don’t know the other third, that it makes a fantastic project to learn and, at the same time acquire those techniques and maybe the tools that you build along. The way to do the next project each time you do that you just get better and more versatile. I find my inspiration in historical technique and it’s probably because i wanted to be an archaeologist when i was a little kid that interest in really old, artifacts and old ways of making things was always with me, and it just got the upper hand.

Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith

At a certain point – and i decided to make it a job, but i really love the challenge of going back to techniques that they were limited to several hundred years ago or a thousand years ago and finding that they didn’t really regard them as limitations. They were glad they had any tools and they did the most amazing things with them, and i just like to relive some of that and to educate people that those things are possible and possibly even that they’re even realistic. Given that the tools that you can acquire for yourself on the level of let’s say, viking or medieval metal work are relatively easy to make or to come by part of my ongoing training of myself, which will never stop, because i just have too many ideas. I want to try the next thing i want to do is i want to go to sweden and norway and learn traditional axe making for the wood building trades there they build traditional wooden houses there.

Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith

They always have and to maintain their building stock and to build wonderful new, traditional buildings. They use traditional axes and they actually support the the blacksmiths who want to make axes for uh. For that purpose. The first advice i’d give to a novice blacksmith is that you need to be extremely patient.

Maker Stories: James Austin, Master Blacksmith

You have to love blacksmithing, you have to love just banging on metal, even when it’s not working right. If you, if you find that that’s what your relationship to blacksmithing is, then you can go a very long way, but you’re going to have to do a lot of learning. It’S a very steep learning curve at the beginning, and and yet you are doing something with your hands that will show you the every bit of progress, you’re making and in fact, you’ll have it recorded for the rest of your life. If you keep what you make so just be patient, be focused and look at the progress you’re making to keep up your spirits at it, because it’s a it’s, a wonderful trade. You .