For Simon’s birthday we bought him a 300lb anvil. Not a simple gift to keep secret, wrap or deliver so we didn’t try.
Suffice it to say he was a willing recipient and couldn’t wait to show us how well it worked with him wielding the hammer.
We went over to his tiny house with steaks and pie and were treated to a demonstration.
It was dusk but he soon had the electric lights on and a fire blazing in his forge,
“I find coal burns much hotter than coke,” he said.
My grandmother had a coal cellar in her London house and kept fires blazing throughout the winter in her parlor and living rooms.
“Or wood,” he added.
I nodded as I watched him retrieve a red hot steel bar from the smokey forge.
“The hardest thing I had to train myself to do was not to grab it with my bare hands in my haste to hammer the metal flat while it was still glowing!”
Ouch I thought!
“The reverb is great on this anvil.” He smiled as he flattened out the steel, “I can use a heavier hammer now and get more force behind it.”
He popped the metal back into the coals and grabbed a chisel to be ready for splitting the almost molten bar.
He then hammered the tines apart and bent and shaped them in his vise under the steady gaze of one of the peacocks silhouetted in the barn eaves.
Finally, just as I was wondering how much longer my eyes could tolerate the smoke he was finished.
My very own iPhone stand!
He also makes knives,
Pieces of art like this beautiful rose that he wrapped around a black walnut handle (also crafted by him) on their pantry door,
and a one of a kind coat rack
for my slowly developing mudroom that Hubs is constructing for me.
What a handsome, talented pair!
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