Blacksmithing

Started: 2025-12-26 22:08:54

Submitted: 2025-12-26 21:50:04

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Post-Thanksgiving family adventures: boating, wake-boarding, blacksmithing

Sometime this year my brother-in-law Tristan bought a boat and a trailer, and parked it in his parents' garage, which has plenty of room for a boat (or an RV), once the other stuff in the garage gets pushed to one side. The weather was dry and the sun was peeking through the clouds on Friday after Thanksgiving so he decided to take the boat out to Big Lake in the Cascade foothills just above Mount Vernon, Washington. Calvin and I joined because it sounded interesting.

Actually getting the boat out of the garage and up and into the lake turned out to be fairly involved, but none of the individual steps were especially complicated. (I was glad that I was not the one driving a full-sized van with a trailer and a 26-foot boat on the Interstate or the streets of Mount Vernon or the winding mountain roads above the town still wet from the recent rain or backing into the boat ramp at the edge of the lake.)

The lake marked on the map as Big Lake is 2.5 miles long and a half-mile wide at its widest point. It's not the largest lake in Skagit County but it looked easy to access and was big enough to play around.

The shore was lined with houses; some looked big and expensive with their own boat ramps and boat garages, accessible only from the water. Others looked more like they could credibly be cozy mountain cabins. The scent of wood smoke hung in the air from wood-burning fireplaces around the lake as the sun descended from its low zenith (we were within a month of the winter solstice) towards the tree-covered hills surrounding the lake.

The lake was almost empty; there was one guy in a kayak and a couple people fishing from docks along the shore. Only as we left did another motor boat launch. Tristan made a few lazy loops around the lake then gave me a chance to drive the boat. In the middle of the lake with no other boat traffic it was easy to open the throttle and let the boat go. According to the speedometer on the dashboard I got up to about 30 knots (or maybe miles per hour; the indicator was vague about which "miles" it was using, but I maintain that any self-respecting boat ought to be using nautical miles). I took a few laps around the lake then gave Calvin a chance at driving the boat.

Calvin took to driving the boat immediately (he appears to prefer driving the boat to driving a car). After a few laps Tristan decided he wanted to wake-board, despite the obvious fact that it was the end of November and the air temperature was maybe 50 degrees. (I didn't measure the water temperature but I'm sure it was cold enough to be in the rapid hypothermia range.) Tristan gave Calvin a brief tutorial on how to drive the boat to pull a wake board, and then he jumped off the back of the boat holding the tow rope with the board strapped to his feet. It took a couple of tries to get Tristan up on the board and then he got up and slalomed around back and forth behind the boat a few times before he was done and we went back in the boat to pick him up. (From the timestamps on my photos Tristan was only in the water for ten minutes but it felt longer on the boat.)

We returned to the boat ramp and then had to pull the boat out of the water, which had its own set of maneuvers to back the trailer into the water just deep enough that the boat could float onto the trailer, then winch up the boat and pull out the trailer with the boat sitting evenly on the trailer. With all of this completed we drove back to Mount Vernon, stopped for gas along the way, and had just enough time to grab a quick supper before heading out to our scheduled evening outing.

We drove down to Marysville (past construction and a collision that constricted the highway and routed us onto the frontage road for a Google Maps shortcut that actually seemed to be the right thing to do) to Lawless Forge for the "horseshoe knife" class. (This was part of a plot to get us all out of the house and give us something to do.) We joined a dozen other people (some observing, some participating) under the guidance of a single instructor who walked us through all the steps along the way, starting with the appropriate safety equipment: leather gloves, a leather apron, and safety glasses (at least for people who didn't already have glasses).

We started with a half of a horseshoe, plus the equipment we'd need: a pair of tongs designed to hold the horseshoe, a hammer, an anvil, and a propane-fired forge with a blower to get the fire hot enough to melt the horseshoe.

The first step was to heat the half-horseshoe in the forge until it was red-hot and then bend it straight. This wasn't especially hard except that I was trying to keep track of everything our instructor said and I was a bit nervous carrying around a red-hot strip of metal at arm's length.

This was the point where Julian got overwhelmed by the experience and Kiesa stepped in to help him.

The next steps were:

1. Straighten the horseshoe by tapping it with the hammer to straighten it on the anvil;
2. Flatten the end into a sort of putty knife (this involved the most vigorous hammering on the anvil;

3. Shape the blade of the knife by hammering the metal into the knife and spreading it around;
4. Straighten the blade and the handle;
5. Add a bit of turn to the handle;
6. Quenching the almost-knife in water in a sudden puff of steam.

All of this took multiple trips to the forge to heat the metal until we could work with it, and then figure out the best way to hammer it without twisting the blade in some other way. The final result of the blacksmithing phase of the class was something that was shaped like a knife. Our instructor used an angle grinder to add a finger notch at the end of the handle before the blade to make it harder for fingers to slip onto the blade; that addition is visible in the picture here.

Our instructor took our almost-knives and used an angle grinder again to add an intermediate edge.

Then we took the knives to belt sanders and sharpened them.

The final result was a small knife with a credible blade, sharp enough that one might be able to use it on a cheese tray or as a letter opener. Our instructor gave us notes on how to care for it (like cast iron, basically) and how to sharpen it again. It's the wrong steel to make a very good knife but it's an interesting outcome for a few hours of work.

We ended up with three knives for our family (and made careful notes to make sure they were packed in our checked luggage for our trip home).