Forging involves heating metal and shaping it with tools such as the forge, anvil, hammer, tongs, and slack vat. Safety is important, and training is necessary to handle tools correctly and avoid injury. The forge heats metal with charcoal and air, while the anvil allows for hammering into different shapes. Cooling in the slack vat adds strength.
Forging is the process of shaping metal by heating it until it is malleable and then bending and otherwise altering it with forging tools. The forge itself is perhaps the most important of all forging tools, but other useful tools include the anvil, cotter, chisel, hammer, stout, tongs, and slack. Each tool must be used correctly to ensure the best end product, and the locksmith must be trained on each tool. It is very easy to burn or otherwise injure yourself working metal, and even with training, tools can be difficult to handle safely.
The forge is where metal is heated. It includes a brazier and a hearth, both of which will hold heated charcoal. A tubular is mounted under the brazier; this tube allows air to be fed to the coals, thus providing a hotter temperature. An aerator is fitted to the other end of the nozzle to provide that airflow. The blacksmith will spend most of his time near the forge, which is exceptionally hot and potentially dangerous. Tongs are perhaps some of the most important blacksmithing tools for safety, as metal cannot be placed into or removed from fire by hand, even with the use of fireproof gloves.
Once the tongs have been used to remove a piece from the fire, other forging tools are used to bend and shape the metal. An anvil is a heavy metal device that allows a blacksmith to hammer metal into different shapes. One end of the anvil is flat, while the other is usually conical or round so that the metal being worked can be hammered into curved shapes. This round end is called the horn and the flat end is called the face. Between the face and the horn there may be a feature known as a step, which is essentially a smaller face set slightly lower than the face. The hammer itself is also metal and is usually quite heavy.
A slack vat is a large tub of water or other liquid used to cool the metal rapidly. This hardens the piece and adds strength to it. Before the metal cools, other forging tools will be used to produce the final shape: a chisel or stout is used to cut through the hot metal, and a cove is used to create grooves.
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