Beautiful Iron

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Latest update January 18, 2010.

Fire & Roses is an amateur video documentary showing our team of blacksmiths forging a rose from a solid bar of iron. Using only the traditional techniques taught to German blacksmiths for hundreds of years. This is not a sheet metal rose, nor is it a bar that was smashed flat and rolled up as seen on other blacksmith websites. This is the real thing! Performed live for a small audience from Calontir in October of 2002. The Fire & Roses video DVD is now available for purchase by both internet and mail order. Click on the picture at left or follow this link: http://www.beautifuliron.com/ironrose.htm for more details on the video and ordering instructions.

Beautiful Iron (formerly known as Horsefeathers & Hammermen) is dedicated to the display of tools, work methods, and products of the blacksmith, and to the use of horses as the main source of power on a farm. Building on the history of the blacksmith's trade, this website offers a tremendous amount of information and documentation to help other smiths to build their own forges and to see forges other smiths have built.

With the first Coal Forge pages being written during the spring of 1998 and first published to the web in May of 1999. This website was and still is the first of its kind. Nowhere else can one find so many shops and equipment showcased as they are on this site. With literally hundreds of photos from my collections and including a few book scans along the way, a foundation of knowledge was created to be shared and to support the forge designs and theories I would later describe in my treatise on Forge Design for blacksmiths. This site has grown to include other aspects of work which I or friends of mine are involved in. There is something for everyone from beginner to highly advanced ornamental ironworkers. Updates are made as materials are gathered and time permits. This is a work in progress.

Created by a blacksmith to help other blacksmiths, this website is unlike any other. The photos of forges and design theories cannot be found anywhere else on the internet. The photos show blacksmith's forges (hearths) from around the world. Many professional shops and a few museum shops that tried to recreate period blacksmith shops. Often people who have seen my work will ask specific details of how I make my tools, built a coal forge, and learned the trade. More often still they ask me how they can learn the art and where, how, and what to get to set up a little shop of their own. The result was that I often needed to carry about 60 pounds of books and photos and videos everywhere I went. Many of these photos and other references are now posted here on this website so friends can find them at their own leisure and I no longer must carry so much stuff around with me.

My background. My name in the SCA is Hans Schlosser. I'm an ornamental blacksmith or gatesmith working on all sizes of wrought iron ornamental gates and railings and other items. I am also a mechanic and for those of you who just have to ask, yes I shoe horses- with a preference for heavy draft horses. Gates and decorative work are my main focus along with draft horse shoeing and manufacturing heavy duty hardware and repairing machinery used with draft horses.

Future plans for this site include: We have a huge number of things planned now that the Fire & Roses video is done, but before any more work can be done I must first complete the archiving of a large amount of photos and video from video tape onto DVD. After that we can begin planning more blacksmithing and class related projects as well as new material for this website. What's next for this website? Rewrites for the Forge Design series, another installment of a throttle lock on the air hammer page, a page or two on forging blacksmiths' tongs, and finally a full re-organization of the Links pages into a format that makes them easier to read and locate specific subjects. A new forum is being worked on now. These pages have waited for more than two years for large upgrades.

Updates: More new material and upgrades of older items on this website are added weekly.

January 18th, 2010. Finished re-write on Post Drill page. New photos added, upgraded some older photos. Older photos that were replaced, had been originally added in the days before high-speed internet connections. The new photos are larger and higher resolution.

September 10th, 2009. Editing of the STC-88 Air Hammer page will resume soon. Additional updates will also include new photos for the Post Drill page and the Steam Show Blacksmith page.

June 16th, 2009. Current projects leave little or no time for website updates. A new video will become available soon showing the forging of a rose bud using traditional blacksmith techniques. A new camera will solve the blurry video problem seen in our first video. The roses we make are forged using traditional techniques - NOT the smashed and rolled up variety that have popped up all over the internet recently like mushrooms after a summer rain, and not the sheet metal variety made from store bought parts - just real forged roses. More details on this later.

May 21, 2009. Current projects include a re-design and re-tooling for iron rose production and video to teach others how to forge a full size rose bud from a solid bar of iron. These are of course the fully forged and carved roses that were once made by master blacksmiths from Europe. Other work has been delayed all year due to high work load.

January 14, 2009. The Post Drill page is in the middle of a large re-write and upgrade. This was one of the earliest pages published for this website around 1999. Photos have been replaced with larger versions and new photos will be added soon.

December 20, 2008. Photo upgrades completed on Anderson Blacksmith page. Anderson Blacksmith shop is located in Colonial Williamsburg Virginia in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. The new photos are much larger photos than the originals that I first published in 1998.

November 28, 2008. Anderson Blacksmith page has been re-written and some of the photos replaced with higher resolution photos.

November 8, 2008. Steam Show Blacksmith and STC-88 Air Hammer pages have updates. The Steam Show Blacksmith page will also host a new set of steam tractor and steam engine photos later.

October 21, 2008. The blacksmithing classes were cancelled/postponed once again until my workload allows more time for hosting these events. I hope to have these issues resolved soon. SCA blacksmiths please check the Blacksmithing Classes webpage for future announcements. I will also make announcements through the usual channels where many of you first heard of the classes.

October 13, 2008. New blacksmith shop photos and updates and new steam power photos and Steam Show Blacksmith page re-written.

October 7, 2008. Large photo update in progress for STC-88 Air Hammer page. Approximately 30 photos will be added to Lubrication and Oiler sections.

September 3, 2008. The Capel Garmon Firedog page is updated and complete. This project will begin soon.

September 2, 2008. Drip oiler receiving more updates at the STC-88 Air Hammer page. More updates for other pages coming soon.

August 24, 2008. Blacksmith classes and seminars will become active again. Purpose is to produce Capel Garmon Firedog at a Lilies War 2009. See Blacksmithing Classes page for future updates.

August 14, 2008. Updates in progress. Tongs page gets a minor facelift. A real tongs page (showing how to make tongs) will come during this fall season.

May 26th, 2008. Heavy work load has slowed most updates on this site. There is a large ongoing update on the STC-88 Air Hammer page. This large update is a result of dozens of small changes made over approximately 3 months. Most notable is the additional material on use & operation of the drip oiler used on small air hammers.

January 24th, 2008. All updates on hold for another 6 weeks due to heavy workload in shop. Lots of new material to add later.

November 18th, 2007. More re-writes for the STC-88 Air Hammer page. A lot of repairs and new material added since the last update in August. Additional updates will be delayed as work load in the shop is too great. The latest job is a set of gates that will offer an opportunity for more photos and videos of this hammer in operation, as well as some good material for the ironwork section of this website.

August 24th, 2007. Produced a couple of short YouTube videos titled Forging Vine Picketts, showing a recent baluster forging job. Videos can be seen by clicking on the icons at right. Shorter versions of the air hammer forging work for this job can downloaded from the Videos section of the STC-88 Air Hammer page. More updates for the Air Hammer page are now in progress.

June 8th, 2007. Current work load is very heavy and no new updates will be made to this website for at least another 2 weeks.

March 24th, 2007. Discussion Forums not ready. I have software that can edit the forums but work on the air hammer page has prevented me from getting the forums running at this time. I expect at least another 3 to 5 days work on the air hammer page and then a week off of updates before starting on the forums again.

March 24th, 2007. A very large re-write for the STC-88 Air Hammer page is well under way. Changes and new material have taken now more than a month to install. Reason for the delays? The STC-88 page began as a journal describing the task of setting up a new air hammer, and piece by piece this page has grown very large. The large volume of additional material added over the last 3 years was in need of categorizing for easier reading and locating specific subject related postings. Most of the work is completed and the page is nearly done.

January 24, 2007. Major re-write in progress for the STC-88 Air Hammer page. Upgrades should make this page easier to read and print.

January 18th, 2007. The Discussion Forums are not ready. And workload is too great to solve the problems yet. Work on the Discussion Forums will continue soon.

November 14th, 2006. A new discussion forum is being set up now. The old forum (using Xoops) was plagued with software problems and security issues. I decided to go back to phpBB but this time installing the full program manually instead of the free one-step install offered by my webhost. The manual installation offers the features I was looking for with Xoops that were not available with the free one-step installation. The new discussion forum should be up and running during this coming weekend (November 18, 2006).

August 5th, 2006. Working on archiving of a large number of photos and video. This has been a lot of work and will take a few more weeks at the least. The first archived disk will mark half of the archiving completed. The second half of the work can be done next winter and should take less then half the time needed for the first disk. The discussion forums are not working well. The software has proved to be a total disaster. When my first archive disk is finished in a few weeks, I will begin looking for a better discussion forum program.

June 24th, 2006. The Discussion Forums are now running. Registration is not needed to view forums but only registered users can reply to or post new topics.

June 12, 2006. New Discussion Forums have been set up. There are still some bugs to be worked out but the forums are now running.

May 27, 2006. Installing new Blacksmithing Forums now. Earlier difficulties have been cleared up and adding content to the forums pages now.

May 21, 2006. Beginning to set up a new Blacksmithing Forums area.

May 16th, 2006. Updating STC-88 Air Hammer page with new material concerning safety. Started new page Resources for Forging Hammer Owners to review some of the books and other sources available to help owners and hammer operators.

April 20th, 2006. Updating and aligning new page series Air Hammers.

April 16, 2006. Posting a new series of pages devoted to pneumatic forging hammers (air hammers) and related tooling for blacksmiths at: Air Hammers. This past month we took time to visit with other blacksmiths and begin new renovations for this year in our own shop.

February 18th, 2006. Forging and testing new tooling in the shop for air hammer work and developing a new (old) style of ironrose. I planned to have the first roses in the new style made by last December but finding the right combination of work methods and tooling has been difficult. Weather has become extremely cold and work in the shop is stalled for few days. When the weather breaks then its back to the shop for design and development of the new German style roses.

January 28th, 2006. The new air hammer has helped make a tremendous improvement in the amount and quality of tooling we have in the shop. More updates on setting up the air hammer throttle stop at the STC-88 Throttle Stop page.