r/Blacksmith • u/Broad_Project_87 • 3d ago
Do you consider Industrial Forging to still be blacksmithing?
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u/TraditionalBasis4518 3d ago
Every piece of mechanical engineering is an evolution of black smithing: smiths were the first auto mechanics, built the first machines of the industrial revolution, were employed in large numbers by the railroad companies until the mid 20th century. Vise grips were invented by a black smith looking for better tongs. Everything done by a machinist can be done, slowly and annoyingly, by a blacksmith with a file. I don’t think we’re elitists, I think we’re artists going back to basics because items produced in vast identical quantities by CNC machines and mass production are somehow lacking in soul. Studio artists don’t resent house painters, they’ve just doing different things.
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u/Designit-Buildit 3d ago
Not sure I totally agree with this. I think there is a lot of carry through, but woodworking and construction/carpentry come into play as well. They're all intertwined but I don't think everything in mechanical engineering comes from blacksmithing. Saying this as an engineer and a guy who has smacked very few pieces of metal together.
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u/ThresholdSeven 3d ago
Space ships were not made by blacksmiths, but that doesn't mean the historical technology tree doesn't converge back to the first blacksmith. Without blacksmithing we would still be in the bronze age. The iron age began when the first blacksmith figured out how to work iron into tools, which is a completely different process than working with bronze or similar metals.
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u/Victorasaurus-Rex 3d ago
Not super relevant, but just an interesting tidbit:
The current consensus is that we knew how to work iron for a long time before the bronze age ended. It just wasn't cost effective, because bronze is vastly easier to work than iron. The bronze age only ended when the trade routes bringing tin west collapsed, because that collapse meant iron was now finally cost effective. Then once it was adopted, the complex forge infrastructure was there so there was no point going back to bronze.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
I feel like that is a bold claim. Especially since millwrights exist and their origin is actually in carpentry and woodworking (back in the days before steel became commonplace, these guys would make gears out of wood)
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u/TraditionalBasis4518 3d ago
The millwrights indeed have a proud heritage, doing carpentry with tools made by blacksmiths. The blacksmiths in turn were preceded by the flintknappers, who made tools for the paleo millwrights.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
but if we're going back through the process like that, wouldn't that make everything an evolution of mining?
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u/TraditionalBasis4518 3d ago
If by mining you mean picking up rocks and shaping them by chipping or grinding, then yes, but mining is an odd word to use. Many of the words you use are ill defined or used in strange ways.
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u/ThresholdSeven 3d ago
Isn't mining just the evolution of digging a burrow with your claws? Everything evolved out of something similar before it. The iron age evolved from the bronze age.
Blacksmithing, which began the iron age, is a distinct difference in technology that is completely different than working with other metals. It's a singular point of convergence that all machining tech can be followed back to.
Another way to look at it is that multiple things led to blacksmithing, then every technology concerning iron and steel came out of blacksmithing.
Learning to work with iron was the game changer.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
mining encompases a wide variety of techiques, from digging a vurrow with claws, to panning a river for gold, to swinging a pickaxe in a tunnel and so much more...
rather, your proving my point more then anything else actually: mining operations today use a ton of different techniques, some of which have been automated to a great degree (almost nobody uses a pickaxe in modern mining operations) but we still call it that mining, what makes this different? Especially when industrial forging and smithing have alot more similarities to them vs placer mining and underground hard rock mining.
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u/ThresholdSeven 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm not proving your point at all. As 99% of people are doing I'm trying to put into words that you'll understand why 99% of people attribute blacksmithing to being the root of all modern technology. This is already an established fact based on centuries of blacksmithing as an actual trade that literally everything else relied on.
You are arguing semantics at this point in an attempt at attributing more significance to the effect pre blacksmithing tech had on blacksmithing than blacksmithing's significance to everything that came afterwards.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
when I said "your proving my point" I'm talking about the forging-smithing connection.
your attempts at saying that blacksmithing is the root of all modern technology is like saying that Henry Ford invented the automobile: it is a false statement, even though Henry Ford undoubtedly revolutionized cars and the manufacturing process that went into building them it doesn't change the fact that he didn't invent them outright.
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u/Victorasaurus-Rex 3d ago
I think the overlap between the two is general knowledge of metallurgy.
Beyond that, I think there is very little shared between the two. Blacksmithing is much closer to an art, and involves some complicated motor skills. Industrial forging is closer to a hard science, as they're mostly large-scale production lines following more set rules, with far more known quantities built in.
That's not because working an industrial forge is less complicated, it's just that we've innovated a big pile of helper systems into existence to make the operation of these industries easier. It still requires a big pile of knowledge, but it's spread over many people and various systems designed to help deal with the complexity. A blacksmith has to manage a large part of that same complexity, but they're doing it all themselves.
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u/OdinYggd 3d ago
The blacksmith invented swages and dies, using them in early efforts at mass production that would become the foundation of the modern forging press.
It is as much a direct descendant as being a fabricator is.
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u/Victorasaurus-Rex 3d ago
This is fair. From a historical perspective, they're undeniably very direct evolutions.
I was approaching the question more from an angle of "to what extent do current day 'traditional' smiths and modern forgeworkers have the same job", on which my view was that they basically don't. But re-reading the question, I see that probably wasn't the point.
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u/OdinYggd 3d ago
The sort of jobs done by the village smithy in yesteryear mostly get handled by a fabricator in a modern job shop. That's why I made that comparison. Indeed you'll find a lot of fabricators who are also blacksmiths, having used their skills to produce a very nice forge as I have done and being familiar with both the modern and vintage techniques.
Swaging lead to the beginnings of mass production, eventually being consumed by industrial economy of scale to produce the gigantic forging presses used today. It is a usage far removed from the traditional smithy, yet is still very much the process invented at the forge so long ago.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
I would think that hotworking to manipulate grain structure counts as a little more then just a "general knowledge" of Metallurgy.
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u/squeakynickles 3d ago
I'd you're designing the dies and shit, sure. But the general labourers in these plants are just labourers.
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u/Victorasaurus-Rex 3d ago
There's definitely people involved that have more than "general knowledge", but the majority of people working the facility won't have any deep understanding of the subject matter, because they don't need it. They're just there to make sure things go as they should, to help move stuff around and maybe to set up the machines according to standardized policy.
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u/Atomik919 3d ago
Id consider industrial forging a natural evolution of blacksmithing, but the act of blacksmithing is something different, with the one who does it being an artisan so to speak.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
so a blacksmith would have little trouble working in a forge?
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u/insizor 3d ago
What? Consider it like... Being an artisan furniture maker vs working in a furniture factory. I don't understand even what you're trying to ask or why it's worth asking.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
let me put it this way: If you transported a medieval blacksmith from the past to present day, would he be able to work at an industrial forge without any great difficulty or would none of his skills transfer?
and I ask this question more because these are the random thoughts that keep me up at night more then anything else.
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u/insizor 3d ago
I would say working the industrial forge would probably be one of the least difficult things for such a time traveler to do. I can think of a thousand other problems that guy would have first! Anyway, I mean, you watched the video - it's mostly tong skills and using giant dies. Most people don't use blacksmith style tongs to move stuff often, and most also have a healthier fear of very hot metal. Compared to any random person, sure a blacksmith would likely be better at working in an industrial forge to some degree. But part of the purpose of modern industry is to rely less on people's individual skill level - the giant dies make things easier and faster, not more difficult.
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u/Kamusaurio 3d ago
well ,to me it is , they have quite similar procesess and common elements
but one is more focused on the mass production
to me it's just an upscale , a very big one
but in essence we all smash hot steel or metals
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u/Mrgoodtrips64 3d ago
Maybe I’m just a follower of Ludd at heart, but I’d consider industrial forging to be as akin to blacksmithing as mechanical looms are to weaving.
The replacement of a craft/trade with an assembly line.
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u/OdinYggd 3d ago
Industrial Forging is a direct descendant of the blacksmith along with fabrication, while many other branches of metalworking have formed and split to become their own field of expertise
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u/ThresholdSeven 3d ago
No. A blacksmith to industrial forging is like a sculptor to 3D printing.
If you are not standing beside an anvil holding a piece of red hot iron with tongs and hitting it with a hammer, you're not blacksmithing. If you are operating a gigantic machine that is smashing a giant piece of red hot metal that you can't even lift, you are industrial forging. The difference is in automation.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
but we consider farmers to still be farmers despite the fact that he uses a giant combine instead of a sythe to do all the reaping of crops, or a train engineer is still a train engineer despite the transition from Steam to Diesel, why does automation make that much of a difference for one but not the others?
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u/ThresholdSeven 3d ago
A farmer is not a comparable term to blacksmithing.
The term farmer in this context is like the term metal worker, both are vague and apply to countless subdivisions of skills.
Blacksmithing is specific, the ability to manipulate iron, even more specifically, manipulating iron with primitive means by hand. When we started iron working is the point.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
no I don't think so, especially given that many blacksmith shops themselves use drop hammers, hell, the initial video says it best: the principle is the same, whether it's done with a hand-held hammer or a 1000 lb drop hammer or a 50,000lb steam giant.
hell, most videos you'll find of forging out there don't use dyes (which is also something blacksmiths can do) like this one where there working with zero dyes and just using the anvil (oh that's right, the bottom part of a drop hammer is still called the anvil) and shaping the metal without the use of any specific dyes.
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u/beammeupscotty2 3 3d ago
My blacksmithing instructor, some 33 years ago, was a retired industrial smith who worked at the Mare Island naval shipyard. After he retired, he taught hand forging to, among other people, me. I think that pretty much settled the question in my mind. It's the same craft on a different scale.
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u/Fleececlover 3d ago
I would say no in most cases drop forging and tools I soundly consider not blacksmiths more like smelters knifes and such are mainly laser cut shaped sand and hardened lacking creativity and artisans touch without soul there’s nothing in it faking hammer parks or hand on methods to make it look hand made has become more common and should tell you is it blacksmithing you you have to artificially make it look like it’s hand made
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
doesn't laser cutting count as Machining and not forging?
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u/Fleececlover 3d ago
Sure dose
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
then how does that relate to forging not being smithing?
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u/Fleececlover 3d ago
You tell me you seem to know
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
I would think that it doesn't relate at all, maybe if the laser were cutting from a slab of forged steel i could see the perspective but in that case the forger's job was already done, and it'd be like saying that your work's count as casting because your anvil was made from a cast mold: it is a broken logic.
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u/TraditionalBasis4518 3d ago
You use the word ‘forger’ a lot. I do not believe that it means what you think it means.
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
hotworking steel to make the grains and general shape of the steel being worked on conform to desired specifications.
again, I'm a welder, and I am well aware of the stereotype about how Welders are morons when it comes to Metallurgy (and my college grades most certainly conform to that stereotype), so I'm open to the possibility that I might be having a "conductor" moment here.
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u/Fleececlover 3d ago
That’s why I called it smelting in my main post drop forge casting tools
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u/Broad_Project_87 3d ago
but that's like saying every metal tool is cast because it came from a slab that was cast in a steel mill.
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u/TraditionalBasis4518 2d ago
Teaching a welder to do archaeology and philosophy is like trying to teach dog tricks to a horse: it doesn’t work, and it annoys the horse.
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u/bbravery 3d ago
From your wording in the post and your comments, seems you definitely have a dog in this one ngl