The Skills of a Blacksmith, Volume I, Mastering The Fundamentals Of Blacksmithing

Title: The Skills of a Blacksmith, Volume I, Mastering The Fundamentals Of Blacksmithing

Author: Mark Aspery
2006
300 pages, over 1000 black and white photographs and a glossary.

This book is for the serious blacksmith. The one who really wants to understand why the metal moves the way it does. It is a little pricey at $55 (plus $5 shipping, from the author) but well worth the money.

The book evolved out of the course notes from the blacksmith classes he teaches. The author goes into great detail on each step in the process of forging an item. Each step has pictures to go along with the explanation.

In the first 100 pages, Aspery covers basics: safety, tooling, hammer control. There is a lot of emphasis on making your own tooling: chisels, punches, drifts, etc. The last 200 pages consist of 18 separate projects. The projects are a nice mix of items: wizard’s head bottle opener, fork, ladle, knife and tooling: various tongs, monkey tool, scrolling wrench.

Chapter 7 which covers heat treating and metallurgy is quite a bit deeper than the similar chapters in Jack Andrew’s or Randy McDaniel?’s books. It would be helpful to study those chapters before tackling Aspery’s coverage of that topic.

If I have one complaint, it is that in some instances, he does not show a picture of the finished item. For example: Chapter 9 The Wizard Hook; there is no picture of the completed project. Or in Chapter 15a, the colonial spatula, there is a very small picture of the finished item which does not let you really see the item in significant detail to appreciate all the work that went into it.

If you would like to see some free samples of the quality of Aspery’s writing and photography, go to his home page, listed above, and click on the ARTICLES button at the top right of the home page. Aspery has a number of short articles listed there, about 5 pages each in PDF format. The articles are changed periodically. At the time of this writing, the articles cover: The Stylized Bird, The Ribbon Scroll, Building the Side Blast Forge.

Volume II Joinery And Leafwork is scheduled to be released in the Summer of 2008. After seeing the detail in Volume I, I can’t wait for Volume II to be finished.

Ordering information and form are available off of Aspery’s web page: http://www.markaspery.net/Home.html
Mark Aspery
PO Box 523
Springville, CA 93265-0523
559-539-0523
blacksmith@ocsnet.net

Book review by Albin Drzewianowski

-- AlbinDrzewianowski - 29 Dec 2007