Ric, I hear what you're saying, and I agree with you 100%.
My work in the forge has only ever been for educational purposes. I set out to learn as much as I could about traditional blade-smithing principle and practice. I did not set out to make a living. I learnt a lot of general blacksmithing along the way, and I made damascus blades for a while and sold them, but even back 25-30 years ago it was costing me money to play with damascus. When you charge $10 PH for knife work, and people are prepared to pay you +$60PH (C1990) for writing an opinion, what's the smart thing to do?
Still, I did the unsmart thing for a lot of years, and learnt a lot from it.
I'm glad you can make a living from your forge, but even so, I reckon you'd be a rareity at the present time. I know a couple of extremely talented damascus makers in the US who have fully tooled shops with hammers that would make Thor flinch, and they just struggle along. Just to get return on capital investment seems to be regarded as a major achievement. Here in Australia, I doubt that anybody in knife work of any type, let alone specialist damascus smiths, can make a living from it. Yeah, they might say they do, but investigate them and you'll find some other source of income propping them up---often a wife who works a regular job.
I know two or three "art smiths" here in Australia who can scratch a living by doing stuff like wrought iron railings and so on (using mild steel); I know one old bloke who still does traditional stuff like resetting springs and repointing jack hammer tips, but all these people just barely make a living. If they had financial advisors---which they do not---I'm certain that the advice would be to quit work and go onto social security, because they'd be better off.
Its good to know somebody can still make a living out of fire and iron.
Michel , I'm sorry to disillusion you, but my time spent in forging would be very, very low compared to a fulltime smith like Ric.The difference between Ric and me is that Ric is working at something to make a living, I have always worked at forge work to learn specific things. You could call it an academic approach. The sort of things I have learnt would be not a hell of a lot of use in making money out of forge work.
Additionally, in the making of a keris blade, most of the work time is spent in the sculpting. The longest time it ever took me to make a keris blade was 47 man-days.
This was comprised of me and two strikers making the forging, this was pamor miring and took three days.So that's 9 man-days.
The actual benchwork took the balance of the time:- 38 days of between 8 and 10 hours each.
I am not counting the staining tme.
To sculpt the sogokan alone took 8 days---four days for each side.
The forge work involved in a keris blade is regarded as rough work that any reasonably qualified smith should be able to do.
The difficult part of making a keris blade is all in the bench work.
In all blade work I have done, I have only ever worked in a traditional fashion, using traditional tools. Doing it this way, only very wealthy people can afford fine quality work.
Read what Ric says about the cost of traditional work:- a lot of people want it, but who is prepared to pay the price?
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