Metalworking Is Literally a High-Pressure Business

You watch as a seasoned blacksmith takes a piece of red-hot iron with tongs out of the forge and lays it on his anvil. He picks up his heavy hammer and starts to beat the metal into a shape. You marvel at the skill of this craftsman in shaping the metal to his will, perhaps comparing him to a sculptor. While that is an apt analogy, what you ar...

Bending Metal to Your Will

While forging—the verb—is what a blacksmith does with hot iron, a forge—the noun—is what heats up the metal for the blacksmith to work. Heating metal to make it more malleable dates to prehistoric times, and even though presses and other forging machines have greatly improved the efficiency of the process for large scale modern production, quite a bit of hand forging...

The Daily Grind

A common tool found in machine shops and metal fabrication facilities alike is the metal grinding machine, usually just referred to as a grinder. While certain types of grinders can remove large amounts of material in an operation, many are used for smaller jobs, such as more intensive finish work where they smooth the rough spots left on a workpiece after all other operations ...