The Black Lung Tries out a Backup Career, Part 6: Our Wimpy Chickens Come Home to Roost

The morning after our kayaking/beach adventure, we had to wake up early, like 6:00, which was a real kick in the pants. We had an appointment-with destiny! Or not, as the case may be. Anyhow, the waking up period was no good for me. I legit could not lift my arms higher than shoulder level. My arms, upper back, shoulders, abs, and calves all hated me so much. But hey, no worries, we were only about to do one of the most physically demanding things of vacation. In retrospect, we should have done some of the super hard things further apart.

The reason we had to get up so early was because our blacksmithing class was down kind of near Hobbiton. It would have been much easier to do that on the day after Hobbiton instead of driving back down, but classes are only offered on weekends, so we just went back. Of course, during the day when we mentioned it, they were like, "Dang, we totally would have accommodated you on a different day if we had known," except more New Zealandy. And we never would have thought to ask at all! I feel like there's a lesson here.

We spent the day at Kowhai Forge (apparently in Maori, the wh makes the same sound as f. I'm pretty sure. Maori speakers, feel free to jump in here to correct me). The blacksmith is a guy named Rob, and the forge is in a barn behind his house. His wife, who was super nice, was named Arja. I think she's from Denmark? Somewhere in Europe, anyway. We didn't really know how long it was going to take us to get there, so we left in plenty of time, and were, of course, early. I was basically asleep in the car, and we were just going to awkwardly chill in their driveway until 9:00, which was about half an hour away, but luckily, they saw us and invited us to hang out with them in their house until it was time to start. They had a couple of very cute little kids, a great dog named Tui (like the bird), and a super unique and beautiful house. I think they had done a lot of the work on the house themselves, which was neat. Anything made of metal, like the door knobs and bathroom fixtures were made by Rob, so we could immediately see the greatness that we aspired to.

We had talked a bit with Arja over email about what kind of projects we wanted to do, so while we were hanging out waiting for the other person taking the class, Rob asked us a bit more about it. Leah had decided to make a pizza knife, and I had wanted to try making a door knocker, because they are great and I have a door. Rob seemed kind of worried about the door knocker, like, "I don't know if we will have time to make something so difficult!" but also into the challenge of doing something so complex. But the door knocker was not my idea! It was one of the ideas in the confirmation email! I wonder if they took that off the option list after we visited. 😃 Apparently no one else had ever taken them up on that particular project before.

The other person taking the class with us was this extremely young looking redhead. He was just doing half day, and his very young looking wife was also there, hanging out and taking pictures. I don't remember their names, but seriously, he looked maybe 25, and she looked like a teenager. They had driven to the forge in their electric car, which I think is super neat. He was doing some sort of battle reenacting the next day, as a roman legionnaire, I think, so his project was to make a spear head.

Each of us had our own little forge to work with. They looked sort of like the barbecue grills they have in parks, except super flaming hot. We also had little anvils next to our forges. We started off with pieces of rebar to get the technique down. We were supposed to heat our rebar, then when it was literally flaming hot, hammer it on the anvil to make it longer and thinner, and eventually to curl over on itself like a fern frond. I was not good at this. Leah also struggled with it, and the redhead was some kind of ringer. He was very good at it! Rob kept saying that being a blacksmith is not about power-it's about leverage! Apparently, we have neither of those things. I do feel that I could have done better if I had been able to easily lift my arms like I normally can. Not great, but better.

My very own anvil! This picture accurately represents how high I could easier lift my arm.

You can tell I was working hard. Look at my concentration face. Also, the way I am holding that hammer is extremely awkward, but in my defense, every part of my body felt like death.

After we got at least kind of OK at doing our rebar stuff, we got started on our individual projects. Rob had a big table with a pile of scrap metal on it that we used for all of our stuff. My door knocker was made from a piece of metal that looked kind of like a heavy duty wrench, plus another flat piece of metal and a couple of small things, and frankly I don't know what any of them were originally. Leah's knife was also a flat metal thing, and it was very cool to see them slowly turn into other stuff. So what I was supposed to be doing was lengthening and smoothing my long wrench thing (that is such a bad description, but I have nothing else). I had to keep switching arms that I was hammering with, mostly because after a while, it became almost impossible to keep my grip on the hammer. Honestly, I couldn't grip things for about 4 days after. Fun times. I tried to sign a receipt a couple of days after this, and I could barely hold the pen. I was also supposed to use my rebar skills to twist the top of the metal into a fern-like swirl. That was very hard. All of it was very hard! Whenever Rob felt like we had suffered enough, he would take our various pieces of metal and stick them in the giant, super hot forge for a while. Then he'd use what I can only describe as a giant electric smasher thing to get our metal to flatten more. Otherwise, we would almost certainly still be there, trying to get our metal to change shape. The fern-like swirl was basically impossible. I conquered the swirl so much with my rebar, but I couldn't get it with my door knocker. Rob couldn't get it either, though. I think he started to take it really personally, so he worked on it for a while as well, using a giant clamp to hold it while he bent it. It never quite curled like he wanted it to, which makes me feel better about my lack of skills, to be honest.

Leah hard at work with her flaming hot forge. 

The other big piece of my door knocker was the back plate, which Rob helped me to make look like the tail of a fantail. He actually did almost all of it, but I put the grooves in! My favorite part of blacksmithing was when I got to use the giant sledge hammer. For those times, Rob would hold the piece and shift it while I struck the vicious blows! It was also hard, but very fun, and I felt super cool. The other thing I felt moderately successful at was using the metal grinder to grind down the rough edges on a couple of the pieces that had sharp edges that you don't want to be sharp when it's on your door. Seeing the sparks fly made me feel awesome. I also was not too bad at using the special tool to poke holes in the back plate so the door knocker can actually be hung on a door.

Striking the vicious blow with the sledgehammer!

We also took several breaks throughout the day-they served us morning tea (with some super delicious brownies) and lunch, and we all sat in their super amazing back yard and relaxed with Tui the dog. I wish I had pictures of Tui. We were great friends by the end of the day. I'm not sure I would want to live so much in the middle of nowhere, but it was an amazingly beautiful place (welcome to New Zealand). Also at this point, the ringer and his wife left, so we no longer had to be compared to his natural skill level.

Proof! I did not just pose for pictures!

After lunch, Leah and I went back to work. Blacksmithing is amazingly sweaty, because not only are you working out like crazy, also, the heat from the forge is super intense. It was kind of cool when we got to Kowhai in the morning, but that didn't last. I'm not sure how hot it gets in New Zealand, but I definitely don't envy Rob his work in the summer. Leah's project was simpler than mine-I think hers was only one piece that was then shaped? So she finished first and got to spend time sharpening it. That looked really fun and awesome. I was very jealous, as I was still whacking my stuff with a hammer and making no progress. She also helped me with my project, which was great. The two of us worked together to put the lines down the sides of the back plate! We will not mention that Rob had to redo one of them totally because we did such a bad job. He was very patient with us. Rob did cheat a little bit and weld one of the bits on-he had us do everything else the old fashioned way, but we were running out of time. I didn't even care though, because it looks awesome.

With Rob, our intrepid teacher.

Guys, I'm not gonna lie, this is hard to write about. It was super interesting and fun to do though! It was also pretty $$, so I probably couldn't afford to do it all the time, but I would want to do it again for sure. Although, since it's been like 6 months, I have definitely lost all my muscle that I built, and I would have to start from scratch. Also not gonna lie, I still haven't hung up my door knocker. Basically, it's too majestic for my current house! I keep going back and forth about whether to hang it up anyway. I need to move into a stately stone mansion for it to look really right.

 The fruits of my labor!

A close-up of the door knocker in its current home on this chair. Notice the lines along the side and also the kind of fern-like swirl at the top.

At the end of the day, we headed back to Coromandel. I'm glad Leah was driving because I almost certainly would have struggled to hold the steering wheel. Overall, I'd say we didn't really find back up careers, but we did find a cool hobby that we are too weak and poor to actually do. Basically the same thing.

Next time, on The Black Lung: The Black Lung tries to wrap this sucker up.