It’s day 24 of our meetings. Today we’re forging hooks tools to hollow out spherical shapes, based on the experiences from the previous meeting, where we turned a convex Swedish drinking bowl with handles. We’d already forged hooks during a previous meeting, but this time Pieterjan’s assignment was to make hooks with a specific curvature. So, first, we’d draw out the shape needed to turn properly under a rim, and then forge that shape as precisely as possible.
(In the photos it looks like only Martijn was working, but because he forgot his camera, only Pieterjan took pictures of the work)
Today we’re working Pieterjan his workshop, where he has a nice gas furnace for forging and a piece of rail road track that we use as an anvil. A pair of pliers, a few simple hammers, and voilà, you’re ready to forge. We’ve already covered the steps in a previous blog post, but in short, it boils down to heating the steel vigorously and hammering it into the desired shape. But it doesn’t stop there. The steel still needs to be ground, normalized (heated three times to about 860 degrees Celsius and then allowed to cool slowly until it’s black again), hardened (heated thoroughly to about 800 degrees Celsius and then cooled quickly in oil), and tempered (held at about 180 to 200 degrees Celsius for 45 minutes to release tension from the steel, making it less likely to break).
By the way, for these hooks we used O1 steel, which is a good steel for cutting tools and is fairly easy to forge and harden with simple means.
We spent the rest of the day preparing for Draaifeest 2025, the ultimate seesaw lathe event in the Low Countries.
