https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/hammer-time-blacksmiths-work-metal-make-sparks-during-weekend-demonstrations/article_da08c3aa-5854-11e7-9091-637d4b95ebee.html
TOM KNAPP | Staff Writer | June 23, 2017
With a resounding CLANG, Dave Kauffman brings the hammer down on the magma-red steel, showering the area around his anvil with glowing, 2,000-degree sparks.
Kauffman is a blacksmith, and showing people what blacksmiths do brings him joy.
"This is an age-old craft that most people think is dead or dying. It's not," Kauffman said Friday. "People like to see it, to try it ... to walk and say, 'I made something.'"
Blacksmith Days is an annual event at the 1719 Hans Herr House & Museum in Willow Street. Patrons can watch -- and, if they want, try -- the blacksmith's art, a process that has remained relatively unchanged for millennia.
The event started on a much smaller scale on Friday, with a handful of smiths working at a few fires, with a small but steady flow of onlookers watching them work.
Saturday is the big day, however.
"As long as the weather cooperates, we'll have 80 to 90 registered blacksmiths here," Kauffman says. "Come on out and see a bunch of grimy, grungy, smoke-covered people enjoying the day."
"There's no better setting," adds David Schrock, Hans Herr's interim director.
Blacksmithing was a major industry in colonial Lancaster, according to local blacksmith John Laird.
"There were a whole lot of people making a whole lot of things," he says. "Guns, farming tools -- the things that people heading west would need to live, to trade with the Indians."
Laird runs his hand over the big doors of the blacksmith shop on the Hans Herr grounds and points out all the metal used in its construction.
"The blacksmith made all of the hardware that went into the house. The nails, the hinges, the locks -- everything," he says. "And they made the tools that the other craftsmen used."
"It's an amazing process," says Schrock. "To go from a raw material to something you can use."
It's not all about brawn. Ask Kauffman about the trade and he'll rattle off facts about smiths in ancient Rome, medieval Europe and colonial America.
He explains the importance of burning off the elements in bituminous coal, converting it to coke that "puts all of its heat" into the steel.
The luminous reds and oranges that help gauge how best to shape the heated metal.
The tools of the trade: hammers and anvils, pliers and tongs, blocks and swages, punches and chisels.
The way to choke up on a hammer and use the shoulder, not the wrist, to power the swing.
Kauffman earned his credibility the hard way, plying the trade at various local forges (including one at his home) and helping to build a Viking longship and the biblical Ark in Williamstown, Kentucky.
A former industrial electrician, he started smithing more than a decade ago. He didn't consider himself a blacksmith, though, until the day he made his own 3-pound hammer out of a Chevrolet truck axle.
"Blacksmithing is one of the most popular things we do" at the Hans Herr House, Kauffman says. "In this day of mass-produced items, to take a tool and a fire, to think something up and have it in your hand at the end of the day -- it's magical."
Local blacksmith Stan Newcomer, working on a portable forge outside the Hans Herr barn, says he developed a fondness for smithing after working for years in the more modern trades of welding and steel fabrication.
"It started as a hobby 25 years ago," he says. "My grandfather was a blacksmith. I always wanted to do this."
He enjoys the feeling he gets working on an anvil.
"You name it, I've probably attempted to make it," Newcomer says. "I guess I just have a lot of energy to waste."