Architectural Ironwork
Forging Texture

b y :     e n r i q u e

It's another hot and humid day in the country. The air is thick and heavy. Add to it a scorching coal fire which spews white hot cinders and raises the temperature at the coal forge to well over 110° Fahrenheit, and you have captured a moment in time at my forge in rural North Carolina.

Even though the day is hot and sultry, I am excited about the new texture dies I have made for my 25 lb. Little Giant and how they are going to function in creating the water texture I am trying to recreate for the Dragonfly Railing I am working on.

Since I am hot forging textures on over 35 feet of 1/2" square, my mechanical hammer will help keep the sweat down to a minimum. This small hammer has the ability to output over 160 blows per minute, and is the perfect tool for the required repetitive blows to make the water texture I need for these railings.

Since it's hard to capture a still photograph of the intensity and motion which this 25 lb. Little Giant is capable of, you may be interested in watching this QuickTime movie I made awhile back showing how to draw out a point on a bar of steel.

• Digital Design - Introduction
• 1st Floor Railing - cattail newel post
• 2nd Floor Railing - perspective
  • Scaled Elevation view
• Dragonfly Split Level Railing
  • Tracing perspective
  • Creating Scaled Elevation
  • Skewing for perspective
• Outputting Scaled Drawings
  • Image Transfer

• Forged Texture Reflections
  • 25 lb. Little Giant Demo
• Silver soldering cattails
• Applying Verde patina for color
• Metamorphosis of an Iron Dragonfly
• Yin and Yang of twisting wrought iron
• Forge welding for natural form
• Basis for a distinctive newel post

• Installed railings 

Contact:

E. Vega Studios

p h o n e : 9 1 9 - 3 6 7 - 7 2 3 3

apex, north carolina

c o m m e n t s ?

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is the malleability of steel when heated in the orange to white heat ranges. I use a coal forge and "Gulf Grade A" coal for fast heats and work two pieces of iron at a time. The air gate is swung wide open and the pieces of steel are driven slowly into the fire pit until I get about twelve inches of bright yellow heat on one of the bars. The air is shut off and both pieces are left to absorb a brief moment of very intense heat.

I then pull the hotter of the two pieces of iron out of the fire and take a few short steps over to the Little Giant hammer. I push the iron all the way in to the beginning of the heat and proceed to lower the foot treadle. The hammer immediately responds with quick heavy blows setting the textured indentations into the hot metal.

As the texture is developing, I pull the bar out in 2" increments and continue to hammer the texture into the iron. As I approach the end of the bar I realize that the depth of texture is not enough and flip the bar over as I again push the iron all the way to the now cherry red end closest to me. The reason I am always pulling the bar as I work it, is because I found it harder to push the bar with these textured dies because of the grooves embedded between the weld beads of the dies.

After forging all the bars for the water scene, the straight bars are then curved using bending forks and a set of two 1 1/2" pins that are secured to a special work area on my work table.

last refreshed Mon, Sep 14, 1998
© copyright 1998 E. Vega Studios