O thats nothing!!!! Why didnt I forge it sooner??? I dont want to talk about it!!!

So we all have seen things that we want to try or learn. Many times we look back and never did. This is sad and sometimes it’s because we just figured it was not the right time, we needed to know more, or we just figured we would never be good enough to do it.
 I told a friend of mine that the hardest thing to do in blacksmithing is to work on your first piece of iron!!! I find that is even harder when you have spent a long time reading about it or watching YouTube videos. Amazingly it seems the more you know about blacksmithing the harder it is to go and try and do it………. Why?????? You may have your opinion and I have mine, however one reason I see is that because of all that knowledge, you become unable to accept anything but perfection!!!! Yah that’s right you’re just too scared to mess it up, or------ brace yourself------ FAIL!!!!! Oh yah good one there Skippy!!! My friend said he has read everything there is on blacksmithing, but never done it, so I brought my smithy to him, sadly he found every excuse to not drive 3 blocks and forge his first piece of iron. He is a very talented designer and home builder and craftsman, yet still not a forger of iron. I see others that have to have all the best tools and gear and will not forge until they acquire them. This is insanity!!!! I want to smack them upside their head and scream, “what’s a matter with you!!!!” my first forge was a hole in the ground with a pipe and my wife’s blow dryer in the other end, my anvil was a piece of RR track, a HF hammer and a pair of channel locks..
So it turns out………. I may,,,,,,,,,, possibly kind of sort of in a way roundabout way, be that way also, not really, but yah, ok, just like that in my own way. I saw a candle holder that had wedge joinery used to make some fantastic candle stands and oil lamps. I said, “Man I am totally going to do this!!!!” Well that was 18 months ago. Well I am done being afraid, scared, or whatever and I embraced the reality of possibly being on the You Tube 2014 epic fail highlight video, and jumped into the forge halfcocked with both feet and ready to get-r-done!!!! Hopefully before I thought myself out of the idea.

 First I had to build the tools. A fuller, swage, slitter, and drift.

Make a simple and executable design.
And start to forge

It was all pretty easy and I felt I achieved a great result on my first wedge joinery piece. But I felt like it looked like an alien head with antennas.

So I redesigned the wedge and made it part of the piece, because a scorpion candle stand is way more manly then a alien head stand.
       

Well now my mind is a fury of what I can do to now that I have mastered wedge joinery!!!! lol so sleepless nights and I am sure several pounds of scrap iron fails, here I come.

Forge on my friends.