Vent: My forge weld fell apart right in the middle of a demo

I was at the Albuquerque forge-in last Saturday showing how to make a basic fire poker. Got about halfway through the weld when I heard this pop and the billet just split open. Had about 40 people watching me. I just laughed, walked over to the scrap bin, grabbed a different piece of steel and started over. Nobody really cared, they actually asked more questions about what went wrong. Has anyone else had a demo go sideways like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony8838d ago

I've been to probably 30 forge-ins across 4 states and I notice something nobody else has mentioned. The ones where the smith had a catastrophic failure, those demos ALWAYS get more people hanging around asking questions afterward. At Colorado Springs last year a guy snapped his tongs mid-weld and the room went quiet for a second. By the time he grabbed new tongs he had like 15 extra people crowded around asking about heat control. Failure is actually better for the audience than success because it shows them what real problem solving looks like. You probably taught those 40 people more about forge welding in that 30 second failure than you would have in 20 minutes of smooth sailing. The pop itself is a pretty good way to teach people about what happens when your heat drops past the welding range or you get scale trapped in there.

noah1358d ago

Wait is this really that big of a deal? You're a blacksmith, stuff fails sometimes. Metal does weird things when you heat it up and pound on it. Sounds like you handled it fine - nobody's gonna remember your weld popping 5 minutes later. People at demos are usually more interested in the process than some perfect result. They probably learned more from seeing you fail and restart than if you nailed it on the first try. Honestly the worst thing you could've done was get mad or embarrassed about it. You laughed it off and kept going, that's basically the whole point of demos.