I love Alec's positive encouragement when blacksmithing. he is a great teacher. I hope you do more co-ops with him in the future, there's a lot you can learn from him
He's in the uk until spring but i agree. Alec's persona on video is always positive and fun to watch. He'll probably start a school at some point, i bet 5$
he oozes charisma so much that when youtube started stopped showing him as much in my home page i seeked out his channel after a year. great guy great content
Even when things seem to be going terrible, he rarely ever gets terribly down. A problem can be rather exciting for someone like him, cause it could mean using/learning new techniques, making new tools for the job, or dismantling something to really understand how it works
Give him a subscribe, it gets better from here. I've been watching him sense he was a 100k youtubelet making vlogs about teaching classes in his tiny workshop in England, and he's been awesome from then till now and probably into the future.
@@Skiddlescout unless prepped correctly, just making a mash from cannabis wouldn't do anything because the active chemical is THCA until it's heated then it becomes THC
Also since you said you wanted to harness water power maybe you could look at the video on "How to make a Water powered Hammer (Monjolo)" from the channel "Primitive Skills". He doesn't really talk but he show his process nicely. It could help a lot.
Tip: When you are forge welding make sure to brush off the scale. Even with the Borax, you will create little pockets of impurities that will leave cracks in your billet.
@@varjen018 nope, I was too! Also yelling about getting it hotter to forge weld... when I was apprenticing, my teacher kept saying it should damn near be a sparkler when it comes out to get a good forge and then actually hit the damn thing to set it. Took a while to get used to it!
a collab i never expected but I'm happy it happened to very good channels what i love about alec steele is that the channel is about the journey not the ending of a project a failed project is also worth a video and what i love about how to make everything is that it show the most simple thing take a lot of work to make
@@sarenhs4535 Using scrap iron is kind of a cheat code, that's what I think people are getting at. Perhaps he got impatient, which is kind of understandable, but that's what smithing requires.
I'm loving you channel Alec, been watching for a couple of years now. Wish I had the room to do some of those things now. When I did have the room and did a lot of these things I found it always paid off taking more time in getting things set up and spend more time in doing the actual bloom. It always seemed to take twice as long as I thought to get it right.
I love when you collab with other TH-camrs. I mean you’re trying to examine every specialization we as a society have built up over thousands of years, and what better way to learn and teach than by collaborating with people who are modern day specialists.
This gives you an appreciation of how far we've come. This is a bit like watching someone in a modded version of Minecraft work their way up to nuclear reactors and starting off the game punching trees and rocks. I think a lot of folk take for granted how far on the tech tree we are right now.
Is this a crossover episode?! Really great stuff, love to see these collabs, and with arguably the blacksmith who's been the most influential on me recently no less
Socially, he looks like a pain to work with. Like if the attention isnt directly on him he always seems so stale and judgemental. Just a random persons opinion though.
Every blacksmith I've ever seen on TH-cam or met in real life have always been great, soft happy people, I love blacksmith's and think they should get a bit more recognition.
For not knowing all the ins and outs of forge welding, I, amazed you got some of that material to stick together at all! To help make it easier next time, try removing as much scale as you can from the surfaces you want to stick together. The metal you were trying to weld together was super bumpy and hard and full of oxidized metal, so it didn’t want to stick, but if you can get most of the oxidation off they’ll stick together much easier next time!
Its wedged and then cross wedged with iron. You can see how alex makes his hammers on his channel. Oh god I just saw Andy's hammer. I'm sorry for commenting without seeing the whole video
It's interesting that this channel is the one that helps me deal with being a perfectionist when it comes to making things, especially with blacksmithing. When the internet is flooded with people that have been doing these things for years, it's hard to grasp what it's like to be a beginner. Your projects don't have to be amazing, or awe-inspiring, just doing it is the important part. If you make something functional, it should be considered a win.
"Or your teeth if you're particularly brave" As someone who has had to close a back of a suburban by biting the leather strap (hands were full and didn't want to do multiple trips), I think I qualify. It should also be noted I can use my toes to open doors, so I think I win
@@joshd2013 before I take on this challenge, how strong does the pull weight need to be? I can do this easily, but first I need to know how much I'm yoinking back
Alec is so incredibly skilled. I can just imagine how it would have come out looking if you to figure it all yourself. It'd be like a pair of chopsticks tied together with a nail in a wobbly hole.
Alec has a great video on how to properly fit a handle to a hammer head. I've used his techniques many times when reconditioning vintage tools I've sourced from yard sales.
i'm a huge fan of both channels, you two are passionate about your subject and fullfill my crave for the type of content that you provide. You both give us super high quality content, and this cross-over video was a blast for me. I waited for this video since a while and wasnt disappointed, it was awesome, love you guys, merci beaucoup from France !
I trained with Alec back in the day, and I know how difficult the 4 sided drawing out technique he uses is to master. Good job, and good job as well getting those forge welds to stick. Not an easy thing to do as a beginner!
Hey man fellow blacksmith here, im not sure if its just the camera or not but you'll have much better luck with forgewelding if you abrade away the scale layer of the metal. Also try to do rough shaping at a glowing yellow temp evenly throughout the billet, any hotter and you risk "scorching" the steel.
You need you use a crucible, when you put that usable iron into the crucible it keeps extra carbon, and impurities from getting to the iron. This is called crucible iron, and it was highly prized in 1200 AD due to its amazing resilience, and flexibility. I wasn’t sure if you had thought of this yet so I decided to just inform you to help, I’ve been experimenting with ore I found in my hometown and it was just way too impure, so if you melt enough iron from the ore you can put it in a crucible and seal it to create a solid chunk from all the small pieces of iron you created over the few runs you made
He might end up doing that at one point but I think we are still a bit off from there. This episode still counts as 1000 BCE and the very earliest evidence for the production of crucible iron is from around 300 BCE and it didn't really become common until around 600 AD.
@@darthplagueis13 very true, I would like to see him try and make some graphite crucibles, I know that wouldn’t be a thing in the era he is in, but I don’t think clay would cut it quite as well as graphite clay would, its basically the same process when making a clay crucible just graphite would be included within the mix, I was actually planning on trying to make my own crucible, and mixing some bloomery steel, and some relatively low carbon steel to help get the brittleness out of the high carbon bloomery iron. I can tell it wouldn’t be a great quality iron because it’s basically become cast iron, which is why I’m mixing the low carbon steel to help dilute the carbon content
This video is immensely valuable to a beginner blacksmith like me. I have been really struggling to make a decent set of tongs. I am excited to try Alec's method.
@@Prober61 He didn't make any iron. The iron you see he "made" is from the scrap nails etc he put in there. The bits he couldn't use because they fell apart is actually the bits he tried to make.
I came here because I saw Alec's name in it and thought - huh, I don't recall seeing that before. Now - I'm like - wow, someone tracking weapons and tools through the ages and recreating them - that's awesome. I'm binge watching your channel for the rest of the night.
Hey Andy, a tip for your forge welds when you're using ingots like that might be to hammer them together at a cooler temperature to mate the surfaces before trying to heat the pieces to welding temperatures. Then when you have it hot enough, light, fast taps will help the pieces stick. And weld in smaller sections over multiple heats. Love your videos, keep 'em coming.
It's a bit embarrassing. How the hammers turned out (they aren't even hafted), and how poorly he was working the bloom pieces as well (also looks like a heat problem.
Oh man, genuinely 2 of my favorite channels in one video. I love your collaborations, I've discovered a few new ones through them. You guys introduced me to TastingHistory in the recent garum video, spent most of my week burning through his vids too.
He also used an anvil and hammer he didn't make when making those tongs. Honestly I don't think you can compress 10,000 years of development and a million lifetimes of experience (with division of labor, research, etc) into a single person's youtube channel without taking some shortcuts. You can find nearly infinite ways he's leveraged modern tools to accelerate this process. How did he transport the ore he found in Utah? Where does the firewood come from? Does he start the fires by rubbing sticks together, or make his own matches? How did he meet and communicate with Alec? Etc ad infinitum. The first knife was made purely from rocks. With that demonstrated, he's accelerating the process by multiplying the raw material with some non-hand-sourced stuff
I agree, the modern steel almost certainly has lower impurity content and useful additives. It's still impressive what he's doing, but this one fell a bit short of my concept of the spirit of "the reset"
@@ryrandom8785 but he does have a credit card and an Amazon account. He could have ordered iron ore. Or ran sand over a magnet to get magnetite. Sure the magnet isn't accurate, but the magnetite is, so at least he's using proper materials. It's like saying your meal is organic when you used factory farmed beef with suppliments and all the antibiotics it can stand. There's a big difference between that and beef from a cow that was fed factory made sweet feed with its grass.
I've seen things like on Black Bear Forge, when he forge welds it's like a tiny sprinkle of flux. I'm not sure how it works, but I wonder what effect the heaping piles of borax had on this.
@@TheJohnreeves the borax serves to stop the iron from oxidizing on the welding surface. Adding excessive borax might make it a bit more difficult, but the biggest issue is that he's not cleaning the iron off before attempting a weld. The welding surface needs to be very clean before joining.
I'm noticing that you "anvil" is moving a lot. You are losing energy everytime you try to work your material. Get a bigger rock. A much bigger rock. A very large very hard rock. Your rocks that you are using looks like sandstone. Too soft too much moisture, too much movement. I think that's why it is breaking. Go bigger, harder and try to tie to a big heavy log. Add mass. I know that I'm kinda back seat driving here, but I'm fascinated by your journey here and want to see you succeed.
When the iron is sparking, the sparks are small pieces of the iron flying off, burning. Combined with that iron burn before it melts, you will have parts of your iron burn away then you try to fuse two pieces of iron together. So you want your iron just hot so it melts, then quickly hammer them together hard, and back into the fire. Around 2-4 strikes are recommended between heatings. If you have it out too long you risk undoing your work, as when the iron cools, the welding part is the weakest and is what is going to give first under the stress from the hammer.
I think people forget that making iron was a large community process requiring the constant work of probably very many people prospecting, gathering, crushing/refining, multiple furnace types working the basic metal, coal and charcoal makers, brickmakers, large bellow operators/makers, and finishing. Its ALOT for one man to try and accomplish esp if your trying to do everything from scratch.
Every single time you want to make really good forge weld. You need to have completely clean surfaces. No scale, no dust. Nothing. So if you want to forge weld two stocks like you did. Give them a few light blows with a hammer when their are cold to break off the scale. That should help. Absolute best is grind the scale off but classical brushing the stock while dark red hot will do the trick. Keep it up. It’s wonderful what you are doing.
I’ve been watching Alec for a really long time. Him and Will are great craftsmen and artist. Keep up the good work and keep beating that steel. I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years and it is a fun thing to do and very rewarding. I can’t wait to see how far you take it.
I can't wait to see the next couple of inventions. It is great pleasure to whatch those videos. I hope you will make even more content of such quality. Stuff presentrd on your videos is like from my dreams.
I love Alec's positive encouragement when blacksmithing. he is a great teacher. I hope you do more co-ops with him in the future, there's a lot you can learn from him
Been watching his channel for 2 or 3 years now, absolutely love it.
And his skill at teaching. When you can teach someone as unhandy as Andy to blacksmith, you got skills.
Agreed, I’d love him as a teacher
He's in the uk until spring but i agree. Alec's persona on video is always positive and fun to watch. He'll probably start a school at some point, i bet 5$
@@alex0589 he has done lessons in the past, and I'd say it's likely he'll do it in the future.
The sheer amount of charisma in this blacksmith astounds me
Check out his channel, you think that was a charismatic performance....
he oozes charisma so much that when youtube started stopped showing him as much in my home page i seeked out his channel after a year. great guy great content
He's great smith I've been watching him for roughly 4-5years he is painfully optimistic 😅
Even when things seem to be going terrible, he rarely ever gets terribly down. A problem can be rather exciting for someone like him, cause it could mean using/learning new techniques, making new tools for the job, or dismantling something to really understand how it works
Give him a subscribe, it gets better from here. I've been watching him sense he was a 100k youtubelet making vlogs about teaching classes in his tiny workshop in England, and he's been awesome from then till now and probably into the future.
I love how the channel has become 50% brewing alcohol and 50% metallurgy
Pretty much sums up history
bassicaly a dwarf
@@naltlan7651 So dwarfism is the next step in human evolution ;)
I'm waiting for the weed brew. I'm curious what alcohol would taste like if made using weed, and I'm curious what would happen with the THC
@@Skiddlescout unless prepped correctly, just making a mash from cannabis wouldn't do anything because the active chemical is THCA until it's heated then it becomes THC
The collab we've been waiting for
Yes
True
They have already collared in the past tho
Just what I wanted to comment
I was kinda hoping black bear forge but alec is an incredible blacksmith
YAY!!! ALEC!!! He's cool and really good.
Also since you said you wanted to harness water power maybe you could look at the video on "How to make a Water powered Hammer (Monjolo)" from the channel "Primitive Skills". He doesn't really talk but he show his process nicely. It could help a lot.
Another alec fan
@@benjaminlamothe2093 You bet. Been a subscriber for almost 3 years now.
He reminds me of Harley from trollsneedhugs
Tip: When you are forge welding make sure to brush off the scale. Even with the Borax, you will create little pockets of impurities that will leave cracks in your billet.
Oh thank you, im not the only one screaming "Brush it off!" at the screen then?
@@varjen018 nope, I was too! Also yelling about getting it hotter to forge weld... when I was apprenticing, my teacher kept saying it should damn near be a sparkler when it comes out to get a good forge and then actually hit the damn thing to set it. Took a while to get used to it!
Thank you for mentioning it! It was driving me crazy the whole hammer part
a collab i never expected but I'm happy it happened to very good channels what i love about alec steele is that the channel is about the journey not the ending of a project a failed project is also worth a video and what i love about how to make everything is that it show the most simple thing take a lot of work to make
I need someone to encourage me like alec encourages andy
Ikr?!
Why do literally all blacksmiths sound the same when they are instructing someone else what to do?
@@among-us-99999 feels kinda like a tutorial in a video game
You can do it A-A-ron you can grab the bull by the horns and break its neck.
Right mate??
Pretty sure the workable iron that came out of those blooms was the modern scrap you put in.
Clickbait to the max
"I shall now make iron using a clay furnace, some rocks, and a bunch of iron."
Look at his previous videos where he doesn't use any modern iron
@@dela_pinkster3074 what part is clickbait. He made iron tools.
@@sarenhs4535 Using scrap iron is kind of a cheat code, that's what I think people are getting at. Perhaps he got impatient, which is kind of understandable, but that's what smithing requires.
We love Alec. Not just because he’s a fellow Brit, but because he’s taught us so much.
🇬🇧🙏🏻🇺🇸
This is the crossover we all needed after 2020
I'm loving you channel Alec, been watching for a couple of years now. Wish I had the room to do some of those things now. When I did have the room and did a lot of these things I found it always paid off taking more time in getting things set up and spend more time in doing the actual bloom. It always seemed to take twice as long as I thought to get it right.
In 2 years i imagine something like "hey guys today we are making our own Dreadnought from scratch"
Considering how fast he progressed through the stone and bronze age, I'd give it until next may
“Hey guys, today were founding the Empire of Man”
It's for when he starts building an empire. Gotta make a sailing ship first, though...
Can't wait for him to show us how they built the pyramids.
And now we are going to make a laser sword.
Achievement unlocked: Acquire Hardware.
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Y E S
Heck yeah, I was hoping to get to see some more Ironworks.
i cannot believe alec was able to keep quiet about this! He must’ve been bursting at the seams to tell someone. lol
I love when you collab with other TH-camrs. I mean you’re trying to examine every specialization we as a society have built up over thousands of years, and what better way to learn and teach than by collaborating with people who are modern day specialists.
This gives you an appreciation of how far we've come. This is a bit like watching someone in a modded version of Minecraft work their way up to nuclear reactors and starting off the game punching trees and rocks.
I think a lot of folk take for granted how far on the tech tree we are right now.
And we're not even close to end game! There is so much more to learn and build yet we spend all our money on countless wars
@@linecraftman3907 wars advance technology
I love watching Alec teach the basics.
Alec Steele the blacksmith. Definitely another good example of nominative determinism :]
FINALLY, this is what I’ve been watching this whole series for, I hope you continue to make blacksmithing videos 👍🏻
Is this a crossover episode?!
Really great stuff, love to see these collabs, and with arguably the blacksmith who's been the most influential on me recently no less
i love that andy has been doing this for years yet his social skills have hardly developed
Socially, he looks like a pain to work with. Like if the attention isnt directly on him he always seems so stale and judgemental. Just a random persons opinion though.
Every blacksmith I've ever seen on TH-cam or met in real life have always been great, soft happy people, I love blacksmith's and think they should get a bit more recognition.
For how young he is Alec is such a wonderful teacher. Hes been doing it for years already, teaching master Smith's when he was still a teenager.
For not knowing all the ins and outs of forge welding, I, amazed you got some of that material to stick together at all! To help make it easier next time, try removing as much scale as you can from the surfaces you want to stick together. The metal you were trying to weld together was super bumpy and hard and full of oxidized metal, so it didn’t want to stick, but if you can get most of the oxidation off they’ll stick together much easier next time!
Oh man that iron hammer head is a big safety hazard, stick a wedge in the wood!
Yeah, that is by far the worst hafting job I've ever seen!
I really hope they see this comment. That thing is going to break something or someone when it goes flying.
I agree.
however,
I REALLY want to know how this would have been grafted at this point in technological advancement
Its wedged and then cross wedged with iron. You can see how alex makes his hammers on his channel.
Oh god I just saw Andy's hammer. I'm sorry for commenting without seeing the whole video
The dude is known for making some of the best hammers in the blacksmithing world. Ya don't really gotta worry about Alec Steele
It's interesting that this channel is the one that helps me deal with being a perfectionist when it comes to making things, especially with blacksmithing. When the internet is flooded with people that have been doing these things for years, it's hard to grasp what it's like to be a beginner. Your projects don't have to be amazing, or awe-inspiring, just doing it is the important part. If you make something functional, it should be considered a win.
"Or your teeth if you're particularly brave"
As someone who has had to close a back of a suburban by biting the leather strap (hands were full and didn't want to do multiple trips), I think I qualify. It should also be noted I can use my toes to open doors, so I think I win
When you can shoot a bow with nothing but your toes and mouth then you can win
@@joshd2013 before I take on this challenge, how strong does the pull weight need to be? I can do this easily, but first I need to know how much I'm yoinking back
@@Skiddlescout well Matt Stutzman the armless archer uses a 60lb bow so let's start there lol
@@joshd2013 I'll see about getting a compound bow
This whole conversation deserves a lika
Couldn't have chosen a better teacher. Alec's always so positive and he really knows his stuff.
Jooo this dude is free content man! I could listen to him for ages!
HTME and Alec Steele are the bread and butter of my TH-cam entertainment. Thanks for this
I knew he would go to Alec at some point in this series!
That's some effort for the hammer, good to see it working out! Well done!
Alec seems like a good teacher, first time I see him teaching something.
You really should've stick wit Alec for the hammer too....
His hammers are great!
Alec Steele is phenomenal. His channel has been one of my favorites for years.
Marvel: Avengers is the greatest crossover of all time
Me: Have you seen How to Make Everything with Alec Steele?
Alec is so incredibly skilled. I can just imagine how it would have come out looking if you to figure it all yourself. It'd be like a pair of chopsticks tied together with a nail in a wobbly hole.
FINALLY A COLLABORATION BETWEEN MY FAVORITE 2 TH-camRS
Omg yes!!! Im newish to this channel but been following alec for years, since the first workshop. I didnt expect this collab at all, so excited!
"we're going to time travel 2 billion years, with the power of science" -senku
Alec has a great video on how to properly fit a handle to a hammer head. I've used his techniques many times when reconditioning vintage tools I've sourced from yard sales.
I clicked without reading the title and I must say, I was not ready to see Alec here
i'm a huge fan of both channels, you two are passionate about your subject and fullfill my crave for the type of content that you provide. You both give us super high quality content, and this cross-over video was a blast for me. I waited for this video since a while and wasnt disappointed, it was awesome, love you guys, merci beaucoup from France !
I trained with Alec back in the day, and I know how difficult the 4 sided drawing out technique he uses is to master. Good job, and good job as well getting those forge welds to stick. Not an easy thing to do as a beginner!
Hey man fellow blacksmith here, im not sure if its just the camera or not but you'll have much better luck with forgewelding if you abrade away the scale layer of the metal. Also try to do rough shaping at a glowing yellow temp evenly throughout the billet, any hotter and you risk "scorching" the steel.
Alec is such a good teacher 😍
A collab with another one of my favorite TH-camrs! HTME, Alec Steele, and Cody's Lab are 3 of my favorite feel-like-you-can-make-anything channels
Anyone else get a cold shudder down their spine when they saw him water quench that freshly forge welded billet?
Love alex. Amazing the knowledge he has for such a young age
You need you use a crucible, when you put that usable iron into the crucible it keeps extra carbon, and impurities from getting to the iron. This is called crucible iron, and it was highly prized in 1200 AD due to its amazing resilience, and flexibility. I wasn’t sure if you had thought of this yet so I decided to just inform you to help, I’ve been experimenting with ore I found in my hometown and it was just way too impure, so if you melt enough iron from the ore you can put it in a crucible and seal it to create a solid chunk from all the small pieces of iron you created over the few runs you made
He might end up doing that at one point but I think we are still a bit off from there. This episode still counts as 1000 BCE and the very earliest evidence for the production of crucible iron is from around 300 BCE and it didn't really become common until around 600 AD.
@@darthplagueis13 very true, I would like to see him try and make some graphite crucibles, I know that wouldn’t be a thing in the era he is in, but I don’t think clay would cut it quite as well as graphite clay would, its basically the same process when making a clay crucible just graphite would be included within the mix, I was actually planning on trying to make my own crucible, and mixing some bloomery steel, and some relatively low carbon steel to help get the brittleness out of the high carbon bloomery iron. I can tell it wouldn’t be a great quality iron because it’s basically become cast iron, which is why I’m mixing the low carbon steel to help dilute the carbon content
@@HistoricalGeology56 making a clay powder and mixing in about 1/3rd of powdered charcoal works fairly well.
This video is immensely valuable to a beginner blacksmith like me. I have been really struggling to make a decent set of tongs. I am excited to try Alec's method.
What happened to resetting? Finding nails and scrap isn't really making it from scratch in that age... or a forge
Or carbon steel hammer and anvil ? But do you want to watch a series that lasts years?
He made iron. He doesn't need to make ALL his iron.
@@jakobbull5454 Isn't that the point? Rome wasn't built in a day you impatient child
@@Prober61 He didn't make any iron. The iron you see he "made" is from the scrap nails etc he put in there. The bits he couldn't use because they fell apart is actually the bits he tried to make.
Maybe Andy just needs to learn how to do it modern first then primitive. This isn’t easy at all.
I'll be honest. This video introduced me to Alec a few weeks ago. I've watched a LOT of his videos this XMAS break. Thanks!
So awesome when 2 channels I love work together.
This is a super awesome collab! When you started on metallurgy I was hoping you’d ask him. Congrats on your new iron tongs
"Riveting I should say".... a dude with my sense of humour
YAY! Iron age! How far you've come!
Wow! I haven't seen Alec's teaching before. I would LOVE to take a blacksmithing class from him!
Never clicked on a video faster
Ha! Great collab. I've been following both you and Alec Steele for years.
I love practical building and engineering. "So, what are you going to do with your lathe?" Build a bigger lathe.
Love that you two decided to work together, you both are two of my favorites and seeing yall work together was amazing
This is like the HTMA version of “Dirty Jobs”.
A collab with one of my favorite youtubers? I'm liking this at 0:01
Alec looks like a live action Lewis from meet the Robinsons
omg you're right
I’m amazed that little forge got hot enough to weld. I see so many people struggle with getting similar small forges that hot, and you had no problem
Next episode:
Combining Enchantments with Alec Steele’s anvil
I came here because I saw Alec's name in it and thought - huh, I don't recall seeing that before. Now - I'm like - wow, someone tracking weapons and tools through the ages and recreating them - that's awesome. I'm binge watching your channel for the rest of the night.
3:30 "Use those tongs to make more tongs." When does it end!?
I've never clicked so fast in my life! 2 of my favourite creators together is an amazing surprise!
Great Job :)
Somehow it never occurred to me how good of a teacher Alec is. I mean, I guess blacksmithing is sort of both a teaching and craftwork trade.
Achievements unlocked: IRoN CoLlecTEd
Hey Andy, a tip for your forge welds when you're using ingots like that might be to hammer them together at a cooler temperature to mate the surfaces before trying to heat the pieces to welding temperatures. Then when you have it hot enough, light, fast taps will help the pieces stick. And weld in smaller sections over multiple heats. Love your videos, keep 'em coming.
This is like a Minecraft let’s play in real life
^
this is what I've been hoping for!!!! love both of your channels so much !!!
Am I the only one looking at the forge welding and saying to myself. “More heat less flux lol.”
It's a bit embarrassing. How the hammers turned out (they aren't even hafted), and how poorly he was working the bloom pieces as well (also looks like a heat problem.
Oh man, genuinely 2 of my favorite channels in one video. I love your collaborations, I've discovered a few new ones through them. You guys introduced me to TastingHistory in the recent garum video, spent most of my week burning through his vids too.
I think you kinda cheated when you "unlocked" this one. Like, "I'm just gonna throw in all this modern scrap metal but ignore that."
He also used an anvil and hammer he didn't make when making those tongs. Honestly I don't think you can compress 10,000 years of development and a million lifetimes of experience (with division of labor, research, etc) into a single person's youtube channel without taking some shortcuts.
You can find nearly infinite ways he's leveraged modern tools to accelerate this process. How did he transport the ore he found in Utah? Where does the firewood come from? Does he start the fires by rubbing sticks together, or make his own matches? How did he meet and communicate with Alec? Etc ad infinitum.
The first knife was made purely from rocks. With that demonstrated, he's accelerating the process by multiplying the raw material with some non-hand-sourced stuff
I agree, the modern steel almost certainly has lower impurity content and useful additives. It's still impressive what he's doing, but this one fell a bit short of my concept of the spirit of "the reset"
Give him a break, he doesn’t have the infinite time and slaves they had the first time.
@@ryrandom8785 This.
@@ryrandom8785 but he does have a credit card and an Amazon account. He could have ordered iron ore. Or ran sand over a magnet to get magnetite. Sure the magnet isn't accurate, but the magnetite is, so at least he's using proper materials.
It's like saying your meal is organic when you used factory farmed beef with suppliments and all the antibiotics it can stand. There's a big difference between that and beef from a cow that was fed factory made sweet feed with its grass.
I like how we do not just learn about how to make everything, we learn about *learning* how to make everything too. Thank you for the Reset!
"Some" borax
I've seen things like on Black Bear Forge, when he forge welds it's like a tiny sprinkle of flux.
I'm not sure how it works, but I wonder what effect the heaping piles of borax had on this.
@@TheJohnreeves the borax serves to stop the iron from oxidizing on the welding surface. Adding excessive borax might make it a bit more difficult, but the biggest issue is that he's not cleaning the iron off before attempting a weld. The welding surface needs to be very clean before joining.
@@TheJohnreeves Mainly dirtying up your forge and tools and so on afaik
Two of my favorite TH-camrs in one video! Love Alec Steele, so exciting to see this come together
I'm noticing that you "anvil" is moving a lot. You are losing energy everytime you try to work your material. Get a bigger rock. A much bigger rock. A very large very hard rock. Your rocks that you are using looks like sandstone. Too soft too much moisture, too much movement. I think that's why it is breaking. Go bigger, harder and try to tie to a big heavy log. Add mass.
I know that I'm kinda back seat driving here, but I'm fascinated by your journey here and want to see you succeed.
When the iron is sparking, the sparks are small pieces of the iron flying off, burning. Combined with that iron burn before it melts, you will have parts of your iron burn away then you try to fuse two pieces of iron together. So you want your iron just hot so it melts, then quickly hammer them together hard, and back into the fire. Around 2-4 strikes are recommended between heatings. If you have it out too long you risk undoing your work, as when the iron cools, the welding part is the weakest and is what is going to give first under the stress from the hammer.
I've said it time and against to Andy that he needs more heat with his forging, but he never does.
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I’m glad to see Alec Steele still popping up on popular channels. His is one of the few channels I found in its prime.
two of my favorite youtubers working together in a video, thanks for making 2020 awesome guys
Andy AND Alex Steele on the same vid? I can't believe my two fave channels are at the same time! This is the collab the world needs
I think people forget that making iron was a large community process requiring the constant work of probably very many people prospecting, gathering, crushing/refining, multiple furnace types working the basic metal, coal and charcoal makers, brickmakers, large bellow operators/makers, and finishing. Its ALOT for one man to try and accomplish esp if your trying to do everything from scratch.
Great to see two of my favourite channels working together!!
I’m ecstatic this is quite possibly the greatest colab I’ve ever imagined I love both of your channels work
Every single time you want to make really good forge weld. You need to have completely clean surfaces. No scale, no dust. Nothing. So if you want to forge weld two stocks like you did. Give them a few light blows with a hammer when their are cold to break off the scale. That should help. Absolute best is grind the scale off but classical brushing the stock while dark red hot will do the trick. Keep it up. It’s wonderful what you are doing.
Love it when two of my favourite youtube channels collaborate.
YES!!!! My favorite TH-camrs finally collaborated!!!
I’ve been watching Alec for a really long time. Him and Will are great craftsmen and artist. Keep up the good work and keep beating that steel. I’ve been doing it for almost 20 years and it is a fun thing to do and very rewarding. I can’t wait to see how far you take it.
I am super impressed with how well you forge-welded that set. I was certain you were going to blow them out more than once.
I can't wait to see the next couple of inventions. It is great pleasure to whatch those videos. I hope you will make even more content of such quality. Stuff presentrd on your videos is like from my dreams.
It's the crossover we needed, not the one we deserve. That was badass, good job.
Eyyyy! Our boy Alec! Great to see you here!
Been looking forward to this ep, Alec is the best.