The Rail in Santa Ines

There are two splendid qualities (among others) to Venezuela. The first is there is no enforcement of traffic laws, yet still almost everyone gets where they are going since almost everyone survives to prove that anarchy works, and second, there are no noticeably enforced building codes. This thing would never fly north of Nogales. And in this aspect of life I feel it a privilege to have lived in such a lawless state. Gang blood runs in the gutters down the street from our house, we’re coming back from Santa Ines but can’t make the last 100 meters to home for the bodies blocking the street.  But where one can be free to design whatsoever and put it out in the world such an inconvenience really does not matter.

The piece is three-dimensional and asymmetrical. It takes up all the space it can hold.

This is how it started out. I like this photo for the crisp little trucker’s hitch that is holding all the steel together.

And more or less the same view installed.

The middle span: one way…

And then another.

Credits: Emilio Mercado was my striker and holder almost all the way through this project and he made more money off it than I did. Mi amigo, Joel Colmenares, saw it through with me for the last two weeks. My best friend and lover, Marianthi Constantinu, always did impeccable translations from a Portuguese version of an almost unintelligible Venezuelan variation of the Chihuahuan kind of Castellano I came to speak long ago in Santa Fe.

First of all: The distance between the floor of the room and the floor of the bookcase balcony just happened to be 29.5 inches (0.75 meters)—half an inch higher and all openings in the rail would have to be 4 inches (10 centimeters) or less.

And everything else (except for the little hand rail going up the steps) is based on the Golden Ratio and Fabonacci Numbers simply because the distance between the newel post at the top of the steps and the (unseen) wall to the right constituted a space that was perfect for designing minimalist outlines of visual elements, that had at least one dimension that was a factor of 0.612 or 1.612 to one of the adjoining elements.

My excellent friend, Cooper Lee Bombardier, helped in the forging and installation of the piece.

When I first came to South America all I could find by way of hammers was one standard issue 2.5 lb. Ridgid with a cross pein that can double as a cold chisel.  But it worked well enough to help forge both of these from a 2” bolt of tool steel that was probably scrapped out from a Venezuelan oil field and sold to me for about 18 cents a lb. (U.S.$). Because I lacked a good tempering block and I’ll be damned if I’d stoop to using a torch, both turned out to be perfectly tempered using the reserve heat process and a couple of fairly well educated guesses as to timing. They were annealed and then slowly brought to a uniform cherry red heat. Then I quenched them in 50 wt. motor oil until I decided to take them out. Then I waited a little until they were uniformly colored again and quenched them in water just to a barely black heat on their surfaces. Next I pulled them from the water, thought about it a little and quenched them again until cool. I have been using them for about three years and their faces are as good as the first day they went to work. The little one lives on the vice post and the big one on the anvil. I don’t know, nor really care, how much they weigh, but its enough.

The little Ridgid can be seen below as Vladimir, my striker (golpeador to him), and I start to pierce the handle eye in the larger piece.

I’ve been around long enough to have grown fairly cynical about all occupational cultures. Making one’s own hammers might seem high-order Blacksmithing to some, but to me its a waste of time and fuel unless one can’t find what they need in a store. After all a hammer is just a chunk of steel on the end of a stick and hardly worthy of being named or dedicated or baptized and christened Conan or Mildred or made the object of any other kind of sentimental and romantic nonsense. And they don’t have to be pretty or polished or shapely. All that is needed is heavy and hard enough.

In the late 90’s I rented a corner of Frank Turley’s forge in Santa Fe, NM, U.S.A. and one day during one of Frank’s class sessions, Tom Joyce brought Uri Hoffi, the apparently world class Israeli smith, around to show a few tricks; like he forged a screw driver with an overhand knot tied in the shaft. But what I found fascinating was his stylish little short handled hammer that he gripped near the head.  While I cut him all the slack I could find laying around because his health was poor and years were many, I couldn’t help but think that here was a man who never got the chance to learn how to play baseball, never learned to hold a bat full length and swing for the fence, or never learned how to hold racket for a truly uncivilized game of tennis. He never learned how to do any of that and all the tricks needed to keep his body healthy and whole as well.  So he had developed a striking technique that was a perfect imitation of how Walter Brennan used to hobble through The Real McCoys. I was amazed, still am, but nonetheless that big, ugly hammer has a 15” handle that I hold at full length and swing for the fence every chance I get.

Don’t misunderstand here and think the Anti Hoffi hammer style means that I am against his pattern—whatever piece of steel on the end of a stick turns out the work is the one to use. It is just that my two are on the far end of the hammer spectrum from his, sort of polar opposites like Christ and Anti Christ, which seems like an apt analogy since Uri and Jesus hopefully enjoyed the fruits of a common culture that is not one I could call mine. I grew up on ranches in Wyoming.

A Welcome to the World for Jihyeon Ha Nickeson

Perchero? It’s just what you see.

And a couple of the details:

It was all great fun. Its a little over 6’, 17 mortise and tenon joints (uniones de caja y espiga), three asymmetrical feet, stresses and well calculated destruction all over the place.

Here in the slowly developing world the plastic oven dials will never outlive the appliance especially if the mechanism tends to balk shutting off when hot. And like car parts in Cuba, replacement hardware for stoves in Vla. is somewhat hard to find. So I forged this little piece to survive whoever might own it, survive the land-fill when the time comes.

The hammered copper escutcheon is the mortal remains of a medallion that was minted by a supporter of General Perez Jimenez who was the dictator here in the mid-part of the last century. It was to commemorate the completion of one of the General’s big public works. But he was deposed 50 years ago, exiled before the work was done. So the paranoid supporter ditched all the medallions with one of his neighbors and skipped out to Miami or Barcelona or someplace. A few months ago the neighbor gave me a handful of the things to see what I could do with them.

Their possibilities are endless, I’m sure.

Three-dimensional spaghetti can never run in a straight line for even one nano-meter or else it looks like an error—the observer’s eye stops before the natural end to its travels and the effect of all the grace before and after is spoiled.

I have forgotten which side of this Cantera-topped buffet’s spaghetti I started first, but getting it into the fullest space possible was cake compared to the backward forging of its mirror image. It was like Ginger Rogers having to do everything Fred Astaire did, but going backwards…and in heels. (The spaghetti runs through piercings in the legs and wall mounts and is riveted to the 1/2” X 1- 1/2” horizontal bar above it.)

I thought long and hard before deciding to make the thing symmetrical…a decision I almost regret to this day. But if I was going to do another it would not be.

So, it looks a little over-designed…this finial on a 8–foot free standing handrail. But it was fun. The customer thought it was cool and best of all it was fun to do. And design had little to do with it. It was another sketch. This whole thing was a sketch, three short squiggles on a scrap of paper to three chalk lines on the floor under the lay-out table to this…

And then it came together piece by piece, element by element, from pictures in my head. There aren’t any solid joints here, only chain links, pivots, clevises and hinges. Everything just flopped and dangled until I laid 190 lbs of dead-weight on the lower end and drove a 1/4” wedge into one of the eyes in the sliding trammel hook, guy-rod…the oldest trick in the bag. (If one can do the work with a wedge, its better than a weld.) The bottom part of the rail is the double line of 3/4” round stock held together with a wraps of 3/8’’ round in a variation of a Pre-Raphaelite painting of Cleopatra wearing a coiled snake arm band…the piece behind the Kabiri Blog title above.

And I always like to tie things down with “pooch-plate” escutcheons.

Pooch Plates are easy…hot cut through half the thickness of the escutcheon, use a narrow slit chisel to cut the rest of the way through, round it out with a drift. Then heat the plate and dimple it from the back with a ball peen over a block of wood. The vertical element here is a forge welded eye bolt with a rivet head behind the plate.

I lifted the design from Tom Joyce who used it to his usual beautiful effects on the iron work he created some years ago for Christ in the Desert Monastery near Abuquiu, NM. One time I asked a young woman smith who helped him on the project if the erotic aura of these elements wasn’t just a sly little joke on the monks. She was horrified. No one at Tom’s forge had ever realized they were pure lingam and yoni…the plates never would have been installed at the monastery if they had.

(Photos by Pam Reed and the author.)

Somewhere down in the vertical back yard is Kabiri Forge…

…there it is.

The grand opening and christening the fire with a little
champaign Venezolana.

The basic layout; locally fabricated, custom forge with a Rumsford
style hood, the fire pot is from the Turley Forge Collection
in Santa Fe. The blower is from e-bay, the anvil is of unknown
origin, maybe Brazil—it is a little funky, but it is new and just as
hard as those gourmet anvils from the western U.S. We
bought it in the nearby town of Carrizal, at Ferreteria La Ruina,
which translates into The Ruination Hardware Store (???). The
big 300–year-old copper kettle was an item The Countess Myriam
Moranduzzo couldn’t liquidate when she left her last house so
she more or less loaned it to Kabiri Forge as a coal scuttle.

And then there is the wall mounted, lift-top,
stand-up desk,

the layout table with a 1” top, a lifetime supply of
hammer stock (left) and choice S7 alloyed tool steel
(center), all had for 18 cents a pound at the salvage yard
in El Tambor,

and out back, the supply of really decent coal from
a mine in the Andes just a few kl. short of the
Colombian border.

Starting work–the first pair of tongs…tools to make tools to make all of the rest.

Thanks for dropping by.

Photos by Marianthi Constantinu and Steven Nickeson

The lumbering old swamp cooler on the far end of the space really isn’t doing the job because its August and the forge is in South Tucson. This is a separate town inside a city; a planned community of sorts in the old days, planned for the marketing of numerous vices and a place where people of color could own their own homes and stay out of the spaces of the white folk. One rarely hears English on the streets. The building was once an ice barn. We work in the back two thirds and up front is a failing liquor store, the owner of which pumps very heavy iron every day, keeps a seven-foot komodo dragon and populates his office with half-a-dozen near-life-size Gene Simmons action figures. If he pays the utilities he can’t stock his shelves. If he stocks his shelves they cut the power and his beer gets hot. The guy with whom I share this space is a thirty-something, alcoholic sculptor who’s into the owner for about six months of back rent and it is a horse race as to which of the two will bottom-out first. When things get really pinched up front the owner comes back and tries to throw the sculptor out but somehow he manages to stay and the lights keep shining save for only six or seven days a year. The sculptor often doesn’t show until after four and just as often spends the full night here to stay out of his wife’s way. She studies for a PhD while he slaughters brain cells with a guy named A*** who looks like he still has rickets and sweeps up now and again for the privilege of sleeping in the bathroom when the weather’s bad and his room mate runs him off. A***’s cousin, P***, a crack whore, drops by weekly and bums loose change for smokes. From time to time a tall calaca in a threadbare trench uses the sculptor’s space as a show room to sell stolen bicycles.He and I are the only ones around who are levering any kind of income from the place. I stay because no other site would tolerate my coal-fired forge, the rent’s not bad and the unbuffered life’s mostly a delight in this procession of irrepressible variables and novel contingencies.

Mark is working on an MFA, turns out pretty decent steel sculpture and welds really well. But he’s never seen a forge weld and wonders why I just don’t do these with a machine. I tell him I’m too much of a prima donna. An aspirant once said to me,”I always thought you guys who can weld up steel with your hammers were gods.” and I’ve never looked back. I don’t tell Mark that I’m not as fond as he is of machines, or tools and gadgetry that are bad stand-ins for talent, but I do rejoice in fire, its always sinuous look, its odor, the menace and fever from it, and the cool, visceral wash of adrenaline I feel in its presence.

The scarfed ends of the two steel bars, side by side in the coke-bed, are a radiant, searing bright lemon color. Their surfaces look glassy and slick; they’re starting to sweat, I hold back on the speed of the blower, watch for sparks, tiny brilliant chips of iron oxide slag that shower off like fireworks when the metal’s ready to weld. The three of us, Pamala, Mark and I are all sweating just like the steel. The feel of this scene is so charmed I want to laugh. Mark knows what to do; we’ve practiced. He’s handling a 30 lb. length of 2” round stock; my end is a little thicker, noticeably shorter and two-thirds as heavy.

A burst of sparks—I say “Go!” and we plunge into a state of intensely focused and reckless speed. He drags his steel, fast, fast, from the fire, lays the incandescent end inside the chalk marks I’ve outlined on the anvil, braces himself and I press my piece, scarf to scarf, atop the other.

I hold it almost loosely there and strike with sharp quick hammer blows. I’m trying to shock start the molecular exchange across the dimensionless space between the two. It will happen all at once inside the first few seconds or not at all. Four swift blows, five, and I feel my piece suddenly tighten against the other, feel the steel below the hammer double in thickness, The hammer’s ring drops an octave in the space of that single blow. The weld is stuck…integration…cohesion. What was dual in one split-second transcends to unity.

That’s when I lay into the joint like I was possessed, yelling at Mark to turn it over…pull it back…push it, push it…turn…again! Pamala’s camera is clicking over like a tiny diesel engine on a fast idle. Sweat is running in my eyes, washing ash across my glasses. Mark’s face is turned away from the spray of slag from every blow. When the lemon color deepens toward orange we lay the piece back in the fire. The doubled-thick bulge in the length of it looks like an egg in a snake. Mark wanders around hunting for face protection. Pamala selects another camera, debates herself on filters. I crank the blower, chuckle and catch my breath. To work the bulge into a clean, unblemished, ever so slightly tapered, invisible joint takes five more heats, a 10 lb. sledge and a brake on the beat.

Working hammers of this weight—ten pounds—in this heat is a gourmet meditation on the priceless treasure of the body—that which we are until that moment we aren’t. The eyes and shoulders take care of the weld, wu wei, it doesn’t need another thought. This body is the only asset and care in the whole world now. One strikes right as if growing up, tranquil, from the earth with a dark, slacked core of original energy settled just above the groin as the center and source of awareness. It’s a little like a slow dirty, Latin dance and a dance to be regally, seductively dirty must look and feel as if it is the easiest thing two people have ever done standing up; a dance so certain of itself that the steps are barely there; just brief, cathartic afterthoughts that really aren’t thought of as much as they are small reflexive tokens to the music that, for its own part in the piece, is not so much the impulse for the dance but a restraint on its passion. So too, heavy hammers moves almost on their own, verging on beyond control. Gripping hammers that weigh like this will soon cripple the hands and the feeling of ease; being crippled spoils the fun to be had at the border with chaos. These hammers are held like a small bird—with just sufficient tension to keep them from flying away. They bounce, levitate on their own—boost the lift, stretch up with it, sense the apex, pause there. Throw the hammers down, try not to miss. Hammers of this weight in learned hands are always thrown at the work; softly guided there. They are never swung. The blow, steel against steel, generates power again into the core and that sense could be the entire reason to be right here. Care for the body—that is all there is—keep it straight, tranquil, upright and healthy so it can always feel this sublime and real, this close to the ground and a shout for delight and this fantasy of living forever that is spun up from the source.

But for all of that, sledge hammers still get heavy.

After the first weld is finished we stick an only slightly thinner piece on the other end. Its the same drill; heat and adrenaline, thirst, water and trace mineral tablets, flecks of slag sizzling cool on wet forearms, racked breathing, laughter, shouting, floods of sweat, sulphurous steam when I damp the fire’s edge, the sun-bleached Snickers Pamala brings back from the liquor store and the savored ground of vitality that substantiates it all.

(This piece was excerpted and slightly modified froma much longer essay posted on Integral Liberties, the sister blog of Kabiri)

(Photos by Pam Reed)