I dipped in and out of the livestream through the day. It was wild. No matter when I checked in there he was hammering away. Impressive really. Hours, and hours. Slowly watching his sanity dissolve into madness. By the end he was talking absolute nonsense into the camera. Not even exaggerating. I know Jamie is a good editor but the fact he made a semi lucid Alec appear coherent is impressive.
It reminds me of the time he Marathoned making hammers back, I think, in the Barker street Forge. It was impressive then, and this is impressive now. Quality handmade products will probably always hold an allure over mass produced in very many areas.
Now you know why old buildings were burned down and owners sifted the ashes to get the nails. There were laws about this in the US years ago. There are a few companies that still make hand cut square nails [with some machines used ].
ex carpenter here. one single company makes square cut masonry nails, which work extremely well for pulling down high points in sill plates on concrete foundations
Real tough to burn a junk house these days. Fire departments basically can’t do it if there’s any asbestos, which any house that’s gonna get burned will have, so now they sit and rot because poor farms can’t afford to send their whole wreck to the hazardous waste dump because the bathroom has an asbestos floor. I’d actually prefer a little bit of air pollution to all the moldy collapsed buildings, but society doesn’t care I have to live and work around them and sometimes walk around brooding about the echos of a place that used to be full of life and a center of prosperous commerce. I now just put my sheep fence up to the corpses to keep em out.
@@swamp-yankeeWhat??? get help and probably don’t blame it on environmentalism or whatever you’re implying here and blame it on those that knew about the hazards and those that aren’t willing to spend to clean it up now.
I'm just getting into blacksmithing and am already training myself to switch off which arm I'm hammering with. It honestly feels surprisingly comfortable with either hand, but that could be as a result of already having years of having to train myself to be ambidextrous as a lefthanded person. Definitely nice to feel a little sore in both arms at the end of the day as opposed to very sore in only one arm.
Where I live, we have a lot of living history frontier things people can work or volunteer at. The blacksmith at one makes nails all day, and he can get them out in three hits.
@@Aliyah_666 work strength beats workout strength every time, because it is only 1 hour at the gym 3-4 times a week, vs 8-12 hours 4-6 days a week. Bruce Lee said low weight high rep builds strong, but slim muscles.
well he sure ain't making any money selling nails. $500 for a 12 hour day? and having to pay for materials and gas and shop rent? that's pretty bad return. hand made nails seem so cool, bummer it's so hard to make them
Although you are right, the confusion makes sense. He made 400, still need to make 100, and 100 is 25% of 400. So he still had to do 25% more of what he already did.
@@ak47dukin This kind of mental gymnastics usually indicates very high levels of dishonesty, possibly severe mental conditions and an upbringing within some religious, fundamentalist nuts sect (like Christianity). Good that you aren't any of this. Your nickname "AK47" really calms us down!:)
I love this! Blacksmithing has been romanticised somwhat in the modern age (not a bad thing) but the reality is that you could be making these all day every day for months
It certainly is. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book on nailmaking and how it could be profitable. His main trick would take some of the romance out of it. Made some nice profit calculations and tried to sell his method as some early day dropshipping guru. His main trick was using pre teen slaves to make the nails.
@@neongenesis8499 Yeah, that checks out, it's pretty easy to make a lot of money when you own people who can do all of your actual labor for basically free (only the cost of keeping them alive)
7:30 the time taken may be a bit longer; those old films were shot at on 16fps and they get sped up to either 24fps or 30fps depending on the digital player. so 15 sec may be closer to 22 sec.
This format of square space add is one of the most awesome add formats I have seen... Obviously the profit side isn't as feasible if you don't have the live stream audience but it is still cool.
As a kid watching a blacksmith make nails was always so fascinating since it took the most amount of tools to make the seemingly "simplest" thing possible!
@@dertyp3848 Square nails are more resistant to wood twisting. They're also great for so-called "dead-nailing", which is when the nail goes through a piece of wood and you hammer the point of the nail flat, much in the same way a rivet would. Dead-nailing guarantees the nail can't be pulled out. You can't do that with round nails since they'll bend instead of flatten. The square shape also folds the wood fibers downwards, effectively creating tiny "barbs" that help hold the nail in place. A round nail just pushes the fibers out of the way, around itself. Therefor, the grip strength of a cut square nail can be 1.5 times greater than that of a round wire nail. The square nail shape also aligns with the wood grain to greatly reduce the risk of splitting. Round wire nails were made for price, not for efficiency.
@@WolfHeathen That was a very good explanation. Thank you for the nice little education session. Always like new tidbits of random information on things like that.
fun fact forged and cut nails are far superior to the modern wire nails. they drive better and easier and are less likely to split wood. add that they are held in better and your golden. legit old style nails are worth a mint.
Cut nails' special thing is that they taper only in 1 dimension. Typical forged nails like the ones in this video are tapered on all sides and have huge shanks, so, without proper pilot holes, they are much more likely to split wood than modern wire nails and cut nails.
The Daily tally of Nails for a mature man back in the day was 1,000 nails a day, depending on the size of the nail. Nail making was a Family business, with everyone joining in the work. The Anvil was usually just a cubic shape, and not very large. The Rods for making the nails were gotten from an Iron Monger and were usually just slitted rods of Iron, already at the size of the finished product, so the process was simple, just point the tip on 2 sides, and then cleave nearly through on the hardy, and twist off in the bolster if they had one. Otherwise, they would just clout over the head to one side enough to give it something to hold with. The Good Old, Bad old days in the black country. (You had to earn your bowl of Sop in those days.)
Amazing comment. I now want nothing more from Alex than for him to dress up like a medieval blacksmith and bang out hundreds of arrowheads to be sent as rapid delivery gifts to the French.
I suggest a decent (but not TOO powerful) magnet on a cord/chain attached to your bucket... it'll save your arm from the goo, and from the heat if you've been using it all day
Next time don't use an iPad to count - use a scientific scale under the container that supports percentage mode. You weigh a single nail and tare it, and that becomes "100%". Anything else added to it is in comparison to that weight (so 200% = 2). Just make sure it's a scale you can plug in and doesn't have a mandatory auto-off feature.
funnily enough i did a warehouse job shipping fastenings and we did this for shipments. Done by the thousand and we received intake by the tonne on pallets. Must have distributed millions each week
Or you could jsut count the nails. They're not going to be the same exact size. They're hand made. Non identicle products other than produce should not be sold by mass.
Alex you should make some baskets that you submerge in your quench or cooling tank/buckets. That way when you drop something in the tanks you just raise the basket to retrieve it . I would also space it off the bottom to maybe reduce breaking on whatever falls in .
12:45 hey that was me!!! I had just gotten home from work and was sitting on the throne. Thought I'd check in to see how the live stream was going and it was just as you uploaded them. Kept hitting add to cart before you added them and timed it just right! Haha can't wait to get them. Love the work my guy! Been watching for just shy of 10 years so it'll be awesome to get a piece you made!
Given the title of the video, what was the cost of the propane? I'm wondering how much nails would actually cost if somebody was making them by hand as their sole job, without the benefits of scaling costs and large scale industrial processes and so on?
Ok I watched this video and when i was done I realized, I’m watching someone make nails… NAILS! And what makes me an addict is I watched a good portion of the live stream too! Lol 🤪
given your current equipment. what would be the closest you could get to high production? what about a video series on tooling and fixtures to get something close to one nail per second (not one second per nail)
500 quid for the nails, ad-revenue from the live stream AND the RU-vid video, and a fortune for the sponsorship…well, i think he’s quite well off, even if he can’t get that amount every single day… 😉
Iv never made them by hand but I have forged literally millions of fasteners in my life and I think we probably swung a hammer about the same for a days work.
I think if you made a tool that could separate like old school bullet casts that would work amazing for nail production and then you wouldn't have to risk pounding the head of the nail out of your tool, and waste time straightening it back out. I know if you sold those on your website I'd wanna buy a couple.
Yo Alec, you need to do more of those livestreams, i had a blast with other viewers while you were busy not gonna lie, i miss the drinking game, bring it back please
I'm no blacksmith, so might be a dumb question but when you quench the nail while its in your handmade hole punch thingy does it matter that the whole nail isn't getting quenched? Like the water (If that's what it is) doesn't get inside the hole so that part isn't getting touched by the liquid???
@@cturner8584 when the steel is red hot, it is expanded. When you quench it, it cools and shrinks a few thousandths of an inch and allows the nail to drop out if the header tool.
The nails look kind of wide for how short they are tbh. It almost looks like they would back out cause of how wide they are at the base. The ones I've seen had a longer taper and are def thinner on the shank.
11:10 Earlier in the video it was said that a blacksmith could make a nail in 15 secs. So in a hr they could make 240 nails if absolutely perfect. So 8.5hrs x 240 nails= 2040 nails made.
I'm still a beginner blacksmith but I laughed when you did it left handed cuz when my arm gets tired I swap and have been doing this sense I started and am fairly ambidextrous with it so it's good to know I can match your skill with one and if not the other.
I’m convinced Alec does stuff like this whenever he needs a bunch of money lol (he prolly could make more by spending that amount of time on a video but still)
i wonder if alec would make stuff like the tacks that baumgardner restorations and other fine art conservators use for the side of paintings?? that looked so cool by the way!!
Not to discourage but you should read up on Inchtuthil Roman Military Fortress they found a hoard of 1,000,000 nails: There were at least 875,428 nails ranging from 2 ½ inches to 15 inches long-the hoard likely contained over a million nails originally. The Romans had nail making down to a industry.
The blacksmiths Romans worked in teams to make nails and precut their blanks so the whole process ran like a well-oiled machine. It was like an assembly line.
Step one: Build massive community Step two: Build a workshop Step three: Get any ecommerce website Step four: Advertise your product on stream to a bunch of community members that buy it as merch not as real product Step five: Brag about how easy it can be to make money :D
Alec I thoroughly enjoyed this episode. I first got hooked on your channel watching you hustle making hammers before you came stateside. I am happy for all your success but sometimes I miss these strait forward videos. And you tied it into the ad so well. “ make cool stuff and sell it on internet “ Ave.
Those old B/W videos have a much lower framerate when recorded than when played back usually. If you've ever watched an old film it looks like everyone is manically zipping around. That old blacksmith probably made that nail in 30-45 seconds rather than 15
My blacksmithing instructor would have had a fit if he saw you smithing with that cut off tool still in the anvil. He saw a few guys lose fingers from doing exactly this.
It would've been so much cooler if this was a project for some kind of medieval or old school building heritage project! I bet you'd've needed many more nails though....
Can't wait to get my 20 nails in the mail. :-D Thanks for doing the live stream. I watched it from the start of the live stream till the end (of the second live stream after the first one crashed). That was a lot of fun. You answered a lot of my questions. Please do this again. It was cool to have Jamie answer some of my questions too.
Popped in around the 10:00 area when he was at 288 or so. I think he only survived not having to check footage for the count because folks in chat were counting even when he forgot :P Just had this stream up and playing for most of the day after that. Caught the conversation later when folks were asking him about hardware store preferences and Alec only just caught himself from dropping that hard F in his passion for talking about Ace Hardware. :P
Would have been great to see the process of making one single nail without a cut, or with less cuts. Just to get a feeling of how long it actually takes to make one. I didn't watch the stream so I have no idea.
serious question: are those nails any good? They seem quite short for their thckness. I know of nails that are only tapered on 2 sides, so they make a slot instead of a hole to not spread open the fibers of wood. SO again: Whats the usecase of the nails in the video?
I'm no blacksmith, but I think part of the problem you're having with your nail header tool is heat. As it is continuously exposed to heat from the newly forged nails, the metal expands. Try cooling it down between sets and see if that helps.
@alecsteele you should make your own staple gun that would be awesome too see how you'd make one! ❤ everyone like this comment if you'd like to see this!
How are these nails compared to regular ones ? I see regular nails push their way out of wood over time, seems like it’d be worse with these since they’re so wide near the head
Why do you wear your watch on your dominant hand? I'd imagine that would screw with your step count a lot when forcing or just going about your day writing etc. (Make sure you've at least set up which wrist you wear it on in your Garmin settings. Even if you don't care or track steps, it does matter for other metrics used for different activities you might track with it, for it to know which wrist it is on)
