Nice video! In the 1990's I lived on a small island in the SW Pacific. Our kitchen ( separate from the House) was held together with "Log Dogs" salvaged from WWII Japanese coconut log bunkers.
Another method for getting a SHARP corner which makes it easier to drive with a hammer . Upset a square corner in the usual way and use a convenience bend further back on your bar to enable you to present the short leg of your bend to the anvil so you can forge your taper. Then straighten the convenience bend. Just a thought ( fifty years a blacksmith )
Brandon makes it all look so easy, but knowing exactly how hot to heat the metal, how hard to hit, where to hit, and at what angle takes years to learn.
So my last name is Smith, I live just outside NYC so we always went to the NY Renaissance Faire every year. So we’ll before the time period depicted by the Townsend channel but, I always loved it none the less. When I was a kid I was wearing one of my football jerseys and one of the Smith’s saw the name and was hilarious saying I must become a Smith it is my destiny. I became a Social Studies teacher but I’ve always loved blacksmithing.
I think I’m gonna like this ‘thread’. After all, it covers 4 of my favourite things, heatin’ and a-hittin’ metal, building things, smoking tasty meats and learning how our ancestors lived and thrived through adversity (even though I’m a Tasmanian, our antecedents were remarkably similar).
I always find a kind of relaxation and comfort in watching your 'how we did it' videos. I envy your jobs while grateful we don't struggle and work hard every day to just survive any more. But this is knowledge we should never be without.
I'd honestly pay good money for one of those scribes. Something about the simple elegance of its shape combined with the passion put into its creation really make it a beautiful piece to behold
Wholesome channels such as Townsend's, are amazing glimmers of light in this terrifyingly evil world we live in today! Watching this kind of content is something I have always enjoyed. It's grand to see how our forefathers had to work and live, and what the men did in their days. Keep up the great work! John 3:16-21 Authorized.
Since your homestead will have a smokehouse, will you start raising period hogs soon? Dabbling in early American farming, that which can be done, might be interesting.
I like how Townsend is keeping these traditions alive, food, building products, was very important in the 1800, what a great way to teach us how it was done
I really enjoyed watching this video. I will probably never do any sort of blacksmith work, but learning the process is enjoyable. I love how well this video is out together. The background sounds as well as music are so delightful. Thank you for making such excellent videos! I love listening, watching and learning!!
very nice. I tried to forge a log dog once (as a total newbie smith), and didn't even try to upset, just went for a tight corner and only had moderate success. It still works well enough as a log dog, so if you're new to blacksmithing, give this one a try!
I really enjoyed watch this. It's pretty fascinating to see how tools were made back in the time period. Blacksmithing is cool to watch. A friend of mine and I saw one at a historical site we went to, a few years ago. Happy Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadian viewers of this channel. Cheers!
And here I was planning on building a smokehouse of my own. Planning a little more modern but I love the information. Thank you for sharing this stuff! Looking forward to the rest of the videos I’m this series.
I still say if you have enough room, have a rendezvous. Let people come in, set up camp. Then you can show people how to do the blacksmith things. Teach them to bake breads and things. Make it clear if you don't help, you may not get to share in the "booty". You may not have enough space to shoot but the rest would be a great time....
I quite like the videos that this dude shows up in. All the small little projects he does are fascinating to watch and cool to see the skill and technique that go into them.
It's getting to the time of maple syrup harvest in a couple months. Do you guys have any maple trees nearby? Even if they're not sugar maple, you can still make some tasty syrup or natural sugar for cooking from any species. A tap and bucket are all that are required and a tap could be easily be fashioned on the homestead. Old fashioned taps used to be simple wooden tubes with a taper and trough cut on one end. People (especially indigenous people) used to gather in sugar camps for the labor-intensive syrup harvest and boiling down process.
Have you tried Gravlax "gravad lax" which translates to burried salmon from Swedish. It's an old tradition that's so tasty. I believe they used to burry it underground to cure it to later eat.
I would really love to see more blacksmithing videos as well. I would like to know where they got their iron and steel from back during that time. How it arrived and from where and how they processed it into bars and rods.
What forms of iron would have been available to settlers/farmers, etc.? Where would they get it? (General store? From the blacksmith?) Fascinating stuff; thank you!
So making Log Dogs is a lot like dealing with modern people. There's a lot of hot air, things get heated, after you upset them they get bent out of shape, it takes some beating to straighten them out and then things cool off and you go back to work. Got it! :) Nice work!
Log dogs, not to be confused with dog logs. ^-^ But yeah, those giant staples were probably more useful (but also more expensive) than nails for construction of wood cabins. I have watched videos where modern cabin builders used these log dogs to hold the entire structure together. But that was probably not economically feasible in the 1800's.
Hello. Fellow smith here. What material did you use to make your forge there? What kind of daub or mud or what not is that? What is the lifespan of it and is there stuff you must do to keep it from falling apart? Also, are you using charcoal or regular coal most? Those log dogs are genius... God bless!
