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Ad Rates / Articles / Classified Ads / Editorial / Home / Links / Showtime   Forging into the 21st century    List Ray Yurkowski Next   Forging a link with history By Ray Yurkowski Lloyd Johnston chuckles as he tells the story of how he was duped.   Being a full-time blacksmith, as well as a collector of historical artifacts of the trade, he happened across a Huronia axe head at an auction sale held at a friend's shop. He knew the bulk of them were distributed between 1639 and 1649 in the Midland area.   "This is a French-Huron trade axe," he mused to himself at the time. "I've never seen one in that good shape."   He bought it and the treasure remained part of his collection for 25 years before the friend, a German-schooled journeyman blacksmith, confessed he had made it in his shop.   "He repeated the marks the French smiths (would have) put in it," said Johnston. "When you're doing a replica, it's that close attention to detail that makes the difference."   He advises would-be collectors to do some research.   "For a person who is enthused about iron, if you know something about the technology and how it is built - the casting, the forge work and the material - you're not going to get burned," he says. "When you hammer and forge wrought-iron, there's a grain structure just like wood. Casting has none of that."   Johnston says most of the purported wrought iron being sold today is mostly cold-bent, MIG-welded casting.   "For the most part, it isn't even forged. Hardly anything today is made of material called wrought iron.   "I'm one of the few guys who is actually using it," he says. "I've been mining farm belts for years, going to auction sales, finding a pile of scrap among the old engine blocks, fenders and tractor parts."   After graduating from Waterloo University with a degree in electrical engineering, he says he was looking for something to do with his hands for "a while."   Now, after logging in close to 40 years in the trade, most of his work is for museums and historic sites as well as private collectors.   "When I was younger, I wasn't really too interested in history," he said. "Now, I think I've got something in every major museum in the country.   "I may have worked as an engineer for only a couple of weeks, but the math, chemistry and physics have been a little help on the way."   After graduation, there was talk of launching an old gun shop at Black Creek Pioneer Village. With an interest in antique firearms, he signed on as a gunsmith for the summer and stayed on for four years.   He followed that with a stint as blacksmith at the Ontario Agricultural Museum, now Country Heritage Park, at Milton.   One of his current projects is the repair of a portable forge for Toronto's Fort York, a project he worked on 25 years ago.   "It was a military thing. At the time, they had travelling forges to do repair work."   To ensure accuracy, he is using 18th century diagrams and historical records from the Fort, including a set of drawings done by retired English military engineer, Frank Howard, whose hobby was visiting historic sites and doing very precise renderings of cannons, baggage wagons and forge carts.   Maybe too precise for a blacksmith says Johnston.   "In blacksmithing, you don't work to a thousandth of an inch. To get close, you are looking at a sixteenth of an inch and filing it down to fit."   Even heating metal to the correct temperature to work or heat treat for hardness doesn't require a thermometer.   "A blacksmith doesn't need to know the numbers, all you need to know are colours," says Johnston. "Your eye is the thermometer. You judge the colour of your forging by eye."   The Kawartha Lakes-area craftsman was one of the three founding fathers who started the Ontario Artist Blacksmith Association in 1982 as a means to keep the craft alive. Most of the 150-plus members of the association are hobbyists, with approximately 30 being full-time professional blacksmiths.   These days, blacksmithing is hardly a popular career choice, especially in today's technology-driven society, but the practice of making physical objects can be enormously fulfilling. And the blacksmith's way - the fusion of fire, earth, water and air - can be particularly satisfying.   The blacksmithing community will share their secrets he says.   "They'll tell you how they do something. It's not all my own research, I've made contact with others … some in the States, some are in England or in France."   But it wasn't always that way.   "When I started, there was a lot of secrecy, you almost had to sneak up and look through a knothole in the shop."   Johnston, who was commissioned to repair the gates at Parliament Hill, said the art of blacksmithing started to decline in the 1960s, but has bounced back in recent years.   The ironwork in Ottawa, originally done in the 1870s, saw a team of craftspeople using material of the same age and forging. Some team members had never worked with wrought iron before, says Johnston.   He says he made frequent trips to Ottawa and studied the gates for 20 years before he got the job.   A bench full of tools was designed and created for the project, right down to special hammers for a range of applications to complete the task.   "Sometimes you make a tool to make a tool to do a job."   Once the gates were complete, for him, much of the satisfaction came from comments regarding what was done then and what was done originally. And that's what Johnston was hoping for ... repairs as inconspicuous as possible.   "I believe that's what you should do, give it the best of your ability and make it look as much like the original as you can."   He recalls a repair job on an 18th century English-made, breech-loading flintlock gun which was missing a piece of the firing mechanism.   "There was enough of it left so I could tell what the shape and dimensions of it should be. First, I forged the piece out of wrought iron, filed it and aged it with a bit of acid and heat." When the collector found another gun that interested him even more, he offered the repair to the Tower of London, which was interested because of the overall high-quality reputation of the relic and its maker. The sale was subject to the approval of appraisers from the Tower.   The deal fell through when they were told work had been done on the firearm and they couldn't tell how much.   "They wondered how much was original and what wasn't," said Johnston with a grin. A report came back from the appraisal: "You succeeded in fooling the experts from the Tower of London."   "I wasn't trying to fool anybody," he said. "I was just trying to do a good job."   But occasionally, modern technology is the only way to complete a repair, most especially, in joining metals with electric or gas welding techniques.   "Sometimes you can't repair something with the same technology it was built with. You are going to destroy what's left of the original piece. You just make that judgment when the time comes."   Johnston comes from a long line of blacksmiths, starting with his great-great-grandfather who came to Canada in 1831 and settled in the Belleville area at a time when the bulk of the work included shoeing horses and repairing farm machinery.   He recalls how his father lost his blacksmith shop to an errant piece of hot steel.   "He cut the end off a horseshoe. It went flying and he couldn't find it. When he came back after lunch, the building was on fire. He didn't work much after that."   Afterward, he sold all the equipment salvaged from the shop.   "There's no such thing as a 'typical' blacksmith in terms of history. They tailored to the needs of their community."   According to William Wylie's book, The Blacksmith in Upper Canada, in the 1780s and beyond, blacksmiths first settled in the towns and other centres on the line of immigrant travel.   "It was only when demand for their services was satisfied in the towns that they moved on to the countryside," writes Wylie. "The spread of smithing was slow in the early years because of the shortage of buying power among settlers.   "The typical smith worked alone or with the aid of one or two others, focusing his attention on all manner of iron-working tasks for his rural neighbours, including horseshoeing, vehicle repair and the maintenance of edge tools and agricultural equipment."   Today though, much of the work done by a blacksmith is decorative ironwork.   "There are catalogues where you can order components now," he said, adding, "I don't like to do that, its more fun to make everything."   Through the years of working in the trade, Johnston has purchased the contents of 22 blacksmiths shops, but one of his finds holds a personal historical significance. He tracked down one of the anvils from his father's shop - "one my granddad was using" - to a farm in the Sterling area.   "I offered (the farmer) a hundred bucks for it," he said. "When he said 'yes,' I skipped school the next day to go get it.   "It's not a thing that I can use, nor would I. If you use antique tools, you kind of use them up and this one was abused as well as being a bit soft from going through the fire."   After more than 30 years in the world of industry, it was time to follow a dream. The path to making a living as a journalist/photographer started in Stettler, Alberta, and wound its way through Hamilton, Stoney Creek, Glanbrook and Caledonia. After landing work in the Brighton area, it took his wife Cheryl exactly one day to sell their home in Hamilton and they now live very close to Presqu’ile Park. Ray has contributed to Watershed magazine as well as Community Press and the Shield newspapers.   Return to top of page   This Is Livin' Publishing © 2010 581 8th Line West, RR1 Hastings, ON, K0L 1Y0 Phone/Fax: 705-696-1833   webmaster