BELLAIRE • MEMORIAL • RIVER OAKS • TANGLEWOOD • WEST UNIVERSITY

From Popsicle sticks to steel

By Alex Haug, age 13 | June 1, 2017

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BLACKSMITH Sparks fly as Alex Haug, an incoming eighth grader at River Oaks Baptist School, uses an angle grinder to cut hardened steel.

Since I was a small kid, I have always enjoyed building things. First it was wooden blocks, then massive forts utilizing most of our sheets, then Legos, then hot glue on Popsicle sticks, then robots. Last: turning scrap metal into 2,000-degree steel.

Blacksmithing has been around since 1000 BC. You heat ferrous metal to high temperatures until soft, then pound it into a tool or other useful object. The fire makes this quite dangerous. There’s a saying among blacksmiths: “It’s not if you get burnt; it’s where and how bad.” I can assure you this is true.

My interest in blacksmithing began during my Popsicle-stick stage. I watched lots of YouTube videos of people making things. One day, I found a video titled “Forging a knife from scratch” showing a red-hot chunk of metal being struck with a hammer and made into something useful. I was hooked.

My parents were not. The idea of your kid working around super-hot fire is something no parent wants. But I knew I had to do blacksmithing, so I learned as much as I could from the Internet. One day after school, I built a forge from an old rusted fire pit and some bricks with a bit of dirt. I used lump charcoal as fuel and my mom’s hair dryer as bellows. My anvil was a reinforced concrete stepping stone.

Before my dad got home, I lit my forge and found a long piece of rebar as my steel. I wore jeans, a flannel shirt, and my scout hiking boots. I did have enough sense to try to keep myself alive, so I put on safety glasses and the smallest leather gloves I could find. Just in case, I put a fire extinguisher nearby. Even so, when my dad found me forging, with massive sparks spewing behind me, he was not happy.

That day I forged a fire poker, and it is still my favorite creation. Since then, I have made a knife for my dad, a coat hook for my mom, a cross for my grandma and more.

I think kids should have more creative outlets to make wood and metal objects like kids in the past did. Despite the burns and cuts I’ve gotten, I have never enjoyed anything as much.

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