FIVE: I Get Randy Over Process (And Tools)

I love tinkering. I loved my garage. I love the fact that having tools and a space to use them opens up a world of exploration and creation. I am an old man at heart. I’m just waiting for the years to catch up to me to a point where it is appropriate to mutter to yourself all day while shuffling around in your workshop with a partially deaf dog napping in the corner and talk radio blaring in the background. I can’t wait to start needing medication so I can collect pill bottles and put things in them. 

Of all the questions, I’m most interested in how. A normal person sees a table and says, hmm that’s a table. I see a table and I immediately wonder how the legs are attached. Will that be a sturdy fitting over time? I go to a barn wedding and I’m checking out the barn. Give me a cocktail or two and I’ll climb up to the loft to inspect the joinery. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. You can’t stop me.

I spent the last six months searching the Internet multiple times a day for an antique tool you’ve never heard of called a power hammer. A power hammer is a machine that lets you work bigger material faster than you could ever work by hand. Its like having a whole bunch of friends that are also blacksmiths helping you hammer hot metal together. Look them up on the YouTube, they’re sick. They were made 100 years ago and only about 5,000 of the particular style I was looking for still exist. When they pop up, they usually sell within a day. Faster sometimes.  

The perfect one came up on Craigslist one morning, and I didn’t find it until 11 p.m. the day it was posted. I had broken my routine of searching every morning because it was a weekend, and I cursed myself for it. I had anxiety stomach all night and couldn’t sleep. I was like this kid I saw on the Internet one time when his family deleted his World of Warcraft account. I was making jerking motions and speaking in half sentences and making popping noises. I got up a 4 a.m. and began researching the best way to transport this 1,000-pound machine from Delaware, in case it hadn’t sold yet. 

I got the guy on the phone around 9:30 a.m. and literally (and I’m using literally to mean literally here) begged this total stranger to hold onto the machine until that evening when I could get there with a trailer. It was pathetic but it worked. And I’m not even telling you the whole story. I hope one day I will know the joy that comes with being a father, but until then, the memory of taking possession of this little fellah will do. I show pictures of my power hammer to total strangers. They don’t care at all but I keep showing them. I can’t help it. I’m so proud of the little guy. 

It’s okay, I get it. I know I have a problem. But try to understand it from my perspective. I make shit. I see a tool and I see its history and its story and it potential and I start to drool. I think about what I could make with it and how many things it has been used to make already and how well it was made and on and on. I see beauty in process, art in the act of creation and not just the creation itself. We talk about fine art. I want garage art. 

Nick Moreau is an artist blacksmith and big fan of hand-pulled noodles. For recreation, he enjoys putzing around and watching 'Star Trek.' His business is Wicks Forge.

FOUR: How I Became An Artist At Harmony's Gate

It took about three years of being an artist blacksmith before I realized I was an artist. It happened with a piece called Harmony's Gate.

Until that time, I would make stuff that looked cool, that people liked, but I did not really feel like I was saying anything with my work, or that my work meant anything beyond being sweet. I make functional pieces primarily so it was easy to hide behind that. Artists just draw silly pictures and smoke pot and act depressed and talk down to others who haven’t read the same Murakami books as them. I was solving problems for people, gosh darn it! My clients needed something to rest their TV on and I was their guy to make the table. I sort of felt like a tradesman. Like it was a short jump from roofing a house to making metalwork. Is a roofer an artist? An electrician? Are you an artist? Now I think so, at the time I didn’t. But I’ll get to that later. 

I had been doing a lot of small orders - fire pokers, jewelry displays, fucking bottle openers - and I wanted to work on a gallery piece (that’s what artists do right? I dunno). So I started designing a music stand. They’ve been something I've loved making since I began as a blacksmith. They are functional and use a similar design to gates— the bread and butter of real blacksmiths — while being a fraction of the size and cost to make. You can essentially make a "gate" and show off your skills but not have to spend a thousand dollars on materials to do it — a good thing when your supply of thousand-dollar bills is limited. 

I made about three music stands before this one and had the mechanics down. It was just the design that needed doing. So I started looking at traditional metal gates to get inspired. Traditional metalwork is usually a combination of strait lines and these things called curlicues (I apologize to all of the real blacksmiths out there reading this for grossly over simplifying our very complex and beautiful field). I was on the Google that day looking at all these missionary-style gates (don't get me wrong they were symmetrical and beautiful, but they didn't do it for me, and they weren't the gates ol’ Nicky boy wanted to make). I looked at this symmetry and in my head I saw ivy and vines and I wanted to make something alive. I just wanted to make something cool.

This music stand popped out almost immediately. Usually I suck at designing. It can take me weeks to come up with a stick figure drawing for a client. It’s definitely the weakest part of my otherwise-immaculate game. But this fellah came out almost exactly as it ended up being realized. I spent the 60 hours fabricating it (pounding hot metal, oh yeah!), and then that was that. To me, it looked cool. I applied to put it an art show and then went back to making bottle openers every day.

A little bit later my brother was helping me market myself better and wanted me to start naming my pieces things other than: Rose Music Stand, Ivy Music Stand, Sailboat Music Stand, etc. (sounds pretty descriptive if you ask me). Well, its hard to argue your business strategy when you are broke, so I went along with it. I started thinking about this piece. What did it mean to me? What was I trying to communicate? I dunno, it just fucking looks cool, all right. Leave me alone. Well, okay, it’s kind of this mix of traditional and organic. It’s paying homage to these classic designs, but incorporating natural forms. Its like man and nature but mixed together rather than separate but equal. You see, there’s this scroll but then it turns into a leaf… and then something happened, like the years of Cheez-it preservative residue in my brain finally unclogged, and I had an epiphany.

Metal is a manmade material, and until the Computer Age or whatever we are in now, we were literally in the steel age. Steel defined human society. We built our buildings, our machines, our guns, our railroads and all that shit out of metal. We dominated the natural world with this material and it represented that domination. You can see this contrast by looking at a manmade gate with is symmetry and it's rigidity and supposed perfection then look at a wall of ivy or a tree and see the opposite. It's all curves and dissymmetry and irregular shapes and chaos. Ew, vomit. 

This contrast of man and nature has played out throughout history. As man's technology has grown, so has his relationship to nature. Back in the day, nature was something to be feared. Don't go into the woods because there's wolves and robbers and shit. As our technology grew and trade expanded, nature was something to fear but also to battle. Think Moby Dick — I'm gonna get you, you fucking whale, but you might get me too, oh no! With industrialization and all that stuff, we finally beat nature into submission. With megafarms and genetic engineering and Kool-Aid we put nature in it's place.

And then all of a sudden we realized that we need to save nature. We may be able to manipulate the Earth, but the things we've done to control this bitch have had unintended consequences. So now, nature is not a beast, it’s not the enemy, it’s this delicate little baby that we need to save from ourselves. We need preserves and ‘wild places’ and all that stuff because Man is destructive. The problem with all of these viewpoints is they’re actually all fundamentally the same. They are based primarily on a western conception of man as separate — and apart from — nature.

There's a dude we had to read in school named Lynn White Jr. His schpiel was basically that throughout history, advances in technology have led to advances in our destruction of nature. Think, more efficient farming means more crops per acre instead of less stress per acre. As such, more technology was not going save us. What we needed was a shift in our relationship to this conception of nature. Looking at nature as something all around us — your backyard, your city, your home — something you were actively a part of, rather than a zoo or a national park or something "out there" that needs your protection — this all represented a shift in ideology that he believed was a step towards sustainability.

So what does all this have to do with a music stand? I didn’t look at the music stand that day and all of a sudden realize that man is fucking over the natural world. I went to college twice to learn that one. What I realized was that my viewpoint and my beliefs were represented in that piece without me having to, I dunno, flick some magical switch to be artist. Even using my crude decision-making process of "looks cool" or "looks shitty," I was representing myself and my beliefs in my work whether I wanted to or not. Every decision I made, from what styles I gravitated to, what I drew, how I built, everything, was a representation of who I was and what I believed. I’m not saying you should look at this piece and think anything other than "looks cool" or "looks shitty." All I am saying is that I realized that there was a piece of myself in this stand, and actually in all of my work, and that was pretty cool.

There is a great Tom Waits quote where he says how you do anything is how you do everything. Fuck, I love that quote. The world is your canvas and every day, you make decisions that no one else would make. And if you are a follower and take the missionary approach to life, even that is a decision. The way you dress, the way you talk, what you create, what you decide not to create, if you are a nice person or a weenie — these are all decisions that define who you are and how you communicate with those around you. I think being an artist is about being able to communicate ideas and emotions to others. It requires nothing else other than not being currently dead. But when we do art, we are deliberately trying to communicate; we are trying to have an effect on those around us (which is funny because a lot of artists are really weird and awkward). So the next time someone tells you your work is no good or you shouldn’t be playing with crayons and should go get a real job. Tell them to go fuck themselves; you are an artist (they’ll just chalk that outburst up to you being weird and awkward anyway).

Nick Moreau is an artist blacksmith and big fan of hand-pulled noodles. For recreation, he enjoys putzing around and watching 'Star Trek.' His business is Wicks Forge.

THREE: The $50 Baby's Momma Tattoo

The dude from This American Life says creative people start out with taste but not skills. You have the taste to recognize beauty but not yet the skills to realize it. So you start out making shit that your know sucks but you don't have the skills to do anything about it. And It takes either discipline or ignorance to get over the hump.

In addition to blacksmithing, I'm also a coach. I see a similar process with kids. They pick up a new sport and of course they suck. But they didn't know it yet and they somehow enjoy sucking. After a while — enjoying it the whole time — they don't suck anymore. They get over the hump. I call this blessed ignorance.

The problem with taking up a trade as an adult is you don't have that. You suck and you know you suck. That's all there is to it.

With a background in carpentry, I thought I knew my way around a hammer. But hammer work with metal is a unique skill. There is a dance that goes on between your left hand holding the metal and your right hand working the hammer. You work metal four faces at a time. Ding, ding, ding, then turn it 90 degrees. You do a light tap against the anvil with your hammer in between to keep momentum - a slightly different sounding ding, call it ping — then ding, ding, ding again, and another turn. The slightest mishit (which sort of looks like mis-shit - with similar outcomes), the wrong angle of the blow, the wrong slant of the metal, and you've fucked up the piece you've been working for the last half hour.

And there's just no way to get around the time needed to develop this aspect the trade.

And so you learn to suck. I would have to mentally psych myself up for the upcoming debauchery that would be my work at the shop every day. I once spend a whole week making 12 shutter latches that my boss told me should take 4 hours. To get those 12 fucking latches I had a waste pile of over 40. There's obviously a humbleness that comes from working hours on something and then being able to throw it away. But there is also a confidence that develops - to believe in yourself enough to let something go. To know you can do it again, or do it better, that it wasn't a fluke. 

But let's get back to taste. I think it's rare for an artist to not dream of doing awesome work that inspires and awes the world. Put another way, no one moves to Hollywood looking to be an awesome waiter and doing commercial bits on the side.

But when you start out, A) you suck (as we've already covered), And B) no one knows who you are (and if they do they probably think you suck — see, A).

So where do you go? You start. Wherever you can because your love of making shit overcomes your sadness at being shitty at it. Use what you have available to you right now and do it cheaply with no excuses. Kevin Smith made the movie Clerks. I made bottle openers.

I started my business in my grandparents' garage while living at home with my parents. Besides not having much of a social life, I didn't have people knocking down my doors begging to pay me tons of money for commissioned work (I know, I was surprised too).

So I started small. Bottle openers are relatively easy to make. The metal you use is the same as on larger pieces but thinner so it's easier to work and shape. The variations are endless and any shape you can make on a million dollar piece you can replicate on a bottle opener. Scrolls and pig tails and leaves, and twists and points and anything else.

And so I made — and continue to make — A LOT of bottle openers. I've easily make several thousand of these fuckers. I was the karate kid of fucking bottle openers. Wax on, wax off. Bottle cap on, bottle cap off. Big ones, small ones, fancy ones, ugly ones, REALLY ugly ones. The whole gamut. You name it, I've turned it into a bottle opener.

And you know what. As I made these fucking things over and over and over, I started to not suck so badly. I was the guy from Karate Kid who was also in My Cousin Vinny but with a mustache (two yoots...), and these god forsaken bottle openers were my Mr. Miyagi. I got a feel for the hammer, a feel for how the metal wants to move, and how to move it ways it doesn't want to. I stopped sucking. These god forsaken bottle openers showed me how to be a blacksmith. 

Okay, so problem A) not sucking so badly. Check that baby off the list. Problem two — people aren't throwing wads of cash at you to do your art and express yourself. 

But you know what - that's something that might never go away. I had a conversation with a tattoo artist once and he called this the "$50 baby's momma tattoo dilemma." You got the skills, you open your shop, and instead of doing custom full back canvases for thousands of dollars, someone walks in and wants a "Dave Mathews Dancer" tramp stamp. Maybe you want to tell them that is a terrible idea, that some things shouldn't be immortalized above your ass. But you don't.  You nut up and give this person what they want because they're the ones who pay your bills and let you work on the projects you really want to work on. And it makes them happy. And doing a million tramp stamps gives the you the skills to do the full body canvas.

What I've been talking about is my version of artistic integrity. I don't even drink that much. But here I am working for breweries and celebrating cool craft drinking accessories.

So when your starting out, for me anyways, they're had to be some compromise. I didn't have the skills and I didn't have the clients. So I learned to love my version of the "$50 baby's momma tat." And you know what — my first art commission came from a woman who found me because of my stupid bottle openers. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you purist.

It's rare for an artist not to struggle with these ideas. Why are you making things and who are you sharing them with? How will you get paid? What if someone loves your work but doesn't have the right budget? Are you only a jester for the super rich? Do you pour your soul into grant proposal after grant proposal in order to be granted artistic freedom? Do you do your art in your basement on the weekends and keep it to yourself? Do you do it part time? Full time? How to you translate your passions into a career? What does it mean to be a professional? 

All I know is that I love making things because of the effect it can have when shared with others. And so I've focused on that, regardless of the job and regardless of the price. If you buy a $7 opener from me, you get the same gratitude, the same hand-written note, as when you buy a custom piece of one of a kind artwork. 

That interaction is my chance to change the world by changing that person. By giving them something made with love and shared with love, I get to make them happy, to make them feel loved. I hope they get how much I care, and I hope that every time they crack a beer with the boys, they take a second and think about beauty and change and other sparkly ideas. A lot of times people don't get it. But when they do, it's pretty legit.

So I'll keep making these fucking bottle openers as long as you keep buying them.

Nick Moreau is an artist blacksmith and big fan of hand-pulled noodles. For recreation, he enjoys putzing around and watching 'Star Trek.' His business is Wicks Forge.

TWO: Lighting Yourself On Fire

Blacksmiths today mostly work a material called mild steel. The 'mild' stands for mild carbon, the relative amount of carbon added to molten iron at the foundry, which defines the characteristics of the steel. Just like that stupid statistic about most life forms sharing like 97 percent of the same DNA, most steels are something like 99 percent iron, and it is the composition of that remaining 1 percent that defines the personality of the steel. A dash of zinc and chrome and you get stainless steel. Up the carbon to about 4 percent and throw in some impurities and you get tasty, hip cast iron pans. Mild carbon steel has a nice balance of strength and workability and that’s why we use it. Think of it like Goldilocks' porridge.

Unlike people, when metal gets hot, it begins to glow. First a dull, then brilliant red. Then an orange and yellow, and as it begins to burn (yes, metal can burn) a blinding white. When I first began in blacksmithery, I struggled to see what I was doing when working the metal because of the glow given off by the metal. You learn to interpret shadows and variations within the glow.

This beautiful spectrum is best observed in lower lighting - direct sunlight could make even white hot metal loose its glow. Because of this, blacksmith shops usually have minimal overhead lights. It's important to have proper ventilation however — ideally, a cross breeze set up by two open doors or a roofed structure with no walls, as the gases from the forge, from welding, and from grinding are all poisonous.

If you are going to burn yourself, it's actually best to do so when the metal is on the top end of the spectrum. White hot metal glows like a light saber, and also like a light saber, disintegrates skin. It's so hot you don't even feel it. At first.

Red hot metal will instantly cauterize your skin. This, again, is not so bad. Heck, back in the olden times before Neosporin, if you had a bad cut or got shot, they'd have to do that for you anyways to clean the wound.

The real bitch is when the metal looses its color. Metal without a glow can still be hundreds of degrees. But this steel won't cauterize your skin. Instead, it sticks to it. That's when you really get into trouble.

The left hand holds the end of the hot metal if it's more than a foot long, or it holds tongs which grab the metal if it is a smaller length. The right hand works the hammer. As such, you usually wear a glove on your left hand. And the left hand usually gets burned the most. Leather is a sink for heat. It will protect you from an instant burn, but once it takes on too much heat, it will toast you through the glove. Over time, the heat shrinks the leather and your left glove becomes smaller and smaller until it becomes like an OJ glove and you need to retire it. The pointer finger takes the most heat, being closest to the flame, and is the first point to blow out. Unfortunately, you can't just buy left-handed gloves, so you end up with a lot of extra righty gloves.

The color of the metal is what tells you when and how to work the material. Each time you take the metal out of the forge, you have anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes to work the material before it looses its heat, depending on the thickness and, therefore, the heat mass of the piece. Each cycle of taking the metal out of the forge is called a heat. A piece might take anywhere from one to dozens of heats to work and shape.

A common question for a blacksmith is 'how hot does the forge get.' I usually lie and say somewhere around 1500 degrees. I've looked it up before but I can't remember. The truth is I don't know and it doesn't matter. You don't work the metal based on temperature, but based on color. And even then it doesn't really matter except for that a very scientific scale exists of easier to work when hotter, harder to work when not hot. You could make the same piece working metal at room temperature for the most part, you'd just have to be a lot stronger than me to do it.

Speaking of scale: when the metal is put in the forge, the surface reacts with the flame and oxidizes. A thin bluish black 'scale' will form on the outside of the piece. As you begin to hammer, pieces of this scale will flake off and begin to litter the floor like snow, except hundreds of degrees hotter. This blackish scale is how blacksmiths got their name.

To cut and grind the steel, you use an angle grinder. A fiberglass disk is used to cut the metal and flap disks are used to smooth it. As you cut the metal, the disks break down, releasing fiberglass into the air. Fiberglass particles are wicked small and will pass right through a normal dust mask, entering your lungs where they do lord knows what. It tastes kind of alkaline.

When you cut the metal, you have to get a good line of sight so you can cut it straight. This usually means holding the grinder slightly off-center and to the right of your body. The trade-off is that your lower right half is in the path of the shower of sparks. One spark won't light you on fire, but over time, millions of them will wear out a few "hot spots" on your pants until the threads turn into tinder. The first place to go is the lower right groin region. Don't worry, unless your hung like a moose, the boys are safe.

That's not to say that the sparks won't light you on fire if you get a particularly heavy dose during a long cut. When I was apprenticing, I had never used an angle grinder before. Wanting to look cool — a theme of my life — I told my boss I knew what I was doing. I began the cut and sparks were nailing my leg something fierce. Fear of humiliation kept my eyes on the prize. I was cutting the shit out of that metal! About halfway through my boss said something but I couldn't hear him because of the noise of the grinder. It was probably something like "nice cutting Nicky boy!" Among the smells of Fiberglass and metal, a new aroma caught my nose. It smelt like burning plastic. It was the polyester in my pants. My boss was telling me my pants were on fire. That's what you get for lying about your skills.

Nick Moreau is an artist blacksmith and big fan of hand-pulled noodles. For recreation, he enjoys putzing around and watching 'Star Trek.' His business is Wicks Forge.

ONE: Back In The Day, I’d Still Be A Little Bellows Boy

My name is Nick Moreau, I am a human and a blacksmith and some other stuff. Here's proof:

I grew up idolizing my dad who is a framer - that is - one who frames houses. Here’s me and my butt crack one summer in the act of framing.

I used to dream of having a sweet set up of tools and knowledge of building. I’d see tradesmen in their beat-up trucks, weathered skin and Marlboro red 100’s (that’s extra long cowboy-killers) and I’d think of my pops and how he was cool enough to grunt and scratch his balls in the right synchronization to communicate with those dudes. Maybe my balls don’t scratch the same way, but I was never able to master the language. Whenever I was “hanging with the dudes” on the jobsite I usually felt like a pretender, like I was this keen Bob the Builder caricature. “We need another box of two- and-a-half T25 deck screws, can you grab them from the trailer?” What the fuck are you talking about?

The summer after my first year of college I flew down to Florida to stay with my Dad for the first time. I was excited to finally work with the old man and learn to be a real carpenter. I packed my Tim’s, because that’s what real men wear on the jobsite, just like in the slow motion ads where ripped guys in hard hats are using chains to lift and drag large ambiguous machinery. Boots are legit for looking cool and thug, but rough for climbing on roofs, or on top of walls. Or ladders. Or most things. My coworkers - consisting of my dad who was the boss, and another father-son duo who called themselves the ‘A-Team’ – wore a pair of $8 WalMart Velcro sneakers (my dad is also frugal) and matching VANS skate shoes (the A-team liked to match).

My dad and the A-team also had tans. The younger A-team member had a six-pack and would frame with no shirt on. I thought I would increase my cool factor by catching up on the tan, wearing cool lax pinnies (I should probably mention this now, I am a straight white male from New England who played lacrosse) and rocking the guns sans suntan lotion while I got my frame on. In addition to getting my frame on, I also got sun poisoning that first week and spent the rest of my time that summer ‘framing with the guys’ carrying around a giant jug of scented Aloe vera gel that my stepmom gave me. I had to take a timeout from getting my frame on every 20 minutes to apply this gel to the area of my shoulder where my skin used to be.

When I started metalworking full-time, it took me a while to say I was a blacksmith when someone asked me what I did. For one, when I say blacksmith, people usually ask if I make one of two things: horseshoes or swords. If you learn one thing today, you asshole, someone who shoes horses is called a ferrier, and someone who makes swords is called a bladesmith.

Another reason is I do not see myself as a professional: I didn’t go to art school or trade school or blacksmith school (yes, those exist). I can’t even draw (it’s pathetic, the sketches I have to show to clients sometimes).

My workshop started in my grandparents' garage. I couldn’t hammer on Sundays because the neighbors would walk through their backyard to complain about the noise. I only apprenticed for one year before I began my own shop. I know my work is good, but I know in a lot of ways I am still pretending to be a professional. As my commissions have gotten bigger and my business has grown, so has my confidence. But I'm still waiting for that feeling to go away, and I wonder if it ever will.

I think about if this were back in the day, I wouldn’t even be allowed to be the guy hammering yet. I’d be the kid with the sooty face in the back working the fan to keep the coals hot. The real blacksmiths would probably call me Skippy and tell me to fetch things for them.

Sometimes I get embarrassed by my silly set-up and my lack of experience. I think I’m just playing blacksmith, like a little kid sliding on the roof in his Tim’s, trying to be just like his Dad.

Sometimes when someone compliments my work, I think they are stupid for complimenting an apprentice in training named Skippy whose only skill is making a mean cup of tea for the real blacksmiths. But compliments feel nice.

Nick Moreau is an artist blacksmith and big fan of hand-pulled noodles. For recreation, he enjoys putzing around and watching 'Star Trek.' His business is Wicks Forge.