#urihofi

Today was the official opening ceremony of the biennial Canadian blacksmiths conference CanIron, this year in its tenth anniversary. After a welcoming song by the local First Nations tribe and the major of town, who did not sing, but speak, we got to watch master blacksmiths Uri Hofi and Zeevik Gottlieb from Israel forge a bunch of decorative elements and bottle openers as well as a small female sculpture. Their precision and skill is tremendous and it was a joy to watch them work in tandem, striking for each other respectively.

At nearly 80 years old, Uri is a man of many professions who has gained international fame as a teacher of blacksmithing in the past thirty or so years. As always, the teachings are no less entertaining than the many stories he will tell you between heats.

The weather started off cool and foggy with misty rain in the morning, but it cleared up in the afternoon as predicted and actually got very hot and summerly again.

After lunch we watched master blacksmith Mark Aspery of British origin and now a resident of California forge a chisel and a slot punch in as little as two heats and then hardening and tempering it. He used 4140 cro-mo steel as he does normally, so will have to try to get my hands on some of that stuff too. You can watch him forge the struck end of the chisel in a single heat in the video I will be posting shortly. He then proceeded to start forging a miner’s candle holder out of a single piece of stock, but the day was over before he got to finish it. We’ll see more of that tomorrow.

Mark too is an internationally acclaimed blacksmithing instructor and has an uncanny skill of working to size, calculating his stock size in advance, accounting for loss in material and then forging it as if it were clay, manipulating the steel in any direction he pleases. A pleasure to watch, as you’ll see, even if those are just simple manipulations.