In this video, I show you how to forge a spatula. If you’re forging the spatula, you might as well be forging a kitchen utensil set including the ladle and meat fork too! Downloadable patterns for these are $3.99 at
Hello everybody welcome back to the workshop so today i’m going to be showing you how to make one of these three blanks the first point that i’m gonna start with is perhaps the easiest blank which is this one right here this is the spatula but link this has the least amount of forging involved in it and you know everybody can enjoy a really good spatula now these
Other two here a ladle and important point these are meant to be sold in a three piece set you can add whatever other type of lights you want you could do four pieces make this a ladle that has holes in it so like a strainer type ladle i don’t know what you call those this is going to be just formed like a soup ladle and then you know you’ve got your barbecue
Roasting fork here you know and then once again your spatula is just pretty basic now you can do these out of either steel or copper and i have plans at blacksmith pdfs com of exact size templates to what i’m working with so therefore i will not be going over the sizes with you today you can go there if you have any interest in making these because i have exact
To scale drawings that you can lay out on a piece of material and be able to make these yourself so without further ado let’s get to crack it on this one right here thanks for watching alright now we got a good fire going here we’re gonna start with the first one so the first one is the spatula here so this spatula we are going to take in the very first part
Because we’re not gonna forge the blade of the spatula we are going to take and forge this portion here this is going to be the handle part that you’ll attach later on to a wooden handle or a handle of your choosing now if you just want to attach this to some other handle and you don’t want to make the socket like this you can alter the plans a little bit and
Just make like a little pull tab up there say you’re working with some cob you need to join it to some steel that’s a great way of taking and doing it so the first step in this process is to get this good and hot and then the next steps in this process we’re going to go over to the sledge block now do not be intimidated that you do not have a sledge block you
Do not have a sweat block you can buy a b block for the anvil or if your animal has a step in it you can use the step of the anvil to curl this around i do not have a step of the anvil on my anvil at all so therefore i’m going to use the sweat block because it’s easier so once this is good and hot we’ll be over in the sweat block and will start to form this and
You can see how that works okay so first things first we’re going to want to take and shape this right down here in the nook now this is the part that’s going to be closer to the spatula and it’s going to require the most shaping then we’re going to go up to the next good clear definitive line like what you see right here so you’re watching this upside down and
I apologize for that that’s just the way the camera angle works so this right here there’s there you go so there’s a first stage we’ll go ahead and get this hot again and we’ll just continue shaping all right gooden hut continue to chase this up get right in here this is where our nice small team comes in handy you get these to really shape out nicely without
Being without smacking around too much and if you notice i haven’t really hammered anything on the outside and the reason for that being until just now is we want all of our hammer marks to stay on the inside of this piece because if you put all your hammer rights on the outside really a bugger to clean up so now you guys can take and see how this is shaping
Along we still have to take and get in here and shake this down a little bit better yet so it’ll require coming in here with another sheet or so and shape them that out so this way these get really nice and tight and we can draw those around the ideal here is to make a socket and so we want the socket to be a much wider at the top than what it is at the bottom
So that’s the reason why it’s shaped like it is and it will definitely be that way once we get it done here but i’ll go ahead and take another heat on it and then i’m gonna use the rawhide mallet you can kind of help close and shape some of this up just like so while i’m in the sweat block and then that will take and get our shape mostly closed that seam and now
You’re probably gonna see something that ends up happening here pretty much the seam is going to twist a little bit to one side or the other very rarely do i ever get it to where the seam runs perfectly up the center and i’ll show you how to correct that in the vise okay so i’m going to go up here in a smaller depression continue to work these things in a little
Bit the longer you can stay here before you go to the anvil the better off you’ll be and then we’re just going to close up this scene to try to get it mostly ground but now you’ll start seeing where we’ll need to take and actually start closing the seam up on the animal a little better but here’s the socket foramen now say you want to put a little bigger socket
On this you can deviate from the plans all you have to do is make your adjustment on the width out here from the plans deviations but there we go we got that so far and now it’s really just taking and cleaning that area up there and we have to do that at the end and surprisingly enough that did come out pretty well centered which i’m quite happy with so i’ll
Take another heat on this and then we’ll go to the anvil we’ll close up this last little bit here right by the right by the transition to the actual spatula itself all right so now with some careful hammering we’re going to bring this to this close edge here and we are just going to hammer right down in that area there take your time as you can see i’m working
With a very small small hammer to do this just a little bit close together and then i’m gonna end up going probably back to this wedge block one more time just to refine this shape but that’s really all that’s needed for this you can come in here and clean this up as much as you like it’s really the ideal here is you’re not trying to forge this you’re just trying
To form it so keep that in mind these very light hammer blows we’re just trying to come together so at the same point you can see here that that line got a little crooked so i get to show you that at the vise and how we’re gonna fix that so let’s go over there next and we’ll get this straightened out oh no i say that a lot but here we are i’m going to show you
Guys how to get that straightened out what we’re going to do is we’re just going to grab a hold of it here and we’re gonna lock it in the vise you don’t want to twist your spatula out of sorts we just want to take and get this line straightened up so what you’re gonna do is you can use really any pair of tongs but you’re just gonna take and give it just a little
Twist and this will twist and it’s just lightly and it will straighten out that scene for you now one of the other parts that having if you have the tool to do it it is nice to be able to take in half a good pair of scrolling tongs to just get everything good and center it up because you can actually use that in them and this was my bad for not having it zoomed
Out enough so you guys could see that actually it worked but the scrolling tongs literally sock it right down inside that socket and those become pretty and valuable very quickly but now you guys can see how i straighten that right up so once again you’re gonna end up refining this more probably with some with some sanding and stuff you know before it becomes a
Kitchen utensil and you actually finish the thing but that’s the way that that works there so now that we got the socket done we’re going to go ahead before we do any more shaping of this we are going to go ahead and forge out the blade edge of the spatula we’re gonna do that next we get that forged out then we’ll go ahead and do our final shaping of the socket
And then it would be ready for cleanup and seasoning so without further ado let’s go over the anvil and get this edge forged okay now for our blade edge we’re just going to create a very simple bevel now i just create real simple bevel we’re gonna start with the front edge first okay take it all the way to the edge here at the anvil this way we can work on it
Without hitting the center very ample and you’re gonna notice that it gets a little bit of spread you don’t really there you have it there’s a first bevel the front bevel so when you put in your side bevels now those have become a little tricky when you’re taking trying to forge on an anvil here so one of the most difficult things and get this out of here is
To get this at the right angle so this way you can work all areas i found the handiest portion of my anvil to be clear over here at the horn because there’s a drop-off where i can do that if you have a step of an anvil that’s even easier or you don’t have either of those and you have an upset block or a big block in your handful face that you can work all sides
That’s a great way of doing that as well so let’s get it hot again and we’ll forge in the side bevels now folks we need to take and get this thing a little better shape so most spatulas you don’t want to just sit flat so you actually want to put some curvature in them to where they can make it down in the pan now i suggest using a rawhide mallet for this
In order to get just a slight curve like you see here this allows it to get down into a frying pan or a saucepan of some sort and you can make that curve down at the very bottom of this and not have to worry about not have to take a worry about this thing getting where you can’t put in your handle your socket of your handle if you make your curve too far up in
The socket point here this wire towards this set out to burn stuff so right in here if you put your curve in here you won’t be able to get your socket you won’t be able to get a piece of wood or whatever you’re using is your handle material down into that socket so it’s imperative that we keep that entered the inner diameter of the socket the same okay right
There we got to keep all this in here the same if we can keep all this in here the same and nice and round and coned we’re in good shape and you will have no problems nothing’s worse than finishing off a piece and then realizing oh crud i need to do that again so now you can just give this a brushing at this point i would go and i would clean all this stuff up
At the belt sander i you know clean up any missed hammer marks so it wasn’t showing or you know any transitions that need to take a bit cleaned up like right in this area here like right here this area here i would clean up any transition and here we clean up if i had any missed hammer marks or pop marks don’t want on the surface i’d clean that up and then i
Would also square up this end a little bit and you notice there’s a little bit of a peek just a little bit of a peek right here i would grind this flush so this way when you put instead of it being a diagonal like that so this way when you put a handle to it it’s all sitting nice and square so that’s it for this video i hope you all enjoyed it if you did give
It a big thumbs up and make sure to keep an eye out for the other videos in the series where we make a ladle and we also make the fork and finish help descend god bless you all and thank you for watching and like i always say we will catch you on the next one you
Transcribed from video
Forging a Spatula (Part 1 of Forging a Kitchen Utensil Set) By Christ Centered Ironworks