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Welcome to the second Practical Fabrication Video
Although main interest is designing and fabricating practical and useful items,
in this video I am exploring the challenges of learning to perform what could be considered an artistic process.
The Creation of a whale from a railroad spike.
To begin I slit the tip of the spike with a hacksaw about 1 1/2 widths of the blade.
This will be forged into a tail a little later on.
Again using your handy hacksaw, the offset of the head of the railway spike is also split down the middle.
This will eventually be formed into the front flippers.
The first forging step is to draw out just in front of the tail.
The Blue Whale's tail is very narrow immediately in front of the flukes.
Here you can see the photos that I am working off of, also in foreground is the first whale that I made.
Everyone learns in different ways, my preferred method is through doing.
Normally the third try results in a suitable outcome.
The next step would be to form the flukes by folding the top of the spike along the cut that was made with the hack saw.
The use of the hot-cut hardy works well for starting the fold.
It is best to get the flukes as perpendicular as possible to the spike.
Making the tail flaterer-er.
As the whale takes form the hardy hole becomes more useful for putting flukes and fins in when forming the body, head or tail.
Once again, the hot cut Hardy is employed to split the head of the railway spike.
Here the hot spike is gripped in the vise and is folded over to form the head.
The fold is completed to form the head and then welded into place.
Hopefully this does not cause all the traditionalist blacksmith purists to reach for their keyboards to send comments of disgust with my modern blasphemous ways.
Drawing out the head and the forming of the fins takes some time.
Although some modern r/blacksmiths;) may prefer to play angry birds on their phone while they wait for a heat,
I prefer to have anywhere from 2 to 5 things on the go at the same time.
Keeping the next step of three different parts in mind while pounding the object gripped in your tongs is challenging,
and the burn in your arms at the end of the day makes you feel alive.
Adding the details such as the mouth, baleen, eyes and blowholes are completed with an assortment of custom ground chisels and punches.
There you have it folks,
lots of firsts in this here film,
One of my first films,
One of my first artistic sculptures,
first closed captioning,
Hopefully someone learns something, I know I did. 35 00:09:24,000 --> Thanks for watching. 36 00:09:25,000 --> CC brought to you by the letter "I"