I try not to flood your timelines and email boxes with my blogs simply so I can say I put out a certain number of blogs a month or week, so I hope most of you understand that I only blog when things come up that I think you all may be interested in. This just happens to be one of those times.

The first news is that the blacksmithing has gotten fully under way and the first real useful items have been created there.  My bro Waterboard wanted to make his wife a Damascus steel kitchen knife.  Normally, a hand forged Damascus kitchen knife is going to run you somewhere in the realm of $250 or more.  Most of us don’t have that kind of money sitting around, so we decided to go ahead and make a go at making one ourselves. For those who don’t know, “Damascus Steel” is a generic term that means the same thing as the less sexy “pattern welded steel”.  Basically, you alternate two different kinds of steel (or alloyed steel) in a stack of metal, forge weld all of the pieces together, then alternate folding and forge welding until the desired number of layers is achieved. The more folds you have, the more layers you have, the tighter the line pattern on the finished product.  For his knife, Waterboard went with twenty layers, because he wanted a very loose line pattern.  The welding was the hardest part for us, since the forge here at Priddy Acres only has one burner and I haven’t coated the inside with heat reflecting paint yet, so it isn’t easy to get it up to welding temperatures. Waterboard did most of the forge welding, though, and got the original billet made.  Once we had the Damascus billet, we did some team striking (he held, I hammered with an 8 pound sledge) until we had the billet stretched out into a flat piece of steel about a quarter inch thick and roughly the length and height he wanted for the knife.  Then, Waterboard went to shaping the knife with the smaller 2.5 pound hammer.  Once he reached the shape he wanted, we took turns using the belt sander to refine the knife profile and take out any leftover hammer marks.  Once the profile was good and the sides of the knife were flat with a slight bevel toward the knife edge, we heat treated it. We left it a little on the thick side to help prevent the metal from warping when we did the heat treat.  After the heat treat was complete, we refined the bevel with the belt sander, dunked the blade in acid to make the Damascus lines more visible, and polished it.  After all of that was complete, we went to making the handle.  The piece of wood he chose was a nice piece of black walnut that my Dad had given to us. To attach the handle, we made some steel pins out of some half inch square stock I had laying around and used 5 minute epoxy to stick the wood to the metal while we pinned it (and fill any voids so the handle wouldn’t rattle).  Waterboard finished off the handle with a torch and beeswax, which gave it a nice darkened wood color.  I’d say, together, we probably spent 40 hours making this knife.  Obviously, this is more time than someone might take if they had a power hammer and some knife blanks sitting around ( which would take a lot of the time we spent hammering out a billet out of the equation), but the proof of concept that we can actually make good looking useful things is there.  I’m not saying we’re producing the prettiest things around, but we are getting there and they are functionally equivalent, so we are pretty satisfied with our progress.  I have included a few images of us working on the knife below, in various stages of completion.  Yes, that is me with a jimmy rigged contraption for making the pin holes. In addition to the blacksmithing progress, we have also progressed on the apiary front.

Last week, Michelle and I went down to GloryBee and bought all of our beekeeping supplies for the coming summer.  We will have five hives up and running this year.  We wanted to avoid extra expenses, as beekeeping equipment can really start to add up quickly, so we bought all of our brood boxes, honey supers, frames, and foundation unassembled and unpainted.  Sunday, we started putting all of those together.  You would be surprised at how long it takes to put together five hives worth of honey super frames with foundation.  I think I spent four or so hours putting them together.  It wasn’t that bad as we just put on a trilogy and started watching while Michelle and I were putting them together.  Michelle started putting together the brood box frames later that day and found that we had either bought the wrong foundation for them or were given the wrong foundation.  Either way, we need to go back down and exchange them for the right ones before long.  We are pretty excited at having so many more bees to care for this year, so I’m sure that I will be furiously updating the blog once spring hits to tell all of you about the most recent activity in the hives. In addition to our normal activities around the farm, we also have a wedding to plan.

Most people who know Michelle and I know that we aren’t exactly “extravagant” people, however, this is a wedding so all bets are off.  We have, though, set a fairly conservative wedding budget so we will be meticulously vetting each of our choices to accommodate that.  Michelle has been joyfully setting up bridesmaids and wedding dress appointments, picking out “save the date” cards, and picking out invitations…I was left with the question: don’t the invitations tell people to save the date?!  Apparently they do not.  Even so, I want Michelle to be happy with the choices we make, so spending $50 on “save the date” cards isn’t too high of a price to pay. There are still a couple very major things that I have to accomplish by July 22^nd, the most daunting of which is to remodel the wood shed into a lounge/reception hall.  When we bought our farm, there was a building that the appraiser pretty much assigned no value to because of its dilapidated state.  I have been storing wood and bee hive stuff in there, but I plan to renovate it into a separate activity room. It will have everything we need to entertain a large party without having to go into the house.  It’s going to be quite a bit of work, but I am confident that I will be able to get most of the renovation done by wedding day.  The stuff I may not get done are more like add-ons (fireplace with wood fired stove, etc.).   At any rate, it’s going to be an exciting several months.

As with most of my blogs, I would like to end with a little sip of that motivation. I know I often times feel like the current challenge is insurmountable, like every step forward I take someone is out there trying to push me back two steps, and that I will never be able to please some people.  If this is you, tell yourself what I tell myself:

1. Nothing is insurmountable, you just haven’t figured out the right strategy yet.
2. There will always be people trying to infringe on your happiness. You can’t prevent that.  Just stay focused on conducting your activities with honesty and integrity.  The rest will work itself out.
3. You don’t have to please anyone. If you are happy with the level of awesome you currently have and they can’t handle it, they can take a short walk off a long peer…or something like that.

These aren’t magic pills; they are positive ways of approaching a situation.  So go back out into your life and be that awesome you that you know you can be!