Mankind’s ability to not only come up with metal alloys but also work them into functional shapes, tools, parts, and pieces will forever stand as one of the key accomplishments that led to modern life. You literally cannot look around a room and avoid seeing something that was cast, forged, machined, or fabricated from metal. This video does not deal with the casting and machining stuff but it does deal with the forging stuff on multiple size and scale paths. We see massive glowing hunks of steel getting expertly squashed into the shapes that a manufacturing process designates, we see springs being hot wound, we see gutsy foundry workers handing hunks of metal hot enough to make the surface of the sun seem like Honolulu.
We love the fact that while the basic process is simple, the execution of it is way harder than us normal people will ever know. Heat the metal, squash the metal, machine the metal, right? The squashing of the metal is what we see here and that’s a process that seems to have a million variants and techniques as well. You’ll see stuff like “wedging” performed, where quite literally a wedge is placed between the forging hammer and the object being forged to work a V-cut into it.
This is no work for weaklings it seems. It is also no work for someone who lacks the ability to pay attention. The ways to die in this video are too many to count. Check it out!
