Forging on: Blacksmith creates with metal and fire

The rolling hills of Frohna, Missouri, seem like the ideal setting for bird song, cattle grazing and people taking long strolls in the sunshine, but if that walk takes one near the Saxon Lutheran Memorial, they're likely to hear the ringing song of a blacksmith hard at work with traditional equipment and techniques.

Mark Petzoldt, a lifelong resident of the area with family ties going back several generations, works in a one-room corner of a wooden complex, next to the broom-making demonstration area. A field mouse hops out from under the equipment in one corner, stored there by other people who work at the memorial village.

Since there are log cabins, a traditional kitchen, a visitors' center and several other outbuildings, not to mention multiple volunteers who maintain the buildings and grounds, there's a lot of equipment.

Hand tools of every stripe line the wide-plank, bare wood walls, hung by pegs and nails, and Petzoldt briefly points them out between hammer strikes.

But his main focus is the equipment he's using.

Mark Petzoldt welded a table made with odds and ends of metal bits as seen at his home workshop.Fred Lynch

He's using a 3/8-inch square rod, what he calls "hot roll" metal. He plunges the end into the forge, the metal grate in the bottom open to allow oxygen through to help ensure even heat, the chimney wide open to pull out acrid smoke and some of the heat.

It's still hot in the room, even with the sliding door wide open and the walls not quite completely solid.

He's making what he calls a hot-dog roaster, even though the rod he's using is close to 6 feet long.

"People like to sit back from the fire a little," he says, so he tries to accommodate that.

Petzoldt wants to make sure he's making items people want, he says. This piece is going to a person he knows, so he has a pretty specific design in mind.

He gestures to a rack on the wall by the door, where forks a foot long hang.

"Those go well," he says, when he's set up for the Fall Festival at the memorial village.

Petzoldt laughs, dragging the end of the rod from the fire, its color brilliant orange, almost yellow, almost white.

"That's how you can gauge temperature," Petzoldt says, and angles the rod to the anvil. He strikes it with a hammer, starting closer to the neck and working his way down, to help control the thickness of the point.

He works fast, hammering only when the metal is hottest, plunging it into a bucket of water he keeps between forge and anvil, leaning back from the steam as it spews out.

"Bad for your lungs," he says of the steam, then angles the rod back into the fire to heat it again.

He makes several trips from fire to anvil, then from fire to vise. He's adding a twist to the metal, a tricky art in itself.

Petzoldt watches to make sure the tip's still pointing the direction he wants, turning and turning, making sure the twists are even and rod straight.

The twist is largely decorative, but it also adds strength, he says.

Then it's back to the forge to form the hook on the other end.

Petzoldt started out as a blacksmith when he was 18. He's now 53, and he's largely self taught, he says.

"I don't know a lot of the technical terms," Petzoldt says. "I just know how it works."

He hand-turns a blower to get the fire where he wants it, and points out the room he's in doesn't have any electricity.

"I do everything by natural light," he says.

He also doesn't wear gloves. "I like being fingers on," he says.

Besides, blacksmiths have a heat tolerance, he says.

To finish the piece, he stamps it "USA" with his metal stamping set.

He pulls a "clinker" out of the fire as it dies down, lifting it with a long metal fork. It's the fused impurities that burned out of the bituminous coal, and he laughs.

"That's a piece of a mess," he says, and tosses it aside.

It stops air flow, he says, and that's not great while trying to maintain even temperature with the fire.

He waxes the finished poker, heating the metal so the pores open up and take in more of the wax. It's just regular beeswax, he says, made by bees in Perry County. The wax seals the metal against water, helping protect against rust.

"Smells good too," he says.

He doesn't like to leave his pieces on display, he says. "I'm a volume guy," Petzoldt says, gesturing to the pieces hung ready to sell.

"I make it," he snaps his fingers, "I sell it."

It's taken him just under an hour, start to finish, with this particular piece. Nothing fancy, he says, but functional, and a little different.

He grabs a chunk of lye soap, blackened all over, but with hints of purple showing through.

One of the other vendors at the fall festival makes this soap, he says, and he worked out a deal with her where she'll give him the soap she can't sell. He doesn't need it to be pretty, just strong enough to remove some of the black soot baked into his hands.

He started at the memorial in 1995, he says, but he'd already been working with metal for years before that.

And the blacksmithing isn't his only metal pursuit.

At his home, Petzoldt has an outbuilding, maybe 15 by 40 feet, solid wood, dimly lit, with stacks and heaps of metal scraps and broken tools, projects being built, projects coming together, welding machines here and there. A heap of wheels and a bucket of "just pieces" stand against one wall, and a pile of wrenches, every size and shape, from one barely 4 inches long to one that's easily 4 feet long -- a marine wrench, Petzoldt says.

He builds tables, welding together odds and ends of metal bits, spark plugs and hand tools, chain and broken links, into a metal frame, and for a base, he uses any number of pieces that fit together just so.

He doesn't work on a timeline, by design, he says, because if a piece doesn't come together for whatever reason, he can break it apart and start over.

Petzoldt does some commission work, he says, but he does work for himself. He usually has a booth at Cape Girardeau's Downtown Tailgate Flea Market, held twice a year, and he works with other local artists, including woodworker Cory Hemmann.

While Petzoldt says he used to hit a lot of auctions to gather materials, now he has people bring him pieces they think are interesting.

"It's a whole network of people in my business," he says.

And while he can work from a pattern, he really prefers not to, he says. The materials don't always line up exactly, and he prefers a more flexible approach.

"Anything handmade is one of a kind," Petzoldt says.

mniederkorn@semissourian.com

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