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Making Your Mark
Show the world that you're proud of your work...
Sign It.

Aside from doing work of good proportion, smoothing the edges, fairing the curves, and putting a nice finish on it, nothing makes a forged piece look more 'official' and intentional than having its maker's mark on it.

We will approach the punch-making process from a few directions:

We'll cover theory, filing, sawing, counterpunching, super-quenching, annealing, hardening and tempering, and the tools necessary.

And maybe a bit of type design, as needed.

If you have a binocular magnifier or a pair (or two) of strong reading glasses, bring them.
(Ocean State Job Lot has them pretty cheap, go for the +3 diopter ones)

Gift Certificates for Making Your Mark are available.

Total 9 hours in three three-hour meetings    dates&times

Instructor: Carl West
Fee: $375 per student
Maximum 4 students, one per forge

Prerequisite:

Required: A rapid Covid test that day.
Yes, really, we're still asking for it in 2024.
It's still out there, and no fun at all.

Prerequisites: Students should have done a fair bit of blacksmithing, either with us (RudimentsĀ II at least) or on their own and be somewhat familiar with heat-treating.
Students should also have a couple or ten sketches of possible designs for their mark. Keep it simple.

Please wear proper clothing for visiting or working in the forge:
closed toe shoes (preferably leather, preferably high-topped. Sneakers are sufficient, sandals, crocs, pumps, mules... are not), natural fiber clothing, long pants that cover the tops of the shoes.
Click here for more safety information.


Dates and Times:
If none of the dates below work for you (or are already full), we suggest you
Add yourself to the Notification List for this class.
(The notification list gets emailed soon after classes are put on the schedule.)

This class is either:
- not upcoming on our schedule,
- or we've fallen behind in our clerical duties and not entered it in the database.
If you found it on our calendar page, we are planning to offer it on that date.

If you're interested in taking Making Your Mark and it's not on the calendar, please tell us using our Notification-List Page.

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