Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handy-Works

[After having] hammered or scraped off such scales or dirt as may hinder their merging original: "incorporating", with your utmost diligence clap the piece in your left hand upon the piece in your right hand. With all speed (lest you lose some part of your good heat), begin hammering them together and work them thoroughly into one another. If your bars are large, this will require another person, or sometimes two or three pairs of hands besides your own, to do. But if it is not thoroughly welded at the first heat, you must repeat your heats as often as necessary until they are thoroughly welded. Then, with a flame heat (as described before), shape it, and afterwards smooth it with a blood-red heat.

To make your iron reach a welding heat sooner, you must occasionally stir up the fire with your hearth-staff a tool used to poke or arrange the fuel in the forge and throw out those cinders the iron may have melted onto; for they will never burn well and will only spoil the rest of the coals. Take a little white sand between your finger and your thumb and throw it upon the heating iron the sand acts as a flux, protecting the metal from oxygen to ensure a clean weld. Then, with your slice a fire-shovel or spatula-like tool, quickly pack the outside of your fire down again, and with your washer a brush or bundle of twigs used to sprinkle water dipped in water, dampen the outside of the fire to keep the heat inside.

But you must take special care that your iron does not burn in the fire—that is, that it does not run or melt. If it does, your iron will become so brittle that it will not endure forging without breaking, and so hard that a file will not even mark it.

Some smiths are also accustomed to scatter a little white sand upon the face of the anvil when they are going to hammer a welding heat; they say it makes the iron weld or merge together better.

If through a mistake or poor management your iron is too thin or too narrow toward one of the ends, you may up-set it original: "up-set"; to thicken the end of a metal bar by heating and hammering it endwise if you have enough material (and it is not too long). To do this, take a flame heat, set the heated end upright upon the anvil, and hammer upon the...