One night last winter Angela and I were talking on the phone and she had a fire going in her fireplace. I’m envious of her fireplace…it burns wood like a fireplace is supposed to. I have a propane-fueled gas fireplace at my house that, while it looks like a fireplace and there is actually fire in it when it’s on, it’s not a real fireplace. It even has fake wood in it. Like a low budget movie set, it’s made to look real but not quite getting it done in function. On the rare occasions that I’ve sat in front of it, it reminds me of what it’s like to watch said low budget movie and see the boom microphone come down into the shot.

So anyway, back to Angela…she has this fire going in her real fireplace and she had to adjust a log or something and let it slip that she was using a spatula as a fireplace poker. A spatula! A plastic one! Yes, the kind you have in your kitchen drawer that ordinarily would be used for flipping pancakes. I couldn’t believe it.

Not just because, you know, plastic isn’t a good material to stick into a lit fireplace, but outside of a pizza parlor when was the last time you saw a spatula with a handle longer than a foot? And aside from that those big pizza parlor spatulas (actually called "peels", I understand), in addition to having that giant flat part on the end making them terribly unweildy, are made of wood. Another reason it's not something you want to put into a fire unless you’re short on firewood and lost out in the wilderness. In which case what are the chances you’ve been toting around a giant wooden pizza parlor spatula anyway?

So I told her I’d make her a real fireplace poker. Unfortunately, it took me a while to get around to it but I finally did last summer. Not exactly fireplace season but at least she was prepared for this year and I’m happy to report she has been using it and not once has it melted or caught fire.

As some of you may know, I was bitten by the blacksmithing bug a few years ago. That may seem an odd type of bug to have been bitten by, but there you go…there’s no accounting for where such things come from. I like to do lots of stuff and playing with fire and hot metal seemed like a delightful diversion and something I wanted to try.

The poker was actually a fairly straight forward project that was done over the course of a couple weekends although I’m sure a pro could have done it much faster. I wish I had taken photos of it in progress, but as you can imagine two hands are mandatory in nearly every aspect of smithery. Even if I’d had a third hand with which to take pictures while I worked, most likely I would have been using it to drink beer instead because the garage gets pretty damn hot in the summertime with the forge going full tilt.

I know it took a while for us to get here, but below is the finished product; the bending, twisting, flattening, welding and grinding all done and it's ready for the first coat of paint. My forge doesn’t get quite hot enough to forge weld so I attached the separate pieces with an arc welder (welding I got into for the cool goggles you get to wear).

Another shot of the pointy bits.

 Two shots of the handle; that spring-like piece of quarter inch round stock was straight and three feet long before looking like this. Now it’s like a big curly fry from Arby’s…only heavier and with fewer calories.

Close up of the end of the handle. “S” for Smithery (ok, not really).

The twisty part in the middle. To do this you heat up the section to be twisted to a nicely glowing yellow-orange, stick one end into a bench vise and use a couple of channel locks to twist it around and around from the other end. This square stock was pretty beefy so it took a couple cycles of heating and turning to achieve this length of twist. After that was done I heated it again to true it up with a hammer against the anvil and also to flatten the ridges of the twist.

Last shot, all finished with high temperature-resistant paint and ready to ship out.

I had the good fortune of actually using the new poker in Angela's real fireplace at her lovely home back in December. It does work quite well though honestly, it does that by simply not melting and being long enough so that your arm hair doesn't get burnt off. It looks good, too (if I do say so myself), and really, isn't that 90% of what's important anyhow? Just ask Mitt Romney.

I did see the old spatula poker while I was there; I think Angela's keeping it for allegorical purposes and I can't blame her. Not to get too deep here but I think it may be symbolic of other things in her life with which she simply had to make do. But she doesn't have to anymore, with the fireplace poker I mean. And maybe some other things, too. 

~xoxoxo~