I Discovered Why Blacksmiths Don’t Make Corkscrews!

Looking for projects to undertake as a professional blacksmith is often fun, you get some great ideas of things that you think would both look cool and be fun and interesting to try and make. Corkscrews are a thing! I use them a lot in my personal life, and I thought that it would be both challenging to do, and interesting to watch. I also noticed that there aren't that many YouTube blacksmithing videos on corkscrews. Well, I found out why that is!

Basically, mild steel (what blacksmiths use most often) isn't strong enough to be a corkscrew, so whilst that might still look cool, I thought that in order to maintain some integrity, it needs to work after all. I had some stainless steel lying around and I knew that would be strong enough so thought it would be worth a try. As it turns out, stainless really hates being forged. It hates it even more the more you forge it, so I couldn't just forge down from thick to thin (I started with 12mm round stainless and needed to forge it down to 3mm stainless) because it kept splitting. I had to put my professional, experienced blacksmith head on and work out how to thin it down a different way. So I used an improvised method that I have named "three stage reverse extrusion", I even had to make a tool for the power hammer (which you will see being made) in order to get the right diameter whilst making sure there were no cold shuts or splits in the steel.

Eventually (and after an awful lot of time lapse!) I had it down to the right thickness (or thinness?) and I then discovered how tricky thin material is to work. You'll see my long winded attempt to try to coil up the corkscrew, which took far longer than anticipated, but I think I ended up with something that both looked good, and worked a treat.

Believe me, once the camera stopped rolling, I tasted that wine (it was very hard earned)

The thing you need to understand about my experience with making this video, is that corkscrews won't be appearing as a new Tom Fell - Blackmith product anytime soon.

Hope you enjoy (my struggles).