Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 302; Roy Adams interview, part 4 of 5

Q:

ROY: When I finish my work, uh, there’s a fine line between finished and done. There’s a fine line between finished and done because a finished piece is something that I am... that I am happy with. A done piece is something that is, maybe I could put a few more tweaks on but it needs to go out the door. And, um, so there... there’s that fine line there and so I’m always kind of skirting that fine line to find that balance. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to, you know, when I look at the finish... when I look at the piece after I’ve... I’m basically done forging on it of deciding on whether it’s my best work or if it’s okay for of if it’s not my best work and if I want to go again. Uh, there’s a lot of pieces that never see the light of day, they go straight to the scrap yard and that’s all they’ll ever be. Uh, and generally if it’s not something that is really wrong, something that I’ve messed up there’s a... there’s a gouge in something that I just can’t take out otherwise it’s gonna ruin the aesthetic of the piece, I say that it is finished or, or that it is done and I... that’s how I look... that’s how I determine when a piece is finished or done.

Q:

ROY: It’s a very difficult process to take and figure out what is finished and done because a lot of my work I just want to do so much more but the customer may have only wanted a certain amount done. So, when I did blacksmithing as a hobby, uh, the real enjoyment of doing it as a hobby is you get to make all the choices, you get to make all the choices about the size, the dimensions, you get to make all the choices about the patina that you’re going to put on the piece or the final finish work. That’s where when you’re working with clients and you’re working with customers and other people that this is gonna live in their home and not yours. You have to make sure that they are satisfied so there’s a certain point that they have to be satisfied. Now, you may want to add an extra chisel mark or you may want to add an extra hammer blow or facet or two but that may not be what’s called for on the job sheet and then at that point, it’s a done piece not necessarily a finished piece. So, the work really kind of dictates a little bit or rather you get to enjoy that fact of it being finished or done. Occasionally I’ll get to do my own work for myself and I make finished pieces then.

Q:

ROY: The best day in my shop is any day I get to forge, basically. Uh, I love to forge, I love to go spend life with my wife and my kids, I enjoy that a lot, uh, the forge allows us to do that and be able to be a family and do those things and so I’m real appreciative every day I get to crack open... I call it like the seal on the shop for the first time in the morning, you know, I get up really early in the morning as a morning routine and then, you know, that first, that opening of the shop, it’s like, let’s begin, you know, let’s begin. And, again the rewarding portion at the end of the day is just knowing that I’ve done a good days’ worth of work and, you know, I kind of got it all out there, I, you know, I sweated it all out in the shop for the day. Uh, so any day is a good day to be forging.

Q:

ROY: So, a lot of my passion is really derived from, again this sense of accomplishment that I get at the end of something. All of the work that I’ve done up to this point, it’s exciting to know that, you know, this piece that I’m sending out is going to become something that’s gonna be there for future generations and, and in some way, I’m leaving a legacy behind me. Uh, it is also a great opportunity to have people kind of connect with emotions and things and I like my work to have some sort of emotion to it, for... to drum up something, some sort of feeling whether it’s happiness, uh, whether it’s a reflection. Uh, I’ve done memorial pieces for people who have passed away. I’ve done... I’ve done work for married couples just getting married. I’ve forged wedding bands for a couple, actually had them come out to the shop and help me forge the wedding bands and that’s was just such a cool process and experience and that’s what makes me very passionate about it is that fulfillment to know that I’m putting out some sort of positivity, some sort of light out there, uh, in this great big old world.

Q:

ROY: My work has grown leaps and bounds. Leaps and bounds over the last few years that I have been doing this. Mainly I attribute that a lot to take... being able to take courses and classes from other very well-known smiths, uh, it... I like to tell people, uh, anybody who understudies under me, I like to tell them that taking a class with somebody can cut 10 years off your learning curve in some cases because we all don’t have eyeballs on the back of our heads or usually eyeballs watching us and saying, hey, you’re hammer form’s not right or hey, you could do a little better. Um, and giving us those types of constructive critiques. So, with those my work has really improved night and day. Uh, one of my first classes... one of my first classes that I ever took up until that point I was again, self-taught and I tried to make... I didn’t want to be the only dunce in the class that didn’t know how to make a flower right, so I tried forging a flower ahead of time and night and day difference. When I came back, you know, there was, there was night and day. A flower that I don’t even think my wife wanted because I, I gave it to my wife, uh, a flower I don’t even think my wife wanted or was proud of, uh, coming back and she’s like, could you make more of those? So, you know, that’s, that’s kind of how that has done. But my work has mainly improved I would say based upon my finishing techniques and the det... attention to detail that I put in now. Earlier on I maybe wasn’t so focused on attention to detail, I was a focus... I was focused on the end result, the project and not necessarily the process. As where now I’m more focused on the process and not the project.

Q:

ROY: I like to teach and I like to mentor other people and do workshops and classes and things like that because I feel that I have been very blessed to be able to (STUMBLE) be given the opportunity to not only get scholarships, uh, to take classes with well known smiths, uh, but other smiths that have mentored me, you know, opened their doors to me, basically and held nothing back. If I had a question they would ask it and I wanted to make that more accessible to people around the Ohio valley area, you know, just right in the region of Ohio and wanted to make that more accessible to people. Not only here but all across the United States and that’s part of the reason why I started my YouTube channel.

Q:

ROY: So, the purpose... so the purpose of my YouTube channel is that technology can be a wonderful thing, it can be a terrible thing. So, I see it as a wonderful teaching platform. So, like YouTube is a great... everybody knows it, everybody who’s... well, unless you’ve lived under a rock, everybody knows about YouTube. You get on there to figure out how to bake biscuits to change the oil on your car, right? And, so it just seemed like the logical place that people are going to be in the next 10 years or so, next 5 to 10 years for education. And, so I wanted to build up a library for other smiths, you know, to be able to access free anytime, they can have that information that I didn’t start with. I didn’t start with that information 10 years ago when I started doing blacksmithing and it was very hard to come by. There was very few, you know, resources and books and things on it, only a few in circulation at the time, uh, that I could really get my hands on and delve into the stuff and most books and most resources, they’re not deep dives into the information or all the skill sets that is required or even the skill sets that are required around the tooling of blacksmithing. Uh, they, they don’t really deep dive into that. And, so I wanted to change that with my YouTube channel to provide and excellent resource that you can basically Google about anything and I would pop up with some sort of information to help you out in that department. And, the importance... the importance of that is that is where the youth is going. So, the youth is online, um, they aren’t, you know, necessarily gonna go to the library and check out a book on blacksmithing, uh, I was a bit of a rarity when it comes to that. Now, everybody just Googles it or, you know, whatever search engine of their choice but they go on YouTube to find out that type of information.

Q:

ROY: I never thought I would be where I’m at right now per say in blacksmithing. Of course, there’s always kind of that dream that like, yeah, one day I would be like the best blacksmith ever, um, which, you know, that’s changed because my eyes have been opened to that there’s a lot better smiths than I am out there. Uh, but just to get to the point where I’m at, it’s been such a long journey, there’s been so many twists and turns along the way, um, again, so many blessings just show up out of the blue, you know, being able to take classes, workshops, have mentors, have friends, have close-by people, uh, good relationships with my people that supply me with steel or scrap metal and stuff like that and really building connections and relationships. I would have never thought I would have got that connected with people. I thought it like most people think, well, blacksmithing, that’s a dying art, you know, that’s a dying craft. So, who does that anymore? Right? Um, and so yeah, I would have never thought I’d be here, um, today doing exactly the type of work that I do.

Q:

ROY: So, I believe it’s important to keep blacksmithing, specifically as an artform alive because it is attached to just about everything that you see around here in modern industry. Uh, things that have been forged, you know, stuff that you haven’t even thought about, you know, race car axels are forged, you know, then they’re machined. Uh, you know, sometimes it’s done, again, it’s done by mechanical processes now and a lot of stuff is stamped out and things but the, the roots of modern industry that we have nowadays all stem from blacksmithing. And, so keeping blacksmithing and keeping it as a heritage for future generations is a great way of connecting people with our ancestry, with our past. Um, you know, in just in the Ohio area it has a deep connection with industry, um, you know, just in the Dayton, Ohio region alone. Uh, there’s a lot of industry around steel and manufacturing and things like that and so, uh, you’ll find that in a lot of places all across the United States. And, so again, it was a fundamental building block for our society and I think it’s worth keeping around just if for anything the beauty of the art and the historical value.

Q:

ROY: So, the future of my iron work that I, that I want to take and do in the future; I want to get into larger pieces, I want to do furniture, um, I want to get into larger sculptural work. Um, right now I’m a little bit hampered by the size of my shop and building, uh, but that’s where I want to see my work going, um, eventually. I would like to do pieces that inspire people, again to thank, you know, to connect with people on a deeper more emotional level, you know, maybe not at first but they kind of... they look at it and again, it causes you to look at it again. And, uh, a lot of my pieces that I make right now are doing that, so I’d just like to up that to a much higher scale. So, a lot of the things that you see in larger work, say architectural iron work, sometimes the details get lost just in the pure mass and I would like to bring some of that back, some of that detail work back and, uh, focus in on it that way.

Q:

ROY: When I was... when I was five years old watching that blacksmith at Carriage Hill Metro Park, uh, it was... the things I remember most about it was the coal smoke, the coal smoke, that smell. And, then maybe the noise, uh, next would be, you know, the noise of the tinking on the anvil, you know, hearing that tap, tap, tap noise and I guess that’s one of the things that drew me back to blacksmithing is that first... that first smell of coal smoke and, and it brought that memory back pretty, pretty fast and pretty hard for me as a kid and it was very interesting and then the last thing I remember is how nice the guy was, that was forging. I mean, he told jokes and, uh, and at the end of it all he gave me a little, little horseshoe nail ring at the end of it and from me being so inquisitive and standing around as a lot of people won’t stand and watch even a 10 minute demonstration let along stand there for four hours and watch you do something, so... Those are probably the things I remember the most about being five and at a blacksmith shop.

Q:

ROY: So, the moment that the... I got bit by the blacksmith bug as we call it, uh, that happened... I took Jessica my wife out on a date and it was a date night, we went up to Carriage Hill, we had just been newly married and, uh, just had transplanted back here to the Ohio region. Uh, we got married out in Colorado Springs and when we came back here I was like, oh well, you know, ah I think I remember this place as a kid. I think we’ll go to the Carriage Hill Metro Park, looking for a place to go on the weekend. So, we went up there and when we went to the Carriage Hill Metro Park, again, I heard that dink, dink, dink noise and that smell of that smoke hit my nostrils and then I was a kid again and so I stopped there, I bored my wife to death by standing there for about two hours talking to the guy. Finally, we left, not much of date mind you but fin... finally we left and that, that kind of just reignited the fire, uh, I thought that that would be the neatest thing to be able to do that as a hobby.

Q:

ROY: I like to tell people at the end of the day, you need to do something that you’re passionate about, life’s too short. We get one spin on this big old rock and you better be doing something you love.

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