Learn to make hooks, spoons, and tools that you'll use every day.

This essential blacksmith's reference includes many projects contributed by leading blacksmiths worldwide, each featuring multiple opportunities for variation.

Modern smiths can use the first section of The Everyday Blacksmith as a reference for shop basics: safety, equipment, and techniques. In addition to these fundamentals, illustrated through a series of projects, you'll also learn methods for finishing pieces.

In the book's second section, you'll find a step-by-step guide to a diverse range of essential blacksmith projects. Structured by category and difficulty, the instructions for these projects emphasize the accessibility of techniques, the functionality of projects, and the diversity of design.

The Everyday Blacksmith will become every shop's go-to reference guide.

Take a trip to a simpler era, when inventors crafted solutions that required neither chips nor circuit boards – just plain old American ingenuity. This collection features a variety of tools, presented with original photos and text. Can you identify these mystery items without looking at the descriptions?

All of the tools come from the pages of Farm Collector, a magazine for collectors of vintage farm equipment. In the monthly What Is It? feature, readers contribute photos of objects and others pitch in to identify the items (often sharing memories of personal experiences with long-forgotten tools). The popular articles have been running for 12 years, and this collection draws from that rich archive to present some of the most inventive of inventions and most curious of curiosities.