Stuart Shirley is a college student at the Colorado School of Mines, he is obtaining a 4 year degree from the Colorado School of Mines in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. Currently, as part of pursuing his degree, he is completing an internship at the Center for Metal Arts in Florida New York.
What We Talked About
- Stuart’s interest in blacksmithing started in high school. His welding instructor offered to help Stuart build a forge of his own if Stuart agreed to build two forges, one for the school and one for him to keep.
- Stuart’s forge is called Great Owl Forge and he has both coal and gas forges there. He also has a treadle hammer (he built in high school), an anvil, horizontal bandsaw, oxy/acetylene set up and a utility pneumatic power hammer.
- While he has been working at the Center for Metal Arts as an intern, Stuart has become familiar with the 4 power hammers CMA has in the shop. They have a Ritter, Falcon, Anyang and a Nazel.
- Steel production and failure analysis is what interests Stuart the most and will continue to study that in his next internship with New Corp in their hot mill.
- As an intern at CMA, Stuart started off cleaning and organizing the shop by building racks. Patrick Quinn (program developer and instructor at CMA) and Kyle Martin are teaching him how to use a mill, a lathe for machining and how to build jigs for production work.
- In his second and third months, Stuart has made a total of 58 sets of tongs for the classes CMA holds every weekend. When Stuart makes 10 sets of tongs, Patrick had made a deal that Stuart keeps one pair, Patrick keeps a pair and 8 sets stay in the shop for class use.
- Patrick and Stuart set aside Monday and Tuesday nights to have weekly meetings and focused forging sessions. Other than that, Stuart works from 9 am to 5 pm every day in the shop.
- Stuart has been able to attend the weekend classes that CMA offers on the weekends. One of them being the Seth Gould Forge a Hacksaw class.
- Stuart will be attending his next internship right after his CMA internship, it is with New Corp and he will be working in the hot mill steel production department.
Guest Links:
Center for Metal Arts website – www.centerformetalarts.com
Patrick’s email for internship questions - info@centerformetalarts.com
Seth Gould Instagram - @sethgould
Thanks so much for your support!
