Written by Derek Halsey | Photos by Anthony Harden
Liam Hoffman, at only 21 years of age, is a gifted, award-winning blacksmith for the 21st century.
Pulling off onto the street leading to Liam Hoffman’s blacksmith shop, the road bends upward, as many side roads do in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina.
Hoffman lives near Newland, North Carolina, a town of about 700 people located at 3,600 feet elevation, in one of seven counties that make up the region known as the High Country. His small wood building contains walls lined with all of the tools needed to be a blacksmith, including the proverbial 300-pound anvils.
The concept of the anvil as a tool dates back over 5,000 years to the Bronze Age, when both the tools and the anvils were made out of bronze. Iron, however, is much harder than bronze. Iron was naturally found in meteorites that humans pulled out of the ground and used as makeshift anvils. About 1,500 years ago, however, humans discovered how to make iron on their own, and what is known as the modern-day anvil began to take shape. Hoffman’s anvils are of the classic mold, with their “horns” (cone shaped projections used for bending pieces that have been forged), “faces” (the flat top of an anvil), “throats” (to allow sufficient room under the horns to work), and “pritchels” (small round holes used for punching holes in the pieces).
As I walk into his shop, Hoffman is working on a new sword while heat-treating several axe heads. His hands and forearms are muscled up, reflecting day after day of pounding molten pieces of metal and grabbing red-hot axe heads out of a 1,500-degree oven with giant tongs.
The sword is made in the style of the Egyptian khopesh design, which first appeared on battlefields over 5,000 years ago. Also known as the “sickle sword,” due to its curved nature, it was a valuable weapon and tool for the foot soldier in ancient times. Hoffman’s unique version of the khopesh is both beautiful and functional. He has taken the historically accurate mold of the khopesh sword and put his own spin on it—which is a big part of what makes his work unique and in demand.
The metal Hoffman is using to make the khopesh sword is called “Damascus steel,” a combination of two different kinds of steel, which gives it an unusual and impressive pattern. A friend of his made the Damascus steel, and Hoffman will turn it into a fine-looking piece probably selling in the $3,000 to $5,000 range.
“These are the handles that I made for the sword,” says Hoffman, as he begins to attach them to the khopesh. “They are made of Gaboon Ebony wood and mother-of-pearl inlays. There is no buyer yet. I don’t sell these swords until I finish them. I’ll put a teaser up on my website. It is too much of a hassle to take pre-orders for these kinds of projects. I’ll take orders on axe heads, but nothing custom-made. Everything I sell is online. I don’t have a local business front.”
Hoffman does not need to run a physical storefront. The blade-buying world is literally watching his website and Facebook page on a daily, an hourly, and, sometimes, a by-the-minute basis.
“There are not a lot of people here that would buy my work, so I use the internet because I can reach a lot more people,” says Hoffman. “If somebody wants to come by and see the shop, I usually let them. I’ve been doing this for almost nine years, and I started showing my work on Instagram and Facebook and posted regularly. Over time, the business built up. I post pictures every day, sneak peeks and stuff like that, and I found out that people are more inclined to buy a piece if they can see it being made. It is hard to sell something if you keep it in the dark until it’s done and all of a sudden put it up online. People like to see it made.”
As Hoffman applies the handle to the distinctive and exquisite-looking sword, he outlines the process of pricing such a hand-made item.
“I make all kinds of knifes and swords and tools, as I like anything that is a tool or has a blade on it. If it interests me, I’ll make it. I have put about 60 hours of work into this khopesh sword, and my friend who made the Damascus steel has 30 hours into it. So, there are almost 100 hours going into that piece, plus the material costs, including about $100 for the mother-of-pearl, $30 for the ebony wood, about $100 for the steel in it, and about $400 for propane. The materials cost really isn’t that high compared to what we get out of it, but with these projects, it is all about the labor put into it. These pieces are really time-intensive.”
Axe heads, however, are made a lot quicker, and Hoffman considers them his production product. They are still made by hand at a very high quality craftsmanship, as opposed to some of the lesser-quality brands that are made overseas.
Outside of Hoffman’s shop is a pallet stacked with two-inch thick, rectangle-shaped ingots of metal. These heavy chunks of steel will be heated up until red hot and shaped by Hoffman the old school way, with various hammers while holding the smoldering ingot on his anvil. In his studio I watch him put on his safety gear and briefly open the 1,500-degree oven where the formed axe heads are being heat treated. He quickly uses his metal tongs to remove them and a sudden burst of flame erupts as he eases the pieces into a special mix of cooling oils.
Here is the reason why Hoffman does not require a storefront: After he posts pictures of this custom-made process online, the products usually sell anywhere from days after they are posted, to just a few hours, to sometimes even mere minutes after the finished piece is presented to the potential customers.
As for his axe heads, a couple of years ago there was a ten-month waiting period for purchases. Then Hoffman found himself on national television after being accepted into the high-end blacksmith competition known as the Forged in Fire show, which is hosted by the History Channel. In each episode of the reality show, four “bladesmiths” compete by recreating a classic blade of some type from the past or present. At one point during Hoffman’s 2016 episode, each blade made by the contestants was put through its paces with strength and sharpness tests. For this contest, they were asked to make a Nepalese Kora sword, a wide-ended sword that wasn’t much good for stabbing, yet was brutal and lethal when used with a downward stroke.
Hoffman won his episode of Forged in Fire, the youngest to ever do so, at 19 years of age.
“They film the show in a rough section of Brooklyn, New York,” says Hoffman. “I was there for about four days, and then they flew me back to Brooklyn for the final round, and flew me back again for the judging of the final piece. I won $10,000. The person I went up against in the final round was a master blacksmith, which made it really difficult for me. But I won because my sword was more historically accurate and it worked better during the tests. They used it to chop some sandbags, which was kind of dumb. But then they chopped a bison skull in half and then chopped a sheep carcass in half. The coolest thing was the bison skull, splitting it down the center. It was pretty crazy.”
As a result of the national TV exposure, the waiting list for his axe heads jumped almost immediately to two years, even though he forges about 20 axes a week and makes the hickory wood handles from scratch. As the word about his quality work increased, he had to get rid of the waiting list for axes altogether as the demand kept growing.
What is impressive about this success story is that Hoffman is only 21 years old.
“When I was on summer break during 8th grade, there was nothing to do, so I just started beating on some metal,” says Hoffman. “I had always done arts and crafts, just messing around, but nothing ever stuck. The metal work just stuck, and I kept doing it and got better at it and decided that I wanted to do it for a living.”
The artistic craft side of his upbringing came from Hoffman’s mother, while his work ethic side came from his father, who spent years as a farmer. His parents separated when he was young, yet the two different influences still shape his unique approach to his craft. Currently, his work buildings exist on his father’s land. He has purchased a ten-acre plot near Boone, however, that will someday be the new home of Hoffman Blacksmithing.
On the front page of Hoffman’s website, hoffmanblacksmithing.com, there is the quote by the writer and artist Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) that says, “One machine can do the work of 50 ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.”
Hoffman did not attend blacksmith classes. Nor did he have a mentor, per se. While honing a craft that is over 5,000 years old, he basically taught himself how to do it. A lot of his questions were answered by tutorials on YouTube and in various books. “While there are some things you can only learn in person, you can teach yourself online and eventually get to the point where you can make a living at it,” Hoffman explains. “I’ve never taken a formal class. Now, I know a lot of guys that are really good at blacksmithing, and I will chat with them and learn everything I need to learn in the process. When you are starting out, the stuff you make will break or will look like crap. The first small anvil I acquired was given to me by a neighbor, but it was teeny. The first big anvil that I bought, I found on eBay for about $600, which was cheap. I met the guy in Asheville and bought it. Nowadays, the price of anvils has shot up to $4 a pound, and that is a 300-pound anvil. I got it for $2 a pound.”
By the time Hoffman was a senior in high school, he was already working about 35 hours a week and making over $25,000 a year by forging and selling knives and axes. But he was doing it in a very small building. He kept growing, however, by adding on to the building and by buying more of the tools needed to take the business to the next level.
“Then I appeared on Forged in Fire, which aired in September of 2016,” he continues, “and for the last six months my demand has grown exponentially. The Egyptian khopesh sword is more for show. You will probably never use it. But axes are tools and a lot of people use them for camping and more, especially the small hatchets. It is for folks [who] do not want to buy an axe overseas, and the ones that I make often become an heirloom. So I get people that want one just to hang on the wall; I get people that camp with them; and I also make firefighter axes. I make wood-splitting axes and wood-carving axes. Everything usually sells in minutes. My custom work will appear on my website and usually last from five seconds to a day. The axes will go in seconds.”
These days, Hoffman offers weeklong one-on-one classes for folks from around the world who want to learn the art of blacksmithing. He has had students come to the High Country mountains from as far away as Australia. While he will go to the occasional trade show, usually just the annual Blade Show held every June in Atlanta (it is billed as “the world’s largest knife show”), there is little point in attending most events like that because Hoffman could better spend his time in his shop filling orders.
As for the historical side to the blacksmithing tradition, Hoffman is well-versed in the tools of the 1700s, and fascinated by how the humans of thousands of years ago figured out how to melt and make things out of soft copper, learned how to smelt iron, and discovered that brass is made by mixing copper and zinc, while bronze is made by mixing copper and tin. He chalks all of those earlier advances up to the same processes that worked for him—trial and error; hard work and dedication—and pushed him to be the best at his craft.
With blacksmithing his chosen profession, Hoffman now has three employees that work for him, including a full-time person and others who take care of emails, shipping, leather-working, invoicing, and helping in the shop. He has a high-tech camera on a tall tripod in his shop at all times, ready to give potential customers some photographs of his works in progress via his website and social media. As a young entrepreneur who has found his passion in an art form half a millennium old, he harnesses the power of the modern digital world to market and sell his work.
Hoffman, incidentally, is adding “author” to his resume. Shortly after Christmas he published a book titled Forged: A Guide to Becoming a Blacksmith, which he’s distributing through Amazon. He says that it came about after he noticed a pattern of constant questions about blacksmithing being asked of him online, so he began compiling notes and writing the book a little at a time in order to answer the questions. “The main focus of my book is to help people become a blacksmith from the ground up in a straightforward, and expeditious manner. I provide information regarding which tools are essential, which are luxury, how much they cost, where to get them, how long it will take to get them, and what you can expect different shop budgets to do for you in terms of quantity and quality of output in product.
“The second half of my book addresses a topic that isn’t discussed in other blacksmithing books, and that is how to teach yourself. In the modern world we can no longer apprentice under a master blacksmith for a decade without pay, and so most of us resort to self-teaching. There are tips and tricks for doing this efficiently and effectively to make sure you excel on the learning curve, and I talk about that in depth.”
Reflecting on his beginnings, Hoffman says he is still friends with the customer who bought the first piece he ever sold, a simple steak knife. And even though he is just 21 years old, yet has experienced worldwide success, that first sell remains special to him. At the same time, he is not one to rest on his laurels, as his creative side is always in motion, always looking for a new way to hammer some red hot piece of metal into something fresh and new.
“I am constantly trying to come up with different things,” says Hoffman. “Usually, when I make something unique, I just wing it. When I’m starting to make something new and I’m forging, I wing it and see what happens. Now, I [also] have a couple of knives that I make over and over again that are my design that you can order, when I open my waiting list back up.”
As Hoffman moves forward with an expanded business and fresh designs, plus a forging reputation that continues to grow, the creative vision that got him to this point is what he hopes will get him to the next level. At the heart of that vision is a curiosity-driven mind, the aforementioned—and uniquely human—process known as trial and error, plus a lasting, remarkably intense work ethic.
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