Gate Foot Forge

27/05/2026

Another lovely little “less is more” handrail job installed today in a wonderfully restored old house. The natural stone and exposed timbers really suit this style of work, I feel.

A solid and chunky 25mm bar, fitted with ball ends and threaded on to simple punched and drifted “needles” which are set directly into the stone walls. The trickiest part of this job is surveying it to then get the bends in the bar at correct angles and in the right place!

Just a bit of sanding and a lick of paint required on the filler around the fixings and this will look like it has been there for generations. 🙂

14/05/2026

Managed to just about dodge the torrential downpours today to get this pair of simple handrails installed up some front steps. When I first surveyed this job, the steps and some of the adjacent brickwork weren’t in a state to support the ironwork securely, so I’ve had a previous trip over to this site with my “builder’s hat” on in order to make it all good. Great to see this now securely fixed, and it ain’t going nowhere now!

My apologies to the passing horse today who had never before encountered a core drill or a Henry hoover… 😬

06/05/2026

Really nice to finally get this garden handrail installed. There’s always a slight “squeaky bum moment” when you take a finished job to site and hope it fits where it’s supposed to 😂 …was gratifying to find this one landed perfectly onto the concrete footings I had already placed a short while back.

It’s also nice to see this garden coming alive in springtime, with the plants growing up around it complementing the theme of foliage incorporated into the design.

27/04/2026

I made my 8 year old a slingshot over the weekend - just bandsawed from an offcut of ply - and we had lots of fun knocking cans over and causing lots of father/son mischief! So I thought to myself today… why not forge one?!

Rather chuffed with this. It has some heft to it and feels satisfying. Have to wait for him to get home from school to give it a proper test 😁

16/04/2026

Garden handrail job just finished and finally ready to go off to the galvanisers! This has been somewhat challenging from start to finish… from surveying the site to rolling the initial curve and then building a couple of jigs in order to hold the posts all at the right heights… plus then how to assemble it whilst on a massive jig that made it far too big to fit in my workshop.

Every day’s a school day… but now it’s done save for a little cleaning up, and I’m looking forward to installing it and seeing it finally in situ!

23/02/2026

A little while back my good friend Tom at Mainstone Carving (stonemason extraordinaire and all-round decent chap) popped in to get some callipers made. He spent the day shoving cameras in my face whilst I made ‘em and then did some technical wizardry to make it not look very long and very boring. So if you’d care to see the chaos of my little workshop and the arse-about-face way I work things out and try and get them to work, here it all is in full, glorious HD!

In this video my friend and fellow craftsman OWEN PHILLIPS from GATE FOOT FORGE shows me the process of making some custom callipers to aid me with the conti...

22/02/2026

I’ve just got back from where I was happy to be invited to be part of once again! Really nice to do demos and chat to lots of people about blacksmithing… and the Fyre Garden crew are always great company. Hard graft to get everything set up, do the event then break it all down, and entertaining craic afterwards at the Horse and Jockey!

13/02/2026

I had a customer call round this afternoon after enquiring if I could make a “drop spindle” - a little device for hand spinning yarn. She turned up with an example, but had suggestions for a couple of alterations which would improve upon the design. She also then showed me pictures of a “Turkish” design, made from wood, which could be disassembled to leave the spun yarn threaded on.

It seemed daft not to crack on with forging them whilst she was there in order to make the most of the expertise, get some feedback and conduct live testing as we went on!

So, after brief time tinkering and refining, these are the spindles we came up with. It was lovely to see them in use, still warm from the hearth, and I’ll be getting some “action shots” sent through presently so will be able to share them too when I get ‘em.

Always enjoyable to be able to make the tools to help others with their crafts.

11/02/2026

What with the steady flow of “experience days” booked into the forge, lots of other jobs and literally CONSTANT dismal weather, it’s taken a long time to get a day into the diary to hang this gate. It was a staff training day at the lad’s school so I had an assistant with me, and we had maybe a two hour window before it began pi***ng it down again. This was just adequate to get the journal socket, strap hinge and latch keeper set into the posts… and we’ll have to revisit on a later date to point in around these and make them all tidy.

Given 20 yard proximity to the chip shop, it was also rude not to have a chippy tea to keep the spirits and energy up. He did well, the lad, and it’s grand to see this job finally in place.

30/01/2026

There’s method in the madness, I promise! I have a handrail job to do for this little set of garden steps which curves round as well as rising. So the fixing points are in all dimensions in 3D space which makes things rather confusing. I have already surveyed the site and then installed four concrete pads for the posts. Then I went back to the workshop and threw together a giant jig from cheap 2x1 timber. Taking this back to site (along with my 8yr old apprentice who served admirably as Chief Spirit Level Operative) allows me to double check that the posts are going to land in the correct places on the pre-installed concrete footings and double check the correct lengths for the posts to get a nice, uniform rise on the finished rail.

Basically, if I build the handrail onto this jig, it can’t not fit… hopefully negating the “squeaky bum moment” of taking the fully finished handrail to site and hoping I measured correctly!

Time to reward the apprentice with a pizza, an myself with a beer. Happy Friday everyone 🍻

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