arc iron

If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire.

–Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

To watch forge-yellow metal curl and flatten under a simple hammer is to understand why our ancestors worshipped blacksmiths. Hephaestus, Vulcan, Ilmarinen, Gobannos, Vishvakarma, Ogun, Wayland ... the smith gods often appear more human than their counterparts on Svarga or Olympus, perhaps because it is easiest to see ourselves as gods in their reflection. It is not in their appearance, as some are beautiful and some are famously deformed, some are beardless youths and others grizzled sages, but in their tireless actions, their swinging hammers and billowing forges that birthed everything from the speckled metal dome above us to the blades we used to split fields and bodies. There were always maker-gods, working with their hands to shape clay or cosmos, but the smith gods that emerged in the Bronze and Iron Ages represented the union of Ptolemy’s four elements under a single overmastering power. Air to sustain the fire of the forge. Ore pulled from the earth and transformed in fire, then plunged in water to fix its final form. Unlike the lightning of Zeus or Shiva’s third eye, the power of the forge gods was ours.

The art and trade that these gods gave to us has changed little in the last five millennia. Andrew Chambers practices it at his own Lemnos, a welding and wrought iron workshop in the old Snow Steam Pump Works raised in 1883 on Roberts Avenue in the southwest edge of Kaisertown, now between twin bends in the Buffalo River and the Interstate 190. There are some new “shop toys,” as Andy calls them, that even Hephaestus couldn’t have imagined–like a 50-ton forging press, a hulking gray pneumatic hammer covered in local brewery stickers, or the ten-foot STV CNC plasma table that in seconds can cut a digital design into steel anywhere from sixteen gauge to one-and-a-half inches thick. But Andy doesn’t really need these. For most of his work spanning art and architecture–fences, benches, tables, shelves, and sculptures–he works with the same basic tools: forge, anvil, hammer, tongs, and trough. And each project begins, he says, with the blacksmith’s cardinal command.

Get it hot.
From there, anything’s possible.

Andrew R. Chambers Jr. was not born into a family of smiths, but he was born into a family of makers, problem-solvers, and entrepreneurs. He grew up on Grand Island in a house not far from his father’s welding shop. Andy and his brother, fifteen months younger, were learning to throw electric arcs when their friends were learning to throw baseballs. Their father also had an auto repair shop that he sold to a brother, one of eleven siblings, and the boys worked there, too. Later Andrew Sr. bought a bicycle repair shop that came with an ice skate sharpener–so Andy and his brother learned to fix bikes and sharpen skates. He bought a log splitter and they learned to split logs and stack firewood, and they made deliveries around the island. When he bought an ice machine, the boys woke before dawn to bag ice.

Andrew Sr. was a lot like his own father, Ralph Chambers–raised a farmer in the Southern Tier in the 1920s and 30s, he moved north and learned HVAC, then worked at Bell Aero, then as a janitor. Late in life he married Greta Anderson, the widow of Carl Anderson and co-founder of Anderson’s Frozen Custard; with his new bride he took his first vacation to Florida at the age of 77 and quickly found a job installing pool filters. He worked until he died in 2014 at 92. Men in the Chambers family worked, learned, and figured things out.

Andy’s parents weren’t the type to encourage sports or other activities far from home, but all that working, learning, and figuring found outlets besides labor for wages. At home, Andy picked up the guitar, and at school he developed a talent for drawing. Eventually, in a quiet moment between odd jobs in the machine shop, Andy swapped the pencil for the familiar welding torch. He started making shapes–human figures, motorcycles–more out of curiosity than any particular vision. He was creative, sure–but as a teenager he just wanted to “figure out what metal could do.”

Andy had been welding and fabricating nearly a decade when he and his father moved their operations into the city, buying a piece of the sprawling brick complex that for a century had produced Worthington steam pumps. The building was three stories high and as long as a football field. They were able to take on bigger projects, like parts for car haulers and pumps for apartment buildings, and soon they were employing twenty welders full time. The property came with over a century’s worth of deferred maintenance–a leaky roof, high-up broken window panes, and a 60-ton bay crane stuck on its tracks–but it also came with a century of toys and treasures, like old machine parts, tools, and artifacts from a vanished way of life. One of these was an anvil. It tugged at Andy’s curiosity. During a slowdown on a big contract, he found some scrap metal, got it hot, threw it down, and started hammering.

Andy was careful not to call himself a blacksmith. He wanted to keep his distance from the backyard hobbyists playing dress-up outside their desk jobs. He was learning. He took his first class in 2002 at the Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, Pennsylvania, near the borders of Maryland and West Virginia. The instructor, Jymm Hoffman, taught traditional Appalachian blacksmithing, using only tools and materials that would have been available to colonial Americans. Hoffman specializes in museum-quality reproductions of cannons and farm tools. He even takes part in Revolutionary War reenactments with a traveling coal forge, smithing gun parts and horseshoes on site. With Hoffman, Andy took a leap forward–not only in his craft, but in his confidence.

Back at the shop in Buffalo he bought a new 400-pound anvil and built a forge–not using coal, which is dirty and hard to source, but propane, with ceramic refractory blanketing to heat the insides up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. He started going to local craft shows, selling hooks and spikes and small decorative objects. Forging things to sell snapped his attention to repeatability–the challenge of making the same point, the same smooth curve, again and again and again, as the shop temperature rises or falls, as the mind wanders, as your swinging arm and gripping fingers start to tire. Once Andy knew what he could do with metal, his aim shifted to perfection at scale–that every element of every object please the eye, again and again and again, rods and rivets and perfect curves stretching to eternity.

The first big job Andy sold was a floating staircase and matching railing for a friend. He was twenty-eight and self-taught up to that point–he actually took his first class, called “Keep It Simple, Make It Elegant,” midway through completing the railing. His formal education and entry into a broader community of blacksmiths introduced him to the dominant and recognizable style of ABANA, the Artist-Blacksmith’s Association of North America–straight lines, lots of rivets, and decorative curlicues like wood shavings. As Andy progressed, his own style developed along two divergent but complementary trajectories. The first is a “heavy metal,” steampunk-gothic look with densely packed bars and beams and tight hand-punched rivets–you can see this in the bird bath outside his house or work that he undertook at a family lake house between 2013 and 2020, including 450 feet of fence and a massive cabana bar, elite blue granite sitting atop four intricately riveted iron legs, 400 pounds each. The second trajectory is organic, reflecting Andy’s interest in the inherent contradiction of “making things that are supposed to be soft out of metal,” he says. These are lilypads, olive branches, grapevines, tulips, cattails, gingko leaves appearing in work he did at another family home in Elma and the railings on the new Eleven Eleven Elmwood development at the southeast corner of Elmwood and Forest in Buffalo. Which element of his style dominates depends on the commission: Andy designs everything himself, accounting for the personality and preferences of the client and the context of the site, its environment, history, and traces of earlier architecture.

Andy still wasn’t calling himself a blacksmith even as he completed early commissions. That changed in January 2007 when Hadley Exhibits approached him. The job was to make a gate out of bronze to precise specifications. Andy never had worked with bronze–it’s expensive, $7-12 a pound, and burns easily. But he looked at pictures of the design that he was to copy. Sure, he said, I can do that. Andy didn’t know where the gate was going, but he did know it was a federal job with onerous procurement requirements; Hadley couldn’t find anyone else with the skills, capacity, or portfolio to bid for the work, and had to ask Andy to suggest potential competitors. He did, but Hadley came back. Andy took the job and learned to work with bronze the way he’d learned to work with iron. When the gate was finished, he set it up in his yard and held a farewell party for the piece, taking pictures with it. He only learned the purpose of the commission when Hadley sent him pictures of the installation: the gate was in the U.S. Capitol building guarding the catafalque that had held President Abraham Lincoln’s coffin while it laid in state. Andy had arrived. No more being bashful about it: he was a blacksmith.

There are forty-eight tongs in a ten-foot radius of Andy Chambers’s anvil. There must be at least as many hammers. “I don’t have enough,” Andy says, and means it.

In 2015 or 2016 Andy spent a week south of San Francisco with the blacksmith Tim Cisneros. The focus was “toolmake,” crafting the tools a blacksmith needs to make anything else: hammers, tongs, butchers, punches, side sets, vices, and clamps. And then there are “the tools you need to make tools,” like cone drifts and eye drifts, which widen hammer heads to accommodate their handles. “Sometimes you need to make the tools you need to make the tools you need to make the tools,” Andy says. The blacksmith crafts each element of a tool to fit the thing it will make: some tongs grip, some hold, some bite, and some gently cradle, each meant for a precisely sized piece of iron. The length of the legs and the size of the jaw calibrate leverage against control. And the handle of each hammer must fit the blacksmith’s hand, while the head fits the metal it strikes against the anvil. And within this utilitarian engineering, there are still some elements that are purely decorative, Andy says: “Because you want your tools to be beautiful, too.”

Nearly a quarter century in, Andy Chambers’s art represents the union of these two impulses, curiosity and beauty. Like the boy in his father’s welding shop–the boy who wasn’t allowed to play team sports but still taught himself to sharpen skates–Andy is still “figuring out what metal can do.” He proceeds by making the tools that make the tools that let him do something he hasn’t done before. And at the same time he’s after beauty: every element of his creations should please the senses just as it proves its structural indispensability to the whole, whether that be a bird bath, a fireplace, or four hundred feet of fence.

Andy teaches now, too. He taught his daughter and son to forge, and they come to the Arc Iron workshop in Kaisertown on breaks from school. Andy tries to make the shop fun and the work optional, something they want to do. They might work for a while and then wander the postindustrial playground, shooting pellet guns and riding dirt bikes, before coming back to the torch or the anvil. He hosts all-hands meetings of the New York State Designer Blacksmiths, where Hoffman and other master blacksmiths have come to give lessons in Andy’s workshop. And he has a more formal pedagogical role through an internship program with local schools. Some students come just for a taste, quickly daunted at the drive out to a hidden pocket of Kaisertown, the dirt and the noise, the extreme temperatures, and the long hours failing, over and over, to make a simple hook. But others fall for it, the Promethean power to reshape.

And it is frustrating to learn to use that power. “Anyone can figure anything out,” Andy says, a mantra. “Most people just don’t have the patience.” Patience in blacksmithing is measured in hours as well as cubic feet of iron and pounds of “shop dust,” the black flakes of metal that fall off during the forging process and accumulate in five-gallon paint buckets all around the building.

Andy relates the story of the teenage girl working and studying with him now. She had been crafting an element all afternoon, and Andy could see long before she was done that it wouldn’t turn out right. But he kept his distance. At the end of the day she approached him, disappointed with the final product, and he reassured her. “Throw it out. Come back Thursday and try again.” Andy let her explain what happened, her mind rewinding the process until she found the thing she wanted to do differently next time. “You don’t ever learn by succeeding,” Andy said. “You only learn by failing, because you know how you failed and you have to figure out another way.”

A blacksmith is a lifelong learner. The craft forces it on you. You learn something that allows you to learn something else that allows you to learn something else, in the same way that you make the tool that lets you make the tool that lets you make the next tool. It never ends. The blacksmith is always working, learning, failing, “figuring shit out.”

With enough time and persistence–another way of saying heat–the brain is just as malleable as iron. This is the real gift of the blacksmith gods, the insight hidden in the myths. Understand it, and anything is possible.

in print

photos by mark dellas