Back Yard Blacksmith is a beginner-focused resource for anyone interested in learning blacksmithing at home.
The site shares practical, safety-first guidance on tools, setup costs, and techniques, based on real-world learning and research.
Whether you’re setting up a small forge in a garden, garage, or shed, the goal is to make starting blacksmithing simpler and more accessible.
Every successful blacksmith has a bucket — or a wall — of scrapped projects.
That’s where the learning lives.
About Me - Adam
I’ve always been drawn to making things with my hands.
Like a lot of people, I started out thinking that creativity meant drawing or painting — and quickly discovered that I wasn’t very good at either. I can’t draw to save my life. That didn’t stop the urge to create, though; it just pushed me to look for other ways to express it.
That curiosity led me into painting with alternative mediums, and eventually into resin art and resin casting. Before long, I was experimenting with resin and wood furniture — tables, small units, and one-off pieces made purely to see what was possible.
What I kept running into, though, was the same problem:
the metalwork.
I could design and build the wooden parts, but I could never quite find the brackets, handles, legs, or fixings that matched what I had in my head. So instead of compromising, I decided to try making them myself.
That decision led to a very improvised first forge:
a roasting dish, a hairdryer, BBQ charcoal, and a pile of sand.
It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t efficient.
But it worked — and it lit a spark.
Since then, I’ve spent the past few years learning, experimenting, and refining my blacksmithing skills the same way I’ve approached every craft I’ve picked up: by making things I like the look of, learning from mistakes, and improving one project at a time.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned since I first started is that failure is unavoidable — and essential.
For every scrapped project, every incorrect hammer blow, every catastrophic failure, near house fire, or potential trip to A&E, there’s been a lesson attached. I keep learning because of those moments.
Every failure teaches us how to succeed. And every successful blacksmith has a bucket — or, in my case, a display wall — full of scrapped projects that made the next piece better.
Back Yard Blacksmith exists to share that journey — not from the perspective of a master craftsman, but from someone who learned by doing, by problem-solving, and by building a forge where there wasn’t one.
If you’re interested in blacksmithing, metalwork, or making things simply because you want to see them exist, you’re in the right place.