Forged In Fire

Forged In Fire is my favorite show, but I still have some problems with it.

First, I don't think it accurately represents the talent a lot of the contestants have. If you're a bladesmith, your first priority isn't to make a knife as fast as you can. Your priority is quality. Well, quality suffers if you're in a big hurry. This competition is timed, so all these bladesmiths are in a big hurry. Consequently, the quality of their work in the competition is not at all representative of what they are capable of. If you look some of these people up, they've got amazing talent. I would love to see their true talent displayed on the show, but the format just doesn't allow for it.

Second, the contestants don't have any control over the tempering process. Heat treating is one of the most important aspects of making a knife, second only to material. The problem with not allowing them to temper their own blades is that when somebody gets disqualified because their blade broke during testing, it's not entirely their fault. They might've been able to produce a tougher blade by tempering it at a higher temperature or differentially tempering it. Of course some of it also has to do with grain size, which they do have control over. You can control the grain size by thermal cycling the blade. Also, the blades sometimes break because of there being cracks which form during the forging process.

Third, the testing is kind of subjective. How can we be sure that the judges are swinging each blade with exactly the same force? I wonder about this especially in the case of J. Neilson. He swings those blades really hard. It seems like by the time he gets to the second and third blade, he'd have a little fatigue. Another problem is that the judges don't always know how to wield these weapons. They don't always know how to swing a sword or throw a knife. I think they could come up with more objective ways to test these blades, but it probably wouldn't be as exciting and fun to watch for most people.

Fourth, they don't show enough of the forging process. This seems to be getting worse over time. They show too much of the interviews and the conversation between the judges when they could be showing the people shaping their blades. In this respect, I think there are a lot of YouTube videos that are far more interesting than this aspect of Forged In Fire. I think Forged In Fire would be more enjoyable if they did a better job of editing and show more forging, sharpening, and handle shaping than people talking.

Fifth, I don't like how they try to trip people up. There were some episodes where they had 24 hour epoxy on the shelves, which makes no sense because you only get three hours to attach and finish your handle. Why do they even have 24 hours epoxy? It served no other purpose than to trip up the contestants. This didn't test their ability to make blades. It tested their ability to read labels. I don't know if I would've looked that closely on the labels because it wouldn't have entered my mind that they would've had 24 hour epoxy for a three hours handle segment. It looks like they stopped doing that, and I'm glad.

Sixth, I don't like when they have people do weird stuff with weird junk metal, like making a knife using two different parts of a car or motorcycle. Sure, people do salvage steel to make blades sometimes, but people are usually pretty selective about the kind of steel they'll salvage. They'll use ball bearings, leaf springs, and farrier rasps because those are usually reliable. But no good knife maker is likely to use mystery steel that they know nothing about, and some of the challenges are just silly. I'd rather the contestants get a good piece of known steel from which to work so we can actually see what they're capable of. The ability to forage for scraps and cobble something together isn't that interesting to me, and it's not how most bladesmiths make their knives and swords.

In spite of all these complaints, I love the show. A casting agent contacted me on reddit one time to see if I'd be interested in going on it. I declined because I don't forge knives (I use the stock removal method), and I don't have half the talent most of the people on that show have, but I referred her to another guy I know (Jason Fry), and he actually went on the show! He almost won it, too. He came in second place.