Forging Ahead Inc

10/13/2025

Forged steel and curved handblown German glass. In addition to forging the cabinet, we made a form and bent the glass using Roger Dale’s studio

11/09/2024

What an unexpected and extremely pleasant surprise to walk through master metalsmith Edgar Brandt’s gates at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The details are exquisite and his design is inspirational.

10/26/2024

Blacksmiths save the day…again! 😎

A cool little piece of history from Sault Ste. Marie, MI.

03/15/2024

Rod has been busy crafting some beautiful architectural jewelry. Check out this exquisite forged arrow door pull!

The leatherwork is absolutely stunning, thanks to Clayton Harrison .

This is only one of a few arrows adorning this home. More photos to come!

01/18/2024

‘94 Rocky Mountain Smith Blacksmithing Conference

My introduction to the beautiful fellowship of blacksmiths. Thank you!

08/18/2023

A recent forged railing project for a wonderful client.

08/09/2023

07/24/2023

In this video we are preparing to weld the twisted and curved top rail of a piece of railroad track back onto an intact rail. (See previous video of the twisting and bending.)

Because the end of the hand bent curved piece didn’t align exactly with the rail, we had to do some tweaking. That is what is shown in this video. This took about 15 minutes and then it was ready to be welded.

There are two of these railroad track pieces that will become the structure of an outdoor fire pit table. Subscribe to see the next steps!

04/08/2023

I love rivets! Walking past a retired locomotive, the shadows caught my eye. These cone shaped rivets are badass!

03/18/2023

Two more fireplace doors installed. Deer antler handles this time. They were a challenge, but we didn’t give up. 👍

02/15/2023

We really appreciate all of our new followers - welcome! We hope you enjoy our videos as much as we enjoy creating the functional metal art we are sharing.

This clip is a very condensed process video of a bar foot-rail that took 182 hours (from conception to installation) to create.

The twisted steel and copper bundle is formed on a twisting machine that we built. It has a counter by which we can set the number of revolutions we want.

The cuboctahedron (the faceted terminal ball) is forged on a 200 lb Chambersburg power hammer. What you see in the video is the use of our press to true it up after it’s already forged.

The twisted bundles were curved using a Greenlee hydraulic conduit bender to a layout line drawn on the table.

Let us know if you have any questions or if you would like to see any specific videos. Thanks again for your support!