I dipped in and out of the livestream through the day. It was wild. No matter when I checked in there he was hammering away. Impressive really. Hours, and hours. Slowly watching his sanity dissolve into madness. By the end he was talking absolute nonsense into the camera. Not even exaggerating. I know Jamie is a good editor but the fact he made a semi lucid Alec appear coherent is impressive.
It reminds me of the time he Marathoned making hammers back, I think, in the Barker street Forge. It was impressive then, and this is impressive now. Quality handmade products will probably always hold an allure over mass produced in very many areas.
I'm just getting into blacksmithing and am already training myself to switch off which arm I'm hammering with. It honestly feels surprisingly comfortable with either hand, but that could be as a result of already having years of having to train myself to be ambidextrous as a lefthanded person. Definitely nice to feel a little sore in both arms at the end of the day as opposed to very sore in only one arm.
Although you are right, the confusion makes sense. He made 400, still need to make 100, and 100 is 25% of 400. So he still had to do 25% more of what he already did.
@@ak47dukin This kind of mental gymnastics usually indicates very high levels of dishonesty, possibly severe mental conditions and an upbringing within some religious, fundamentalist nuts sect (like Christianity). Good that you aren't any of this. Your nickname "AK47" really calms us down!:)
Now you know why old buildings were burned down and owners sifted the ashes to get the nails. There were laws about this in the US years ago. There are a few companies that still make hand cut square nails [with some machines used ].
ex carpenter here. one single company makes square cut masonry nails, which work extremely well for pulling down high points in sill plates on concrete foundations
Real tough to burn a junk house these days. Fire departments basically can’t do it if there’s any asbestos, which any house that’s gonna get burned will have, so now they sit and rot because poor farms can’t afford to send their whole wreck to the hazardous waste dump because the bathroom has an asbestos floor. I’d actually prefer a little bit of air pollution to all the moldy collapsed buildings, but society doesn’t care I have to live and work around them and sometimes walk around brooding about the echos of a place that used to be full of life and a center of prosperous commerce. I now just put my sheep fence up to the corpses to keep em out.
@@swamp-yankeeWhat??? get help and probably don’t blame it on environmentalism or whatever you’re implying here and blame it on those that knew about the hazards and those that aren’t willing to spend to clean it up now.
As a Farrier who buys and uses nails for horseshoes in the hundreds each week it really makes you appreciate the work they had to do before industrialisation and mass manufacturing
@@4rog_girl214 sure you mine all the materials used for your tools and any gas for your forge was probably extracted by you too. cant forget you probably discovered all this information by yourself and definitley not through research online. glad all this hard work of yours has shown you the value of humility, such a great chap.
Where I live, we have a lot of living history frontier things people can work or volunteer at. The blacksmith at one makes nails all day, and he can get them out in three hits.
@@Aliyah_666 work strength beats workout strength every time, because it is only 1 hour at the gym 3-4 times a week, vs 8-12 hours 4-6 days a week. Bruce Lee said low weight high rep builds strong, but slim muscles.
@@ilikesnow7074 How do you put 3 or 4 faces on a nail, cut it, and put the head on, in 3 hits? Two hits to make 4 faces, one hit to cut, and one to make a head sounds like it would be legend tier already.
well he sure ain't making any money selling nails. $500 for a 12 hour day? and having to pay for materials and gas and shop rent? that's pretty bad return. hand made nails seem so cool, bummer it's so hard to make them
Remember to wear ear plugs with all that hammering! It's not always about the super loud single noises, but quite loud noises for an extended time will also leave you hearing damaged one day!
@@Trenz0HE SAID REMEMBER TO WEAR EEL PUGS WITH OTTER HAMMERING AND SOMETHING ABOUT SINGLE PEOPLE BEING TOO LOUD FOR EXTENDED PERIODS I COULDN'T CATCH THE REST
7:30 the time taken may be a bit longer; those old films were shot at on 16fps and they get sped up to either 24fps or 30fps depending on the digital player. so 15 sec may be closer to 22 sec.
I love this! Blacksmithing has been romanticised somwhat in the modern age (not a bad thing) but the reality is that you could be making these all day every day for months
It certainly is. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book on nailmaking and how it could be profitable. His main trick would take some of the romance out of it. Made some nice profit calculations and tried to sell his method as some early day dropshipping guru. His main trick was using pre teen slaves to make the nails.
@@neongenesis8499 Yeah, that checks out, it's pretty easy to make a lot of money when you own people who can do all of your actual labor for basically free (only the cost of keeping them alive)
This format of square space add is one of the most awesome add formats I have seen... Obviously the profit side isn't as feasible if you don't have the live stream audience but it is still cool.
So 12 hours for 500 nails worth 500 quid, minus however much it costs to run the forge for 12 hours - so perhaps 30/hr income - just under triple the minimum wage - actually feels about right - a medieval blacksmith making triple the farmers around him .. but by hand it does put quite a price floor on the cost of 1 nail, no wonder the horse-shoe was lost ...
+ materials + tools (special made too for the heads is materials and time as well). And the nails are being sold at a price point that honestly a random person that didn't have internet clout would not get away with... so... yeah... fairly sure if you do the math and include labor hours there's not that much left.
@SyntheticFuture you are 100% correct. I bet he barely breaks even. Gas for those furnaces is expensive. He sould really be getting $50-60 per hour for that kind of work.
Don’t forget the multipack discount. At 14:14 he states he made 393 dollars (yes dollars). If they were selling so fast, not sure why he didn’t raise the price even slightly. Maybe even just don’t offer the multipack discount. I understand not wanting to gouge but I doubt he made minimum wage if you include all his costs (and ignore the sponsorship / streaming / RUclips revenue).
6:05 As someone who has worked in large scale manufacturing for a long ass time, the extra half a step or extra 1cm of having to reach makes a big difference by the time mid-afternoon comes. Seems insignificant, but helps stop you burning out yourself or people you set up machines for. Easily double digit improvements in efficiency and throughput for less work overall
Yeah that "easy sell" part in the end was like wtf man you have 2,5M subs and live stream with hundreds of people... Its not so easy as open shop and sell like you:))
Did you know that old nails with flat tips were better than pointy tips for wood? Pointy tips can split the wood, whereas the flat square tip would punch a column of wood in, cutting through fibers instead of squeezing between them the way a point would. The tips of the cut fibers of the wood make more friction on the shaft of the nail, making it harder to pull out.
The Daily tally of Nails for a mature man back in the day was 1,000 nails a day, depending on the size of the nail. Nail making was a Family business, with everyone joining in the work. The Anvil was usually just a cubic shape, and not very large. The Rods for making the nails were gotten from an Iron Monger and were usually just slitted rods of Iron, already at the size of the finished product, so the process was simple, just point the tip on 2 sides, and then cleave nearly through on the hardy, and twist off in the bolster if they had one. Otherwise, they would just clout over the head to one side enough to give it something to hold with. The Good Old, Bad old days in the black country. (You had to earn your bowl of Sop in those days.)
I loved that you showed us that it's possible to do something like this, but don't forget all the equipment and how costly it is, it's kind of out of reach for most of us at the moment. I've always wanted to blacksmith different things, but the equipment and space required is so much it's hard to get into.
As a kid watching a blacksmith make nails was always so fascinating since it took the most amount of tools to make the seemingly "simplest" thing possible!
I have always been amazed by people who can swing hammers for sooooooo long. I havent lifted weights since i was in highschool so it would take me YEARS to work back up to a point where i could smith. Amazing work!
Gym strength isn't comparable to work strength. And it literally took him years to get to that point too, you know. Nobody's born with the ability to swing a hammer for hours on end without hurting themselves, it takes time and practise like all things.
@@dertyp3848 Square nails are more resistant to wood twisting. They're also great for so-called "dead-nailing", which is when the nail goes through a piece of wood and you hammer the point of the nail flat, much in the same way a rivet would. Dead-nailing guarantees the nail can't be pulled out. You can't do that with round nails since they'll bend instead of flatten. The square shape also folds the wood fibers downwards, effectively creating tiny "barbs" that help hold the nail in place. A round nail just pushes the fibers out of the way, around itself. Therefor, the grip strength of a cut square nail can be 1.5 times greater than that of a round wire nail. The square nail shape also aligns with the wood grain to greatly reduce the risk of splitting. Round wire nails were made for price, not for efficiency.
@@WolfHeathen That was a very good explanation. Thank you for the nice little education session. Always like new tidbits of random information on things like that.
12:45 hey that was me!!! I had just gotten home from work and was sitting on the throne. Thought I'd check in to see how the live stream was going and it was just as you uploaded them. Kept hitting add to cart before you added them and timed it just right! Haha can't wait to get them. Love the work my guy! Been watching for just shy of 10 years so it'll be awesome to get a piece you made!
@@Argaitlam Depends on why you think they're inferior. Machine made allows for precision and thinness, which is great for small projects using thin pieces of wood, big handmade ones hold heavy stuff better but will split wood if it's not strong enough. Both have different uses, outside of the obvious price difference.
My Dad is a Black Country boy, his aunts, grandmother and great greatmother were all chainmakers and worked in small workshops in the back yards of their homes. They regarded nailmaking as a lesser job (maybe true as there are no welds in nails) and wouldn't "lower" themselves to them. BTW Any chain with under a 1/2inch link was considered "Women's work".... Thats 1/2 inch barstock not 1/2 inch long links.. And they were paid by the yard
As someone who lurked silently during the live stream (very loud btw) its a fascinating insight into how much effort goes into such a short 15min video.
Just a heads up, many larger square nails do not have a sharp tip, a little counterintuitive but the blunt tip helps prevent the wood from splitting. tacks have a sharp tip.
Even the smaller ones do, back in the day i was always confused as to why the old copper roof slate nails had square tips when our new round were pointed..
Amazing comment. I now want nothing more from Alex than for him to dress up like a medieval blacksmith and bang out hundreds of arrowheads to be sent as rapid delivery gifts to the French.
Next time don't use an iPad to count - use a scientific scale under the container that supports percentage mode. You weigh a single nail and tare it, and that becomes "100%". Anything else added to it is in comparison to that weight (so 200% = 2). Just make sure it's a scale you can plug in and doesn't have a mandatory auto-off feature.
funnily enough i did a warehouse job shipping fastenings and we did this for shipments. Done by the thousand and we received intake by the tonne on pallets. Must have distributed millions each week
Or you could jsut count the nails. They're not going to be the same exact size. They're hand made. Non identicle products other than produce should not be sold by mass.
@@MeepChangeling You are very wrong. Everything is sorted by mass in bulk. We move things by the thousands, by the millions and sometimes billions. You can't count and package a ten thousand of anything let alone a million anything. Its percentage based. Nail 1 weighs 10g, nail 2 is 12g, which is 120% of nail 1s weight so its to small to be 2 nails, and is counted accurately.
fun fact forged and cut nails are far superior to the modern wire nails. they drive better and easier and are less likely to split wood. add that they are held in better and your golden. legit old style nails are worth a mint.
Cut nails' special thing is that they taper only in 1 dimension. Typical forged nails like the ones in this video are tapered on all sides and have huge shanks, so, without proper pilot holes, they are much more likely to split wood than modern wire nails and cut nails.
You got a good thing going with this video, making serious money from the nails, the money from live stream, money off additional footage like this, then you got other social media. I wish I had this ability when I was a lot younger
The fact i know the feeling and act of his 7 to go dance/chant makes me appreciate his dedication to doing stuff that doesnt get seen normally in videos.
Visiting historic sites, the local work towns would have various trades working at the forge, one of which was nailsmithing. Might be long, repetitive work but, one of the most important blacksmithing crafts for humanity.
I suggest a decent (but not TOO powerful) magnet on a cord/chain attached to your bucket... it'll save your arm from the goo, and from the heat if you've been using it all day
Very impressive Alec your shop is so large and airy and clean. My husband had a shop in his friends antique Chicken coops. in a town near me Jackson, New Jersey. It is literally covered in very old chicken coops. When farmers would sell their property, they weren’t required to take down the chicken coops. so the town is literally right up the road and has all of these chicken coops. The new owners turned them into everything from garages to homes to workshops. They actually have in the bylaws of my community do not feed the wild chickens. Feeding the wild turkeys is OK, but not the wild chickens. And I saw some wild chickens two weeks ago so I guess one of my neighbors are not doing what they’re supposed to do. Ha ha ha. The roosters that roam around here are very, very colorful and normal size, and the chickens are very colorful as well. You have to look pretty hard to see them, but if you know where to look, they’re always there. Sorry if my grammar and punctuation is off, but it’s very late at night.
This is where you aquire a great respect for the original nail makers who did this all day every day 150 plus years ago. for a lot less money than Alec is currently earning just from videoing the process. edit to add in the nail maker footage there he wasnt quenching his nails....
Alex you should make some baskets that you submerge in your quench or cooling tank/buckets. That way when you drop something in the tanks you just raise the basket to retrieve it . I would also space it off the bottom to maybe reduce breaking on whatever falls in .
Yo Alec, you need to do more of those livestreams, i had a blast with other viewers while you were busy not gonna lie, i miss the drinking game, bring it back please
i know im a bit late to this, but another way you can make old fashioned nails by hand is to hammer out sheets, and cut them. Old nails were actually made from sheets of metal. Nails today are made from coil, because the automatic processes that make coil are now very cost efficient. Sheet nails also have a lot more grip and tensile strength than coil nails, but this is also due to cut nails having more material. I'm not sure which method produces more nails per hour, or if there is sufficient demand for cut nails. Builders that i have talked to seem to like cut nails over coil nails. Cut nails are also from what i hear a lot easier to forge the head.
You should try forging your own muzzleloader firearm. The lathe work and learning how to checker pattern a stock. Create your own trigger plates. I can only imagine the engraved masterpiece you could make of a percussion cap plate. I believe in the UK you just have to join a target shooting club and you can posses a muzzleloader at least.
Popped in around the 10:00 area when he was at 288 or so. I think he only survived not having to check footage for the count because folks in chat were counting even when he forgot :P Just had this stream up and playing for most of the day after that. Caught the conversation later when folks were asking him about hardware store preferences and Alec only just caught himself from dropping that hard F in his passion for talking about Ace Hardware. :P
Ok I watched this video and when i was done I realized, I’m watching someone make nails… NAILS! And what makes me an addict is I watched a good portion of the live stream too! Lol 🤪
I'm still a beginner blacksmith but I laughed when you did it left handed cuz when my arm gets tired I swap and have been doing this sense I started and am fairly ambidextrous with it so it's good to know I can match your skill with one and if not the other.
Not to discourage but you should read up on Inchtuthil Roman Military Fortress they found a hoard of 1,000,000 nails: There were at least 875,428 nails ranging from 2 ½ inches to 15 inches long-the hoard likely contained over a million nails originally. The Romans had nail making down to a industry.
The blacksmiths Romans worked in teams to make nails and precut their blanks so the whole process ran like a well-oiled machine. It was like an assembly line.
Why do you wear your watch on your dominant hand? I'd imagine that would screw with your step count a lot when forcing or just going about your day writing etc. (Make sure you've at least set up which wrist you wear it on in your Garmin settings. Even if you don't care or track steps, it does matter for other metrics used for different activities you might track with it, for it to know which wrist it is on)
given your current equipment. what would be the closest you could get to high production? what about a video series on tooling and fixtures to get something close to one nail per second (not one second per nail)
I caught a good 4-5 hours of the live stream throughout the day. Then I decided to order some around nail number 83-100. Really looking forward to getting them, even though I have no idea what they are getting used for
Iv never made them by hand but I have forged literally millions of fasteners in my life and I think we probably swung a hammer about the same for a days work.
You should have kept selling them as packs of 5, so that more people would have a chance to get a some (as opposed to bundling them in 20s and them selling out right away to fewer people)
Given the title of the video, what was the cost of the propane? I'm wondering how much nails would actually cost if somebody was making them by hand as their sole job, without the benefits of scaling costs and large scale industrial processes and so on?
500 quid for the nails, ad-revenue from the live stream AND the RUclips video, and a fortune for the sponsorship…well, i think he’s quite well off, even if he can’t get that amount every single day… 😉
I'm no blacksmith, so might be a dumb question but when you quench the nail while its in your handmade hole punch thingy does it matter that the whole nail isn't getting quenched? Like the water (If that's what it is) doesn't get inside the hole so that part isn't getting touched by the liquid???
@@cturner8584 when the steel is red hot, it is expanded. When you quench it, it cools and shrinks a few thousandths of an inch and allows the nail to drop out if the header tool.
I dipped in and out of the livestream through the day. It was wild. No matter when I checked in there he was hammering away. Impressive really. Hours, and hours. Slowly watching his sanity dissolve into madness. By the end he was talking absolute nonsense into the camera. Not even exaggerating. I know Jamie is a good editor but the fact he made a semi lucid Alec appear coherent is impressive.
Me, too.
It reminds me of the time he Marathoned making hammers back, I think, in the Barker street Forge.
It was impressive then, and this is impressive now. Quality handmade products will probably always hold an allure over mass produced in very many areas.
I feel like you nailed it.
i dipped in and out of your mom
@@DustinSeiger lol
“Feels like someone else is doing it” while hammering left hand was pretty cheeky. lol.
Almost like a stranger was doing it. 🤫
I used to make that joke every time I forged left handed on livestreams a couple of years ago. Blacksmiths have a similar sense of humour apparently.
@@MartilloWorkshop just like cooks lmao. Everyone I've worked with in a real kitchen shares the same childish sense of humor.
@@happyradish1894 agreed
I'm just getting into blacksmithing and am already training myself to switch off which arm I'm hammering with.
It honestly feels surprisingly comfortable with either hand, but that could be as a result of already having years of having to train myself to be ambidextrous as a lefthanded person.
Definitely nice to feel a little sore in both arms at the end of the day as opposed to very sore in only one arm.
Alec: "400 out of 500 is 75% right?"
No Alec its 80%, good job with all those nails though!!
first thing that popped into my head lol
Although you are right, the confusion makes sense.
He made 400, still need to make 100, and 100 is 25% of 400. So he still had to do 25% more of what he already did.
To be fair, his mind had already snapped.
@@ak47dukin This kind of mental gymnastics usually indicates very high levels of dishonesty, possibly severe mental conditions and an upbringing within some religious, fundamentalist nuts sect (like Christianity).
Good that you aren't any of this. Your nickname "AK47" really calms us down!:)
His bad math was still better than government math.
Now you know why old buildings were burned down and owners sifted the ashes to get the nails. There were laws about this in the US years ago. There are a few companies that still make hand cut square nails [with some machines used ].
What kind of laws? That you couldn’t trespass gathering nails at burned down houses, or?
@@randallrun that you couldnt burn the house down for it i assume
ex carpenter here.
one single company makes square cut masonry nails, which work extremely well for pulling down high points in sill plates on concrete foundations
Real tough to burn a junk house these days. Fire departments basically can’t do it if there’s any asbestos, which any house that’s gonna get burned will have, so now they sit and rot because poor farms can’t afford to send their whole wreck to the hazardous waste dump because the bathroom has an asbestos floor. I’d actually prefer a little bit of air pollution to all the moldy collapsed buildings, but society doesn’t care I have to live and work around them and sometimes walk around brooding about the echos of a place that used to be full of life and a center of prosperous commerce. I now just put my sheep fence up to the corpses to keep em out.
@@swamp-yankeeWhat??? get help and probably don’t blame it on environmentalism or whatever you’re implying here and blame it on those that knew about the hazards and those that aren’t willing to spend to clean it up now.
As a Farrier who buys and uses nails for horseshoes in the hundreds each week it really makes you appreciate the work they had to do before industrialisation and mass manufacturing
It really makes you appreciate industrialization and mass manufacturing lol
@@JosuRibeiro People keep knocking the modern world for the ecological impact... But I really don't think they'd last a week in pre-industrial times.
@@MeepChangeling I make all my own tools and grow my own food but ok bud
@@4rog_girl214 Everyone thinks youre real cool and special but how many people do that on average, bud?
@@4rog_girl214 sure you mine all the materials used for your tools and any gas for your forge was probably extracted by you too. cant forget you probably discovered all this information by yourself and definitley not through research online. glad all this hard work of yours has shown you the value of humility, such a great chap.
Man blacksmiths back in the day really were built different, 15 seconds a nail is wild. Alec would've been done in 2 hours and 5 minutes at that rate
Where I live, we have a lot of living history frontier things people can work or volunteer at. The blacksmith at one makes nails all day, and he can get them out in three hits.
@ilikesnow7074Damn, that's wild...must be jacked secretly lol.
@@Aliyah_666 work strength beats workout strength every time, because it is only 1 hour at the gym 3-4 times a week, vs 8-12 hours 4-6 days a week. Bruce Lee said low weight high rep builds strong, but slim muscles.
@@ilikesnow7074 that guys grip strength will be insane😂
@@ilikesnow7074 How do you put 3 or 4 faces on a nail, cut it, and put the head on, in 3 hits?
Two hits to make 4 faces, one hit to cut, and one to make a head sounds like it would be legend tier already.
Alec, you need to do this more often. Nails, leaves, hammers... forge just about anything and sell them in real time. It was so much fun to see.
Definitely reminded me of the old days at Barker Street - loved it
You've found the magic formula for a sponsor integration. Normally, they feel forced and pandering... this was fun.
well he sure ain't making any money selling nails. $500 for a 12 hour day? and having to pay for materials and gas and shop rent? that's pretty bad return. hand made nails seem so cool, bummer it's so hard to make them
Felt forced. 100%
@@davebennett5069 ah, you're forgetting, he was sponsered, which also gives him money.
@@CreeperExploze THAT'S LITERALLY THE POINT :D
@@davebennett5069 Please explain, I appear to be too dense to understand.
Man, the camera work is really what makes this channel shine. Something so satisfying about watching hot metal take shape.
Remember to wear ear plugs with all that hammering! It's not always about the super loud single noises, but quite loud noises for an extended time will also leave you hearing damaged one day!
WHAT?
@@Trenz0HE SAID
REMEMBER TO WEAR EEL PUGS WITH OTTER HAMMERING
AND SOMETHING ABOUT SINGLE PEOPLE BEING TOO LOUD FOR EXTENDED PERIODS
I COULDN'T CATCH THE REST
@@joarsund3855 bra u missed da joke 😂
@@cowdude8948 I am actually slow hahaha
Also hearing loss is cumulative
7:30 the time taken may be a bit longer; those old films were shot at on 16fps and they get sped up to either 24fps or 30fps depending on the digital player. so 15 sec may be closer to 22 sec.
Is that why they always seem to be talking way too fast in old movies?
@@eliabeck689 Itcouldbe,butoneneverknowsdothey :)
@@eliabeck689 yes
I love this! Blacksmithing has been romanticised somwhat in the modern age (not a bad thing) but the reality is that you could be making these all day every day for months
It certainly is. Thomas Jefferson wrote a book on nailmaking and how it could be profitable.
His main trick would take some of the romance out of it. Made some nice profit calculations and tried to sell his method as some early day dropshipping guru. His main trick was using pre teen slaves to make the nails.
Woodturners make a fortune on pens because they are cheap and easy.
@@neongenesis8499 Yeah, that checks out, it's pretty easy to make a lot of money when you own people who can do all of your actual labor for basically free (only the cost of keeping them alive)
This kind of content is giving me real "pre-2020" Alec vibes. I smiled the entire time watching this!
This format of square space add is one of the most awesome add formats I have seen... Obviously the profit side isn't as feasible if you don't have the live stream audience but it is still cool.
I’m not gonna lie it took me till halfway to realize this was a big add
So 12 hours for 500 nails worth 500 quid, minus however much it costs to run the forge for 12 hours - so perhaps 30/hr income - just under triple the minimum wage - actually feels about right - a medieval blacksmith making triple the farmers around him .. but by hand it does put quite a price floor on the cost of 1 nail, no wonder the horse-shoe was lost ...
+ materials + tools (special made too for the heads is materials and time as well). And the nails are being sold at a price point that honestly a random person that didn't have internet clout would not get away with... so... yeah... fairly sure if you do the math and include labor hours there's not that much left.
@SyntheticFuture you are 100% correct. I bet he barely breaks even. Gas for those furnaces is expensive. He sould really be getting $50-60 per hour for that kind of work.
It's propane. It's cheap. Spending 25 bucks to fill an 8 gallon tank lasts me well over 20 hours. At 5psi@@TheMilkman710
Don’t forget the multipack discount. At 14:14 he states he made 393 dollars (yes dollars). If they were selling so fast, not sure why he didn’t raise the price even slightly. Maybe even just don’t offer the multipack discount. I understand not wanting to gouge but I doubt he made minimum wage if you include all his costs (and ignore the sponsorship / streaming / RUclips revenue).
It’s just a square space advert bud. You’re way off.
6:05 As someone who has worked in large scale manufacturing for a long ass time, the extra half a step or extra 1cm of having to reach makes a big difference by the time mid-afternoon comes. Seems insignificant, but helps stop you burning out yourself or people you set up machines for. Easily double digit improvements in efficiency and throughput for less work overall
You should try starting a new shop from scratch anonymously to give hints for those starting without an established brand!
He should. But he wouldn't sell anything. Let alone a nail for a pound.
Yeah that "easy sell" part in the end was like wtf man you have 2,5M subs and live stream with hundreds of people... Its not so easy as open shop and sell like you:))
@@tgregi I had to giggle when I watched this and have hundreds of square nails that look just like this. Gotta love an old farm house!!
He basically started this channel just as you described.
@tgregi Yea like when that tosser Mr Beast was advertising shopify. Saying it was easy to make sales. Boiled my piss that did.
Did you know that old nails with flat tips were better than pointy tips for wood? Pointy tips can split the wood, whereas the flat square tip would punch a column of wood in, cutting through fibers instead of squeezing between them the way a point would. The tips of the cut fibers of the wood make more friction on the shaft of the nail, making it harder to pull out.
I seen that on nails lways wondered why they were flat
The Daily tally of Nails for a mature man back in the day was 1,000 nails a day, depending on the size of the nail. Nail making was a Family business, with everyone joining in the work. The Anvil was usually just a cubic shape, and not very large. The Rods for making the nails were gotten from an Iron Monger and were usually just slitted rods of Iron, already at the size of the finished product, so the process was simple, just point the tip on 2 sides, and then cleave nearly through on the hardy, and twist off in the bolster if they had one. Otherwise, they would just clout over the head to one side enough to give it something to hold with. The Good Old, Bad old days in the black country. (You had to earn your bowl of Sop in those days.)
I loved that you showed us that it's possible to do something like this, but don't forget all the equipment and how costly it is, it's kind of out of reach for most of us at the moment.
I've always wanted to blacksmith different things, but the equipment and space required is so much it's hard to get into.
As a kid watching a blacksmith make nails was always so fascinating since it took the most amount of tools to make the seemingly "simplest" thing possible!
I have always been amazed by people who can swing hammers for sooooooo long. I havent lifted weights since i was in highschool so it would take me YEARS to work back up to a point where i could smith. Amazing work!
Gym strength isn't comparable to work strength. And it literally took him years to get to that point too, you know. Nobody's born with the ability to swing a hammer for hours on end without hurting themselves, it takes time and practise like all things.
@ obviously yeah. Is my compliment in need of correction somewhere?
11:14 “weve got 500 to make, weve got 400. That means were 75% there”. Impeccable math lmao
Finally someone who makes square nails. People have no idea how superior square nails are to round nails.
At 50x the cost, lol.
i`m one of them, could u elaborate?
@@KipdoesStuff Yes, because they're no longer mass produced.
@@dertyp3848 Square nails are more resistant to wood twisting. They're also great for so-called "dead-nailing", which is when the nail goes through a piece of wood and you hammer the point of the nail flat, much in the same way a rivet would. Dead-nailing guarantees the nail can't be pulled out. You can't do that with round nails since they'll bend instead of flatten. The square shape also folds the wood fibers downwards, effectively creating tiny "barbs" that help hold the nail in place. A round nail just pushes the fibers out of the way, around itself. Therefor, the grip strength of a cut square nail can be 1.5 times greater than that of a round wire nail. The square nail shape also aligns with the wood grain to greatly reduce the risk of splitting.
Round wire nails were made for price, not for efficiency.
@@WolfHeathen That was a very good explanation. Thank you for the nice little education session. Always like new tidbits of random information on things like that.
12:45 hey that was me!!! I had just gotten home from work and was sitting on the throne. Thought I'd check in to see how the live stream was going and it was just as you uploaded them. Kept hitting add to cart before you added them and timed it just right! Haha can't wait to get them. Love the work my guy! Been watching for just shy of 10 years so it'll be awesome to get a piece you made!
Watching this makes me glad we have machines to make nails(and tons of other stuff).
Even when machine made is inferior? In this case at least
@@Argaitlam I dunno man-how much would those nails cost?
@@Argaitlam Depends on why you think they're inferior. Machine made allows for precision and thinness, which is great for small projects using thin pieces of wood, big handmade ones hold heavy stuff better but will split wood if it's not strong enough.
Both have different uses, outside of the obvious price difference.
@11:13 definitely the math of someone who has been hammering nails for 9 hours
The last 100 took 25% of total effort 😂
My Dad is a Black Country boy, his aunts, grandmother and great greatmother were all chainmakers and worked in small workshops in the back yards of their homes.
They regarded nailmaking as a lesser job (maybe true as there are no welds in nails) and wouldn't "lower" themselves to them.
BTW Any chain with under a 1/2inch link was considered "Women's work".... Thats 1/2 inch barstock not 1/2 inch long links.. And they were paid by the yard
theres a lot of old homes around where i live and when they get renovated there are soooooo many old rusty hand made nails its pretty cool to see
As someone who lurked silently during the live stream (very loud btw) its a fascinating insight into how much effort goes into such a short 15min video.
Just a heads up, many larger square nails do not have a sharp tip, a little counterintuitive but the blunt tip helps prevent the wood from splitting. tacks have a sharp tip.
Even the smaller ones do, back in the day i was always confused as to why the old copper roof slate nails had square tips when our new round were pointed..
You are an English blacksmith. The real question is, how many arrowheads can you make in a day?
Great idea
And set up his workshop at Agincourt, just because!
Amazing comment. I now want nothing more from Alex than for him to dress up like a medieval blacksmith and bang out hundreds of arrowheads to be sent as rapid delivery gifts to the French.
Alec + Jason Kingsley doing a medieval weapons forge session would have been cool
11:53 I have the same problem my friend. Sometimes i have thousands of steps and i don't even stand from my computer all day.
This is probably one of the better sponsor integrations i've seen. They got their moneys worth on this one.
The secret is to be an Internet famous blacksmith
Next time don't use an iPad to count - use a scientific scale under the container that supports percentage mode. You weigh a single nail and tare it, and that becomes "100%". Anything else added to it is in comparison to that weight (so 200% = 2). Just make sure it's a scale you can plug in and doesn't have a mandatory auto-off feature.
funnily enough i did a warehouse job shipping fastenings and we did this for shipments. Done by the thousand and we received intake by the tonne on pallets. Must have distributed millions each week
Or you could jsut count the nails. They're not going to be the same exact size. They're hand made. Non identicle products other than produce should not be sold by mass.
Works.fpr manufactured nails. These wouldnt be uniform enough
@@MeepChangeling You are very wrong. Everything is sorted by mass in bulk. We move things by the thousands, by the millions and sometimes billions. You can't count and package a ten thousand of anything let alone a million anything. Its percentage based. Nail 1 weighs 10g, nail 2 is 12g, which is 120% of nail 1s weight so its to small to be 2 nails, and is counted accurately.
@@debrascott8775 yes they would
fun fact forged and cut nails are far superior to the modern wire nails. they drive better and easier and are less likely to split wood. add that they are held in better and your golden. legit old style nails are worth a mint.
Cut nails' special thing is that they taper only in 1 dimension. Typical forged nails like the ones in this video are tapered on all sides and have huge shanks, so, without proper pilot holes, they are much more likely to split wood than modern wire nails and cut nails.
You should do a session of making nails using just your left hand. See how many you can do that way!
The direction of the nail header was something I learned on my own after having a hell of a time getting the first nail out.
You got a good thing going with this video, making serious money from the nails, the money from live stream, money off additional footage like this, then you got other social media. I wish I had this ability when I was a lot younger
The fact i know the feeling and act of his 7 to go dance/chant makes me appreciate his dedication to doing stuff that doesnt get seen normally in videos.
6:50 I wasn't ready for that reference lol
thought this was an old school runescape video then Alec going on about making bank off of hand made nails, got me excited
Same bro same
Visiting historic sites, the local work towns would have various trades working at the forge, one of which was nailsmithing.
Might be long, repetitive work but, one of the most important blacksmithing crafts for humanity.
I suggest a decent (but not TOO powerful) magnet on a cord/chain attached to your bucket... it'll save your arm from the goo, and from the heat if you've been using it all day
Very impressive Alec your shop is so large and airy and clean. My husband had a shop in his friends antique Chicken coops. in a town near me Jackson, New Jersey. It is literally covered in very old chicken coops. When farmers would sell their property, they weren’t required to take down the chicken coops. so the town is literally right up the road and has all of these chicken coops. The new owners turned them into everything from garages to homes to workshops.
They actually have in the bylaws of my community do not feed the wild chickens.
Feeding the wild turkeys is OK, but not the wild chickens. And I saw some wild chickens two weeks ago so I guess one of my neighbors are not doing what they’re supposed to do. Ha ha ha.
The roosters that roam around here are very, very colorful and normal size, and the chickens are very colorful as well. You have to look pretty hard to see them, but if you know where to look, they’re always there.
Sorry if my grammar and punctuation is off, but it’s very late at night.
You totally nailed this job!!
This is where you aquire a great respect for the original nail makers who did this all day every day 150 plus years ago. for a lot less money than Alec is currently earning just from videoing the process.
edit to add in the nail maker footage there he wasnt quenching his nails....
dang it man, wanted to see what they looked like after the polish!
been following Alec since 2015 and Id bet good money, he always gets a good nights sleep, what a grafter
0:20 one piece
It’s real
I could recognize a 500gr Fage TOTAL greek yogurt case anywhere!
Greetings from Greece Alec!
Love your vibe!
Alex you should make some baskets that you submerge in your quench or cooling tank/buckets. That way when you drop something in the tanks you just raise the basket to retrieve it . I would also space it off the bottom to maybe reduce breaking on whatever falls in .
I know that I missed the live party, but it looked like a smashing success after watching this 4 months later. I'd say you really nailed it! Cheers 🍻
I kinda want to know how much Squarespace paid for this sponsorship for Alec to slowly go insane for the video
What a bloody fantastic advert for a company and making one.
It was nice to see you doing a long live stream, took me back to the Barker Street forge and Sam. 👍👍
That was a nice stream, wish he could do more.
@@nunyabisnass1141 Yes its great when he has the time. .
Wonder how Sam is doing there days
@@chadlecraft4971i often wonder too, no doubt shoddin’ a horse somewhere 👍💪👌
He’s doing ok….
I love these kinds of videos, its very entertaining seeing alec slowly lose his grip on his sanity 😂😂😂
Yo Alec, you need to do more of those livestreams, i had a blast with other viewers while you were busy
not gonna lie, i miss the drinking game, bring it back please
You do an amazing job at making a 15-minute advertisement super interesting!
Ive made bank selling nails too. Buy them at the lumber yard and sell them on the GE. Easy money
What's the ge?
This is great stuff man. And you have the clientele to get those orders in. Great stuff
Actual forging!!! Best vid in a while...the good old Alec and Jaime show....Nailed it!!!
i know im a bit late to this, but another way you can make old fashioned nails by hand is to hammer out sheets, and cut them. Old nails were actually made from sheets of metal. Nails today are made from coil, because the automatic processes that make coil are now very cost efficient. Sheet nails also have a lot more grip and tensile strength than coil nails, but this is also due to cut nails having more material.
I'm not sure which method produces more nails per hour, or if there is sufficient demand for cut nails. Builders that i have talked to seem to like cut nails over coil nails. Cut nails are also from what i hear a lot easier to forge the head.
You should do a 100 hour outdoor survival challenge where you have to make your survival tools and use them
Thats a really great idea, if not him he could make the tools and collab with another survivalist youtuber
No
5:46 - That is always a problem nobody wants to have. 🤣
You should try forging your own muzzleloader firearm. The lathe work and learning how to checker pattern a stock. Create your own trigger plates. I can only imagine the engraved masterpiece you could make of a percussion cap plate. I believe in the UK you just have to join a target shooting club and you can posses a muzzleloader at least.
Yes, like the youtube video Gunsmith of Williamsburg (1969). Its a historical reinactment of the making of a rifle, fantastic video.
Hands down. The best. SquareSpace commercial I've ever seen.
6:24 So long as you don't get mixed up and make pizza while eating nails 😂
12:00 son, go to the hardware store and grab me some left handed nails.
Popped in around the 10:00 area when he was at 288 or so. I think he only survived not having to check footage for the count because folks in chat were counting even when he forgot :P Just had this stream up and playing for most of the day after that. Caught the conversation later when folks were asking him about hardware store preferences and Alec only just caught himself from dropping that hard F in his passion for talking about Ace Hardware. :P
4:20 Make another nail jig that's slightly smaller so you can just pop it over the nail sticking out, and give it a whack. The tip will be spared.
I got 5 nails 👏🏻👍🏻 I look forward to have them arrive. Alec said “Thank you Mar-tin” when my purchase went through 👏🏻👍🏻🇩🇰🇩🇰🇩🇰
Bro your vibe is on point ahaha first time I’ve seen your content and I already think I’m subbing
11:13 "We've got 500 to make, we've done 400 that means we're 75% of the way there" the maths aint mathin alec.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. 😅
Ok I watched this video and when i was done I realized, I’m watching someone make nails… NAILS! And what makes me an addict is I watched a good portion of the live stream too! Lol 🤪
Yay a video he forges in. 🎉🎉🎉
I'm still a beginner blacksmith but I laughed when you did it left handed cuz when my arm gets tired I swap and have been doing this sense I started and am fairly ambidextrous with it so it's good to know I can match your skill with one and if not the other.
Not to discourage but you should read up on Inchtuthil Roman Military Fortress they found a hoard of 1,000,000 nails:
There were at least 875,428 nails ranging from 2 ½ inches to 15 inches long-the hoard likely contained over a million nails originally.
The Romans had nail making down to a industry.
The blacksmiths Romans worked in teams to make nails and precut their blanks so the whole process ran like a well-oiled machine. It was like an assembly line.
You broke the steam power hammer didn’t you!
Why do you wear your watch on your dominant hand?
I'd imagine that would screw with your step count a lot when forcing or just going about your day writing etc.
(Make sure you've at least set up which wrist you wear it on in your Garmin settings. Even if you don't care or track steps, it does matter for other metrics used for different activities you might track with it, for it to know which wrist it is on)
Dang, im sad id missed the livestream! i love your livestreams and these kind of video's!!!!
dang.. i remember when he had 20k subs, insane to see such growth, amazing, keep it up
'Forging a Giant Nail from five hundred smaller nails' when?
sanity ❌ Nails✅
It remains me the "Bottle opener night" .... (when the price double each new one) I stayed until the end :D what a night !!!!
given your current equipment. what would be the closest you could get to high production? what about a video series on tooling and fixtures to get something close to one nail per second (not one second per nail)
I caught a good 4-5 hours of the live stream throughout the day. Then I decided to order some around nail number 83-100. Really looking forward to getting them, even though I have no idea what they are getting used for
Coal/ charcoal dust works well for "forge lubricant" to keep things from sticking in.
Alec's wife sittin at home wondering what he's doing all day.. ahh, you know, NAILING BABAAAY
Iv never made them by hand but I have forged literally millions of fasteners in my life and I think we probably swung a hammer about the same for a days work.
You should have kept selling them as packs of 5, so that more people would have a chance to get a some (as opposed to bundling them in 20s and them selling out right away to fewer people)
6:51 NOOOO YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO CATCH ME OFF GUARD LIKE THAT
Repetitive tasks make Alec a crazy person😂
ADHD be like xD
Given the title of the video, what was the cost of the propane? I'm wondering how much nails would actually cost if somebody was making them by hand as their sole job, without the benefits of scaling costs and large scale industrial processes and so on?
500 quid for the nails, ad-revenue from the live stream AND the RUclips video, and a fortune for the sponsorship…well, i think he’s quite well off, even if he can’t get that amount every single day… 😉
9:01 lowkey keeping Alec sane for the day with the jokes and taking his mind off the nails
Was a great stream. Highlights were The Sorting Hat, Jamies camera photo whoopsie and the blindfolded nail. Good craic!
lol yeah... that was a little NSFW. lol
5:46 , yeah i tell myself that every friday evening
I'm no blacksmith, so might be a dumb question but when you quench the nail while its in your handmade hole punch thingy does it matter that the whole nail isn't getting quenched? Like the water (If that's what it is) doesn't get inside the hole so that part isn't getting touched by the liquid???
They are made from mild steel, so the quenching has no effect on strength or hardness of the nail.
@a-k-jun-1 Then why? Just to cool them off?
@@cturner8584 when the steel is red hot, it is expanded. When you quench it, it cools and shrinks a few thousandths of an inch and allows the nail to drop out if the header tool.
@@a-k-jun-1 cool, thanks for the response