My name is, you guessed it, Torbjörn Åhman. I was born in 1974 and I live in Sweden. I'm currently doing blacksmithing mostly as a hobby.

My blacksmithing journey

In 1989 my mother brought me with her to a week long class in "ancient iron making". There we learned how to make charcoal, roast bog ore and smelt this ore in small bloomery furnaces. Along side we also tried blacksmithing, making simple things like hooks and door catches. This is where my interest in blacksmithing first started.

Some years later I went for a weekend blacksmithing class with professional blacksmith Otto Samuelsson when he had his shop at Huseby bruk. I bought my first anvil around this time.... and then other things in life got more important and the anvil was put aside for many years.

Then! In 2010 after moving to a new property with space for a workshop I started to build my blacksmith shop not quite knowing where this would take me. I joined the blacksmithing forum iforgeiron.com and did research about forges and tools. It turned out to be a great source of information and inspiration.

Some images from my initial shop build

In april 2011 I found and bought this "ABNO" power hammer. It's a "spring hammer" with a ram weight of 25kg. It was in average condition but usable after a good clean up and lubrication. A friend helped me mill the hammer dies flat and it was good to go.

In December 2014 I acquired my air hammer. It's a BÊCHÉ hammer with a ram weight of 75kg. Below is a series of videos showing the installation.

All since the shop was operational I have been challenging myself with different type of projects and that's actually a pretty good way of learning if you can handle failure now and then. Working on a project I find the "planning" part quite interesting, which often require me to figure out how to make specific tools. Sometimes you even need to make a first tool to make the tool required... which pretty much sums up what the blacksmith really was 100 years ago, a tool maker for all trades.

I often get inspiration from work by other blacksmiths or artists, and I usually ask myself this question - how did they do it? When studying a piece, the actual design is not that important to me, it's the process which I find intriguing.