Conway Tool & Forge

Blacksmith John S. Passiglia of Conway and his son Gianni I. "Iggy" Passiglia, 3, demonstrate a 100-year-old coal forge in front of the Westhampton Blacksmith Museum, during the Westhampton Fall Festival.

Metal Masters: Blacksmith Students Show Their Stuff As Fair Ends
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Forging quite a career From sculptures to railings, Conway man hammers away at blacksmithing
By PATRICK O'CONNOR Recorder Staff
Ever since John Passiglia was a boy, he's been a collector:

He'd find bits of metal, different types of rocks or bottle caps. He'd collect Matchbox cars and Star Wars figures. He thought of collecting barb wire, but never got around to it. "I guess it's not too far of a stretch to see where I am now," the 36-year-old blacksmith said in his shop recently.

As Passiglia spoke, he lifted different found objects from 5-gallon pails in his workspace, which he built beside the home he shares with his wife, Francesca, and their 2-year-old son, Gianni Ignatius.

From one pail, he took out a peculiar rusted object used for walking on ice. It's called an ice creeper. Next, he pulled out a metal bracket, which, when looked at from a certain angle, resembles a toucan. In other pails, there was a large bicycle gear, a pulley, log pinchers, a deadbolt and several wrenches, some rusted in place.

Passiglia, who has a degree in sculpture from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is a blacksmith and an artist. He said he likes the look of certain found objects, from which he makes different sculptures, and the fact that he can fix and possibly use them, whether by restoring them or melting them down and changing them into something new.

As a blacksmith, Passiglia was trained by Robert Compton, who's also from Conway. That was about 16 years ago. Passiglia also teaches intro and advance shop and drafting and draft design at Pioneer Valley Regional School, where he also has a blacksmith club with about 15 students.

Not far from where he stood in his shop, a robotic face with a clear mask looked down from one of Passiglia's many shelves.

"It's a carburetor with Plexiglas welded over it," Passiglia explained of his creation, one of several that animate his workshop.

Called Conway Tool and Forge, the shop looks somewhat like a ramshackle structure. It has tarps blocking open holes in plywood walls and there's no insulation or heat. But it is sturdy and roomy enough room to hold Passiglia's many tools.

Sitting in the center of the shop is the most important tool, the forge. On cold winter nights, it gives off the only heat, burning red hot at up to 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Around the forge, old industrial machinery sits heavy on the dirt floor. The most formidable tool is an 1824 Fairbanks Power Hammer, which stands at more than 6 feet tall and weighs more than 2,900 pounds. It pounds steel flat.

Most of his tools date back more than 100 years. His anvil is from the 1820s. He still uses hammers and scrolling tools used by his grandfather and great uncle, who were craftsmen in Sicily before they moved to Queens, N.Y.

He likes the older tools because newer tools tend to be more expensive and not built as well as older ones. Besides, it feels good to hammer on an anvil that's almost 200 years old, Passiglia said.

He said he enjoys blacksmith work because it's enjoyable to take something that is cold and rigid and turn it into something malleable.

"It seems difficult to work with, but if you get it into a malleable state, you can do anything with it," he said.

As an artist, he's made iron hotdogs, some with wings, as well as cattails and fiddlehead ferns made from reinforcement bars. As a blacksmith, he makes railings, trellises, arbors, candlestick holders, plant pot holders, pot and pan hangers. He also fixes things, like farm equipment, and he makes tools.

Sometimes, his blacksmith work crosses into his artistic projects, like when he recently made gutter hangers for a customer. The steel hangers have a graceful shape. Passiglia explained how he could blow it out of proportion, creating art.

"Now it's something that people would recognize," he said. "But if I change the scale, make it 20 feet, it would change the whole thing."

When asked if he considers himself a blacksmith or an artist, he said it's tricky. Blacksmithing, he said, is like art, requiring simple tools, like a forge, a hammer and an anvil.

"It's what you make out of that," he said. "I see it as art, but it's an old art. It's a venerable art."

Blacksmith enjoys the challenge

09/08/2003

By WILLIAM SWEET Staff writer
wsweet@repub.com

 

CONWAY - People don't appreciate the technology that is in the lowly anvil, but John S. Passiglia gets it.

From its flat face, to the chunky "step," to the tip of its "beak" or "horn," the anvil provides a rich range of surfaces on which the blacksmith pounds out his creative skills. It's been a canvas for Passiglia for the past decade, which he started as an apprentice for fellow Conway blacksmith Robert Compton.

Passiglia demonstrates how striking along the different surfaces produces a different bend and edge to the metal pieces. Bracing pieces with tools inserted into the anvil's squarish "hardy" hole and smaller "pritchel" hole, he twists into shape jigs, pieces which could form a plant holder, a trellis, or an arbor.

"With this metal, you can do anything," he said. "The iron is very forgiving. ... Just heat it back up, bend it, beat it, or change it."

It's a small shop, with just enough room to reach around from the forge to the anvil, tools hanging with an arm's reach. This does carry its risks, he said.

"You invariably sear yourself once in a while," he said, indicating a burn scar on his arm.

Carrying out the forging - the "heating and beating" of mild steel - at his tiny Ashfield Road shop, he recently embarked on blacksmithing full-time, even as he and wife Francesca are expecting their first child. He now spends much of his week in the small shed in his back yard, forging and crafting pieces on order, as well as pieces he will take to local fairs.

"I like the challenge of taking a job on and seeing it all the way through," he said. "Working with other people, you don't see the whole nut."

"Even when I close up at night, I make plans and sketches for the next morning," he said. "If I don't do it, it doesn't get done."

Passiglia plans to take a coal-powered kiln, which has an historical appeal, to the Franklin County Fair, the Heath Fair and the Ashfield Fall Festival. He doesn't set up shop at Conway's Festival of the Hills in deference to his former instructor, who blacksmiths there.

Many of these fairs aren't big money-makers, but effective for getting his name out to potential customers, he said.

Born John Salvatore Francesco Passiglia, he comes from a family of Sicilians who crafted metal furniture, and he inherited some of their tools, including pieces that assist in the bending of scrolls.

The tools and tricks of blacksmithing have long been shrouded in secrecy by craftsmen eager to lay sole claim to the techniques. He doesn't play by that rule, though, and shares with anyone who will ask.

"A lot of the old techniques were lost" in the secrecy, he said.

Holding a degree in sculpture from UMass, he spent his first year and a half blacksmithing as an apprentice to Compton, who still is in practice. Passiglia started out as an undergraduate in Rhode Island studying anthropology, and he sees a tie between the two fields.

"I have always been into metal and junk and old stuff," he said. His art major at UMass concentrated on traditional forging techniques.

In the intervening years he has learned the trade at a number of schools, including the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.

Beyond that, he's been putting in a lot of reading on design and techniques, but he credits his apprenticeship and schooling with putting him at the level he is today.

"If you're just self-taught, you have a fool for a teacher," he said.