2/ I use a mallet and an awl I turned ALL the time. Likewise, the cabinetmaker's workbench I made and the holdfast I forged. Use some specialty tools I ground (e.g. three lobe triangle bit for opening up coffee grinder) rarely. ...but these things don't chain very deeply.
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13/ The idea being that bootstrapping is hard / impossible. With a set of tongs, you can make more tongs (cite: me ; I've made several pairs of tongs). ...but how do you make the first pair?
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14/ Hammers, btw, are easy. Piece of rock lashed into a stick with some vegetable fibre. But TONGS?!?
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15/ My thought is that you bootstrap with crappy tools, including very wet sticks. Blacksmiths still use wooden hammers (soaked through) to straighten nearly finished products. When I did some glassblowing we likewise uses wooden (and paper!) tools.
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16/ So my thought is that you could make a just-barely-passable set of tongs using nothing but a boulder (as an anvil), a rock-and-stick hammer, and maybe a wet stick or two. With that crappy pair, a better pair. And so on.
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17/ Great point - if you can smelt iron, you could make cast iron tongs. https://twitter.com/LibertyFarmNH/status/1001510098370473984 …
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18/ Heck, you could maybe even use brass tongs on iron. For that matter, iron has such a low thermal conductivity, that you can forge iron without tongs - one end in the fire, other end cool enough to grasp by hand.
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