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Blacksmith Seth Pauley remembers the first time he felt the magic of his craft. He was making a gardening trowel, and he struck the steel with his hammer just right.
“It felt like hitting a piece of clay instead of a piece of metal,” Pauley says.
Now, years later, Pauley, 48, only notices when the magic evades him, which isn’t often. Pauley is the owner of Red Pig Garden Tools (2122 SW Borland Road, 503-479-5571, redpigtools.com) in West Linn, where he forges bespoke hoes, spades, digging forks and weeders, all coveted like Baccarat crystal but by gardeners.
Red Pig is the longest-running U.S. blacksmith specializing in hand-forged garden tools. It isn’t easy work. To forge steel is to heat it and pound it into a desired shape, like the head of a shovel (or a samurai sword). Most garden tools are stamped or laser cut, meaning their shape is cut from a flat piece of metal and bent, and most don’t last more than a few seasons.
Like wood, metal has a grain. In raw steel, that grain is random. Heating and pounding it elongates and aligns the grains, making the tool stronger. Forged tools can last generations.
Pauley taught creative writing and literature at Temple University when he was younger. Forging tools isn’t so different from crafting words into stories, he says, adding that every tool has a story. People bring him very old tools, seeking replacements that will last just as long as they had.
Red Pig, too, has a story. Pauley learned design and forging from his mentor Bob Denman, a garden tool expert who learned to make hand-forged tools were becoming scarce in ’80s. After years of pounding metal alongside Denman, Pauley bought the company in 2017. He has two assistants who help him make 4,000 to 5,000 tools a year, every single one shaped by their hands.
Red Pig sells direct online and by appointment at its West Linn workshop and through stores, including Garden Fever in Northeast Portland, not far from where Pauley grew up.
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