The ABS Youth Program is open to participants between the ages of 9 and 18, who must be accompanied by a parent or guardian, and will feature hands-on forging and finish work. Further details on scheduling, required safety equipment, costs, and lodging for each year’s events are available on the ABS website under Upcoming Events.

For more information on this year’s Youth Program events please contact Master Smith Timothy Potier at email [email protected]

The work and hands-on learning continues during each event as both students and instructors spend most of their time at the forges. Students are taught to first form a point at the end of a long bar of steel using the hammer. A distal taper is then hammered out and the point is profiled. The choil is pulled down and the cutting edge then formed. At this point, the blade is cut off of the bar and the full tang tapered handle drawn out. When the hammer work is over with, students are taught the importance of controlling grain size by normalizing the blade three times, and the blades are hardened using the edge quench method. Blades are tempered, rough-ground and made ready to accept a set of slab handles by the instructors.

For a video preview of a past ABS Youth event click on the ABS YouTube Channel video above.