Forging A Hook

High School just started, and I don't have a whole lot of time to forge in my spare time, so weekends are spent a few hours at a time practicing techniques. I went and got my rebar that I had practiced on before and by the end I had a nice decorative hook!

First, obviously, I lit my forge (what it is: https://steemit.com/forge/@armored-spartan/homemade-forge), waited for it to get up to temperature and put in my rebar.

The next step is to start tapering the end of the bar, which is to bring it to a point whether it's a round taper, four sided, eight sided, three sided, etc. Once you get it around probably five or six inches of just taper, then start to curve it by placing the end of the taper off of your anvil and hit the point downwards and continue until you can't anymore. By then the curve should look like a giant fish hook. Then lay the "hook" on the anvil, upright, and give it an angle to continue the curving, until it makes an "eye." Now you will want to try to center the eye to where the center of the eye is in line with the rest of the bar, kind of like a stickman.

The next step is to then taper the other end and almost repeat the process, except just making it a hook and offset it with a 90 degree angle so the hook will face away from the wall.

The only thing next to do is to get it hot, once again, and take a wire brush and scrape off most of the "flaky" pieces, and take it to a grinder with a wire disk. This will give it a nice, metal feel, that doesn't feel like rust. Giving it a coat of paint or putting it in some melted lard will make it last longer, because it eventually will rust (This process is highly recommended).

This whole article is just guidelines but if you followed it to the T, you should have a nice decorative hook to hang hats, coats, tools, etc. I hope you got what you needed from this article, I myself am an amateur blacksmith, I guess that would be the appropriate term, but I hope to eventually be able to teach things such as this. If you would like to help in that process you can just upvote this page (really, anything helps!). Tell me your thoughts about this article and how it could be improved for future reference.

UPVOTE!...please.