Knowing the basics of casting, forging, turning, milling, folding, rolling metal is the easy bit - I spent the afternoon milling a small block of steel I had already part-turned.
I assume mesh fencing is woven on something akin to a loom.
One thing that flummoxes me are how box-joint pliers are assembled!
I dare say YouTube reveals all... but the other thing that flummoxes me is how you now view YouTube videos without being caught up and stopped by an impenetrable tangle of Google B-S.
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An intriguing thought.....
Are we really still in the Iron Age?
The Stone Age - millennia of great skill at knapping flints into effective tools, then those became gradually obsolete with the discovery of metals and how to work them.
At some unknown time in parallel - Fire. More accurately, how to produce and control Fire to cook food, provide warmth, scare away dangerous animals.
The Bronze Age - understanding Fire and its effects on certain rocks brought a huge flowering of metal-working skills that produced many beautiful objects, both functional and ornamental. Those special rocks brought forth Copper, Tin, Zinc: those metals and their alloys are still vital engineering and decorative materials.
The Iron Age - reducing another rock - iron ore - to iron, then melting, casting and forging iron, requires much more heat at much higher temperatures than the cuprous metals do. However, iron brought a big leap forwards by its being far better than bronze for making tools. Then Iron gave us Steel - at its simplest steel is iron alloyed with a small amount of carbon - with all sorts of new abilities and possibilities but still mainly Iron.
Those abilities and possibilities of Iron and her daughter, Steel, gave us machines like the Lathe - its principle was known in Classical times and though the modern industrial versions are very sophisticated and many are computer-controlled, the Lathe remains THE fundamental machine-tool. Without it, very little of what we so easily take for granted, is possible; even where, as Iron and Steel often are, it is in the background rather than directly.
Followed by the heat-engine: the steam-engine then internal-combustion engine. Sometimes the early development of the former, struggled by outstripping contemporary understanding of the nature of the materials, and the accuracy of the lathes and other tools available then.
And now? The discovery of Electricity and how to produce and use it was the next real leap, followed by the discovery of Petroleum and its derivatives. Electricity depends on Copper and Iron; producing both electricity and petroleum demands a lot of Steel.
The Plastic Age? The Computer Age? They are major developments; but there is virtually nothing in our lives that does not depend on Iron and iron alloys.
- What are you reading this on? A desktop monitor? Laptop? "Smart"-'phone? It contains metals, but more fundamentally could not exist without extremely high-grade mechanical and electrical engineering. It was made on machines whose own components are principally pieces of various grades of Steel (so Iron alloys) machined to accuracies measured in tiny fractions of millimetres.
- What powers it? A mains power-supply unit or a battery you re-charge from the mains. Your domestic wiring is of copper insulated with PVC, but you would have no electricity without a lot of steel, plus pure iron and copper, for the generators, transformers and transmission-line parts.
- Where are you reading it? In a nice comfy home built mainly of concrete, brick and timber? What of the tools and machinery that were used to make and transport your home's materials and components? They are principally of more Iron alloys.
- Err, OK, your say. But what of all the plastic and paint and things? Ah. Non-metallic... but most of their raw materials are Petroleum derivatives. How is that mineral extracted from the ground, refined etc.? What is all its extraction, transport, processing, plant made from?
If "we" had not discovered Iron, only a few millennia ago, would we still be in the Bronze Age, cooking a very narrow range of simple foods in bronze or copper vessels over open wood fires in our tree-trunk-and-thatch huts?
Nanoose 