Metal Working


Metalworking is the craft and practice of working with metals to create individual parts, assemblies, or large scale structures. The term covers a wide range of work from large ships, bridges and oil refineries to delicate jewelery. It therefore includes a correspondingly wide range of skills and the use of many different types of metalworking processes and their related tools.

Metalworking is an art, hobby, industry, and trade. It relates to metallurgy, a science, jewelery making, an art-and-craft, and as a trade and industry with ancient roots spanning all cultures and civilizations. Metalworking had its beginnings millennia in the past. At some imprecise point in the distant past humankind discovered that certain rocks now called ores could be smelted, producing metal. Further, they discovered that the metal product was malleable and ductile and thus able to be formed into various tools, adornments and put to other practical uses. Humans over the millennia learned to work raw metals into objects of art, adornment, practicality, trade, and engineering.