Meet Coy Baker

Since 2016, Baker has operated as a Blacksmith/Bladesmith in the mountains of Western North Carolina.

 

Back in 2008, at the young age of 14, Baker began Blacksmithing with a stack of cinder blocks

as a forge and a hunk of steel as an anvil. Fresh out of high school, the love of working with steel

turned his attention to gunsmithing. In the years following, he attended a trade school to

learn the craft and began to run a side business, repairing and customizing firearms.

 

Throughout the years, Baker taught himself how to ARC weld and started gathering

more tooling in the shop to branch out into more metal fabrication and old machine restoration.

It was at this point he built his first propane Venturi style forge and purchased

his first real anvil (a one hundred and forty pound Wilkinson out of Amish country in PA).

 

The love of forging really took hold once again and he picked knife making back up, focusing on rough blacksmith knives and brute de forge work. As his skills increased, he shifted to more “elegant” knives and began messing around with carbon Damascus. 

 

Before long, Baker designed and built his own twenty-five TON hydraulic forging press to

help facilitate the Mosaic Damascus making process. The rest is history.

 

In 2020, Baker  Forge developed their technique for fusion welding copper to carbon steel. Not only was the bond just as good as normal fusion welding, it was FAR superior! The strength achieved stands up far better to shear testing then previous methods. The product outcome has been called "Coppermascus" 

Baker has since expanded on that process to include the use of other alloys in a multi layer setup for unique pattern development. Mostly for use in blades. 

 

Baker is always looking for new ways to create unique patterns and processes. Today he sells his billets worldwide and is currently tooling up the shop to run full production batches of these billets in an effort to make this exotic steel easily available to any smith.