Quincy Barhaug has a loud hobby. When the homeschooled eighth grader is hammering away on an anvil, the strikes ring out from his blacksmithing shop across the backyard.

Quincy, who wears ear protection while he works, takes a hunk of iron to demonstrate his craft.

“Where are my square tongs?” the teen says as he searches through the shop. Not finding what he’s looking for, Quincy continues the search outside, where tools and machines spill out the front of the building.

Giving up on the square tongs, he finally selects another pair that’s pretty close to the ones he wanted for the job. He grips the chunk of metal between the pincers and stabs it into the coals of the forge. He turns the hand-crank blower, and the coke and metal begin to glow. 

The tongs then start to smoke, giving off the distinct smell of roasting meat; Quincy had recently used them to turn a grill where he’d cooked pork chops, and the tongs still have grease on them. 

“Smells like someone’s having a barbecue in my shop now,” he comments with a laugh.

What it looks like is more impressive. By the time Quincy is done working the metal, he’s transformed the nondescript iron into a cross, with his initials stamped into the side. Upon a table, he displays many of the knives, axes, pendants and other little pieces of crafted metal he’s made.

Quincy finds the raw materials for his hobby all over the place. If he comes across a rusted leaf spring, he’s liable to pick it up and take it home to create whatever he decides would be fun to make at that moment.  

“He’s a tinkerer,” said Jaime Barhaug, Quincy’s mom.

Just as Quincy collects hunks of metal, the Barhaug family collects rocks. Jaime said they have “buckets and buckets” from all over the area. They started tumbling and polishing the stones into shiny trinkets, and acquired a saw to cut and shape some of their larger finds. With Quincy’s metalworking skills, they set the stones into metal scroll pendants.

One day, Quincy and Jaime brought boards of their necklaces to The HumbleBee Shop, a boutique clothing store in downtown Powell.

“We were really impressed,” said HumbleBee owner Mallory Riley, and the store started selling the Barhaugs’ jewelry. Quincy sells his more expensive items at Heartworks, also in downtown Powell, and on an online Etsy shop called ElementalCraftStudio. Additionally, he maintains a Facebook page called Quin Barhaug Blacksmith.

Quincy works with all kinds of metal, including wrought iron, high carbon steel, Damascus steel, brass and copper. He’s also worked with Mokume-gane, a metal with a wood grain-like appearance that’s made using Japanese metalworking techniques.

Quincy said he learned most of what he knows about blacksmithing from YouTube videos. He started his hobby on the family’s back porch, heating the metal in a propane-fired forge he built himself and hammering out the red-hot metal on a small anvil. 

As his interest in blacksmithing grew, so did his tool collection. Quincy acquired a bigger anvil and converted an old wood splitter into a press. He’s scraped together a dizzying assortment of tongs, chisels, bits, jigs, forks, saws, slack tubs, stamps and brushes. He found the coke forge, which is over 100 years old, at an auction.

When he outgrew the back porch, he and his family built the shop. A wooden sign hanging over the door, which Quincy made, reads simply, “Blacksmith.” 

Many of his items have a rustic look that comes with handcrafting items with ancient techniques and tools. It gives them an appealing character.

“You just don’t get that look anymore with a lot of stuff,” Jaime said.