Aaron Cergol stokes his fire to heat an ingot. Cergol, a 23-year-old blacksmith who specializes in making hammers, heats the steel in a coal-fired forge built for a railroad repair shop in the 1860s and shapes the metal on a 608-pound, 170-year-old German anvil. Credit: Gary Porter

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The first thing Aaron Cergol ever made was a little playhouse for Beanie Babies.

He built it with a hinged roof that opened and closed, and his dad, a carpenter, let him use some of his power tools. Aaron, at the time, was 4.

Several years and many projects later, he got an Xbox. He can't recall whether it was a present or if he bought it himself, but he does remember that after about a month and a half he grew tired of playing it.

So he did what any sensible teenage boy would do: He sold the Xbox and used the money to buy a forge. He's been pounding on red-hot steel ever since.

"Everyone," said Cergol, who just turned 23 and likes nothing better than to lay a block of almost-molten metal on an anvil and whale on it with a 3-pound hammer, "says I was born a couple centuries too late."

But there's money to be made in the ancient ways. After less than a year of going at it seriously, Cergol is developing a business fashioning hand-forged hammers that sell for $100 and up.

"I'm swamped with orders right now," he said. "I'm thrilled."

He works at a forge in Riverwest built for a railroad repair shop in the 1860s. His hand-cranked blower, which keeps the fire going, dates to 1902.

"Still works good as the day it was made," Cergol said.

At the moment, he's using a 608-pound, 170-year-old anvil from southern Germany. He imported it from Europe along with 20 others, including a stake anvil forged in Spain in the 1740s, to re-sell. "And to fund my anvil addiction," he added.

Cergol likes anvils. Hammers, too. He has about 50 cradled in a wooden rack at his Riverwest shop — rounding hammers, set hammers, cross peens, straight peens, ball peens, Czech style, Swedish style, French style — and another 100 or more elsewhere.

"I have a collection of antique ones at my house," he said.

Among his favorite work hammers is a 6-pound cross peen with a sterling pedigree — it once was used by a master blacksmith who helped repair the Statue of Liberty and made the stainless steel eagles on New York City's Chrysler Building.

But Cergol's not a tool snob. Another favorite is a hammer he found lying on the side of the road near Appleton.

And, it seems, he knows how to make them.

"His hammers, they're a work of art," said Mark Spesard, a farrier in Marengo, Ill., who bought a $200, eight-pound sledge from Cergol. Spesard uses it to shape heavy shoes for draft horses.

"It's awesome," he said. "Super high quality. Extremely balanced."

Glenn Reese, a farrier near Birmingham, Ala., said much the same thing — "almost like a work of art" — about his Cergol hammer.

"And it works very well," Reese said. "It's hard to find somebody who forges out hammers now. Most people are making them on CNC (computer-controlled) machines and just cutting them out of the piece of steel."

There are lots of blacksmiths in the U.S., many of them hobbyists doing fancy decorative work. The Artist-Blacksmith's Association of North America counts more than 4,000 members, and has been growing.

Professionals specializing in hammer-making, though, are another story.

"It's all about just efficiency and production work, and that probably isn't that appealing to a lot of people," Brent Bailey said.

Bailey, of Orland, Calif., may be the most prolific of the American hammersmiths. He estimates he has forged some 15,000 over the last dozen years. Asked about other specialists in forged hammers, he could think of only a few.

And though Cergol has entered the field only recently — he's sold maybe 200 hammers — Bailey knows his name.

"A lot of positive things have been said about him," Bailey said. "And as far as looking at his stuff as another tool maker, I would say, (expletive), for a guy 23 years old, not probably making tools that long, they look great."

Cergol's interest in blacksmithing was sparked in his early teens when he first watched, then helped, a smith who demonstrated at Bastille Days. He later studied in Mississippi and, most of all, has learned through practice.

He's no hulk with Popeye forearms. At 150 pounds and average height, his sooty black work jeans and torn lumberjack shirt hang loose on his frame.

"There's a lot of finesse in blacksmithing," he said. "People say you have to be so strong to be a blacksmith. No, you don't. It's muscle memory, confidence and knowing what you're doing."

When he talks — about topics such as "The Lord of the Rings" (favorite character: Gimli, the ax-wielding dwarf); 14th-century armor; or the advantages of a properly crowned hammer face — he punctuates his speech with a little chuckle.

He sometimes ties back his blond hair in a ponytail, sometimes lets it hang shaggy around his neck. He looks like he might have just hitchhiked back from Woodstock.

"He's an old soul," said his father, Mark, who occasionally helps out as Cergol's striker. " The thing of it is, he allows himself to do his passion, and that's so important."

Now his goal is to turn the passion into his livelihood. While he spends 35-40 hours a week making hammers, hatchets and other tools, Cergol also holds a day job at a hardware store.

One step toward making Cergol Tool and Forgeworks a full-time business would be a stronger Internet presence. Its Facebook page has gotten good response, but Cergol probably could do better with a full-fledged website.

"I'm working on it," he said. "It's just I'm a dumb Luddite, and I don't know how to use a computer very well."

So it might take a little time. A person can only master so many things, and the millennia-old craft Cergol is pursuing is demanding enough.

"I hope I never stop learning," he said. "I mean, a day that I don't learn something about hammer-making is not a good day at the forge."