Photos by Art Holeman

At 74, Scottsdale blacksmith Bill Smith still wields a mean hammer, creating beautiful pieces for high-end homes.

To step into Bill Smith’s Scottsdale blacksmith shop is to step back in time. Cobwebs cling to wooden rafters, and fluorescent light bulbs cast flickering light upon soot-dusted anvils, hammers and an old-fashioned coal forge. Horseshoes that Smith fashioned a half-century ago lie scattered on a workshop table. A simple metal sign on the door says, “Blacksmith: Custom Hand Forged Ironwork.”

Then there’s the man himself. With an inviting smile, gracious manner and lilting Scottish accent, Smith more closely resembles a grandfather than a hardworking blacksmith who makes a living forging steel into custom door-pulls, beds and tables for high-end homes.

More chiseled in his younger years, Smith was the model for a full-page color ad in a November 1977 issue of The Western Horseman that he still proudly displays in his shop. Today, however, he confesses, “I’m not what everyone thinks a blacksmith should look like. They’re usually big, tough guys.” Still, coal-blackened hands, burn-scarred biceps and a worn leather apron bear the marks of his trade. So does his last name, Smith, although it was not his father but his uncles who were blacksmiths before him in rural Scotland.

“He’s amazing. He can tie knots in metal,” says Janie Ellis, owner of Cattletrack Compound, a 10-acre enclave of artists and tradesmen off McDonald Road in Scottsdale. Smith’s shop has served up countless early morning wake-up calls for the property’s artists-in-residence. “It’s a nice, high ‘ping’ that floats across the property. I love that sound in the morning,” Ellis says.

Strike While the Iron Is Hot
One of the longtime tenants at Cattletrack, Smith set up shop 20 years ago. Before that, the simple brick building was a milking shed for cows. Later, Ellis’ brother David converted the shed into a hotrod shop. “He ran pit for Mario Andretti. In fact, we built the car Andretti won the Indy 500 with in 1969 – the only time he won Indy – in that very shop,” Ellis says.

Today, modern fiberglass racecar technology has long since yielded to the art of old-school blacksmithing. Turning a manual hand-blower crank with his left hand to stoke the coal forge’s flame, Smith calls out over the noise, “I’m a little bit old-fashioned,” then quickly hammers and twists a red-hot steel rod around an anvil’s tip into a perfect ring.

Dozens of knives, pliers, hammers and tools are within arm’s reach as Smith burns, pulls, cuts, twists and otherwise molds the metal that has been his livelihood for six decades. But his work is not all clanging and banging. Smith mounts his giant anvil to a tree stump so it “gives a little bounce” and offers more pliability. Open doors and a fan are his ventilation. They are small consolations on hot summer days, but you won’t hear Smith complain. In fact, when the mercury soars to 115, the additional degrees only seem to add determination to an early start and a hard day’s work.

Smith was born in 1935 in Tealing, a picturesque farming village in eastern Scotland. During World War II, he remembers German aircraft flying over his village to bomb on Glasgow. His father, a farmer, was killed in North Africa in 1944, leaving his mother to support him by waiting tables.

Smith often gravitated to the door of the village blacksmith, watching for hours as the smithy heated and hammered iron. “When I was 16 and it was time for me to leave school, the blacksmith asked me if I wanted a job,” Smith says. From 1951 to 1956 he apprenticed, mainly shoeing Clydesdale horses and performing local repair jobs.

By 1956, at age 21, he began two years of mandatory military service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a corps of the British Army charged with maintaining and servicing electrical and mechanical equipment. “I did blacksmithing, if you could call it that. It was mostly straightening bumpers,” Smith says.

After his Army service, Smith continued his blacksmith trade in eastern Scotland, developing a hobby for fashioning medieval swords and armor on the side. When he was approaching 30, he wrote a letter to the editor of the American publication Guns & Ammo, hoping to connect with other readers who shared his hobby. “I was flooded with letters from every state in the Union wondering if I would make and sell medieval items,” he says. But one letter caught his eye. “There was a guy in Minnesota who wrote to me about his uncle in Phoenix, a blacksmith who had an interest in medieval stuff,” Smith says.

The two corresponded, and Jess Hawley, owner of a blacksmith shop in Sunnyslope, soon made a trip from Phoenix to Scotland. Ultimately, in 1971, Hawley convinced Smith and his wife, Irene, to move to Phoenix. After a brief stint working with Hawley, Smith went to work for Cavalliere’s Blacksmith Shop in Scottsdale, where he worked for about 18 years before striking out on his own two decades ago.