And the importance of that is hard to overstate. Originally fasteners were the product of blacksmiths, and blacksmiths tended to be the best paid people in a village after the bankers. It wasn't rare to see 'hardware' (nails, screws and other useful bits of metal) be painstakingly recovered and recycled and you could find items such as nails and screws in inheritances because of their value.
Without modern cheap fasteners our society would quite literally fall apart.
Acoup.blog had an excellent series on this[0], but anything made out of iron was stupendously expensive. Even neglecting the work to forge it into final shape, the metal alone was expensive. Kingdom Come Deliverance started with a good quest that highlighted this [1, sections relating to Kunesh] but didn't follow through and for game balance reasons iron is way too cheap in that game. In reality, even a small axe or hammer would have been so expensive that it would be an heirloom object.
We are completely spoiled by modern materials science, I'm typing this out resting my elbow on a workbench that would have been worth a literal kings ransom 500 years ago, and now having a 4x8' bench of 5/16" plate steel isn't an insane thing to own. 500 years ago, this bench would equal the yearly iron output of a normal European country, with a price tag to boot. And automated manufacture of fasteners makes the modern world run, even with a lathe making a single screw takes me at least 5 minutes assuming everything is already set up. Forging a nail? Here [2] is a modern blacksmith taking ~2 minutes and 3 heats to forge a simple nail. Having exposure to blacksmithing, I'm always shocked at how cheap modern fasteners are.
I have had the great experience of learning some blacksmithing techniques from Brad Silberberg, who is a master professional structural artisan blacksmith and former president of the Blacksmiths Guild of the Potomac. He also has some pieces on permanent display at the Smithsonian. He uses the making of nails as a form of physical meditation in motion where he gets to turn off his brain and just use his arms. When he's on a roll, he's making three nails in a single heat. Which is apparently about the speed that a good Nailer did back in the day.
If you want to learn more about blacksmithing, I would point you at the Artisan Blacksmith Association of North America at ABANA.org.
One of my cousins is a blacksmith, one of very few remaining in Western Europe. He has a ton of interesting knowledge and is the nearest equivalent to a real life Popeye that I've seen. One day, visiting in Canada there was a chunk of ground that needed to be opened up in spite of being frozen. He took a pickaxe, swung it overhead and aimed for the frozen ground. Then he ended up having to hold on to it for dear life when it rebounded. He looked quite funny, and I'm super happy that he managed to hold on to it, it would have done a lot of damage if he had not.
Most of his work involves horses, which brings in good money but is a real risk for your back.
There are almost certainly blacksmiths in your country, most of them have concentrated on either farrier (horseshoing) or ornamental work. Blacksmithing is still a very common way to do architectural work, think railings or decorative ironwork for buildings. It is sadly a dying trade, those 2 paths above are basically the only ways to make money in the trade besides custom knife making, which is more of a separate trade anyway.
Farrier work is still needed, since factories can't stamp out horseshoes that exactly fit the horse's foot, so a blacksmith needs to custom match the shoe to the hoof.
I'm curious why you say it is a risk to your back? Farriers can definitely get injured, I know a few who have had broken ribs, but I've never heard of that having back issues. Is there a risk I'm not aware of?
Blacksmithing for architectural preservation is being taught at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston SC. The school was created in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo when it was discovered that there were few artisans in the US able to do the level of work needed to repair all the historic buildings that were damaged.
They offer a 4-year Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in blacksmithing, carpentry/timber framing, plastering, stone carving, and classical architecture. Many of them go on to start their own firms after graduation and gaining work experience.
> There are almost certainly blacksmiths in your country, most of them have concentrated on either farrier (horseshoing) or ornamental work.
Yes, as I wrote, my cousin is one of them.
When shoeing a horse you carry a good chunk of the weight of the horse, and that's before we get into the kind of contortions you have to go through to do a proper job mostly under a horse.
And the importance of that is hard to overstate. Originally fasteners were the product of blacksmiths, and blacksmiths tended to be the best paid people in a village after the bankers. It wasn't rare to see 'hardware' (nails, screws and other useful bits of metal) be painstakingly recovered and recycled and you could find items such as nails and screws in inheritances because of their value.
Without modern cheap fasteners our society would quite literally fall apart.