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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2016
JACOB’S HAMMER
Modern blacksmith crafts a new career path
By DAMIAN MULINIX
For EO Media Group
C
HINOOK, Wash. —
Jacob Moore is taking
life a little bit slower
these days. He admits to pro-
crastinating when it comes to
returning emails sometimes
while getting ready in the morn-
ing. Something he wouldn’t
have done not that long ago.
An average day features a
20-minute drive from his Chi-
nook home to that of his in-laws,
Mike and Lynn Dickerson. He
doesn’t have his own shop yet
so he’s working out of their
garage for now.
There, he will spend the next
several hours doing custom
metal work, his new business,
which he named “Jacob’s Ham-
mer.” It’s the kind of metal work
that can be dangerous if you
screw up, but beautiful when
inished.
His work routine stands in
stark contrast to his average day
not that long ago.
“Two years ago my average
day was eight to 10 hours long,
and I usually started no later
than 7 a.m., after driving a min-
imum of 45 minutes to get there
on a really curvy, elk-infested
road with downed trees, loods
and landslides,” he said.
He’s referring to the drive
from Chinook up U.S. High-
way 101 to Goose Point Oysters
in Bay Center, where he was
employed as seed operations
manager until spring 2015.
“I usually spent most of
my day outside in the elements
regardless of the weather. A lot
of work at night in the winter-
time. And really early in the
morning in the summertime,”
he said. “Basically every tide.”
This is just a long way
of pointing out how his life
has changed thanks to a new
profession.
“It is quite different,” he
said, explaining, “I’d always
had a boss. I’ve managed my
own time and had some free-
dom as to when I worked, but it
essentially became a 9 to 5 sort
of thing. So for the irst time,
really ever, I don’t have regular
hours.”
Photos by Damian Mulinix/For EO Media Group
LEFT: Jacob Moore is the owner of Jacob’s Hammer Custom Metal Works. RIGHT: Moore grinds down the leg of a chair — one in a series he made
for the new Salt Hotel restuarant in Ilwaco.
Another large project was
making all the chairs used in the
new Salt Hotel restaurant at the
Port of Ilwaco, a project he did
in collaboration with Round 2
Design, also in Ilwaco.
Making a new way
LEFT: Examples of Jacob Moore’s form folded jewelry. RIGHT: Jacob Moore heats a
hinge for a recent custom metal project.
A life aquatic
Moore graduated from the
University of Washington in
2010 with a bachelor’s degree
in environmental studies, with
a focus on emerging non-na-
tive species in the marine envi-
ronment. Right out of college
Moore worked seasonally for
Nick Haldeman at the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife eradicating spartina
in Willapa Bay. There he met
and worked alongside Kim Pat-
ten of the Washington State Uni-
versity extension ofice. He then
worked at Cape Disappointment
State Park as a park aide and
was given half his time to study
gorse, another non-native inva-
sive species.
“I did a lot of GPS data col-
lection and made some maps to
show where these plants were
growing,” he said. “Half the
time I was literally scrubbing
(expletive) off the walls and the
other half I was carrying out a
study that I designed.”
While working with Pat-
ten on his gorse project, Moore
was made aware of an opening
with the Willapa/Grays Harbor
Oyster Growers Association.
He was soon hired as their inte-
grated pest management project
coordinator.
“So I really moved into inva-
sive species and pest manage-
ment, not necessarily intention-
ally. It was really just where
employment opportunities pre-
sented themselves.”
But he was also the right per-
son for these unusual jobs.
“I just built on my expe-
rience and knowledge in that
area,” he said.
In summer 2013 he was
hired by Goose Point, only a few
years after the farm opened a
hatchery in Hilo, Hawaii. Moore
worked to help “smooth out
some of the bumps in the road”
the new hatchery was experi-
encing at that time.
“I had to work closely with
their hatchery manager so
that the farm (in Bay Center)
received the proper amounts of
incredibly expensive product
from the hatchery,” he said.
His main job was manag-
ing the brood stock, or parent
oysters.
“We hold these oysters in
the convenient womb that is the
Willapa Bay. And on a weekly
basis throughout most of the
year, I would select speciic
brood stock from the repository
that I managed and ship them
overnight to Hilo.”
There, he said the stock
would be put in a conditioning
system that would “coax” them
into spawning.
“Then 800 million fertilized
oyster eggs are loating around
in this 10,000 gallon tank and 30
days later it’s larvae that’s ready
to be set.”
That larvae was also key to
another project Moore worked
on, developing the ‘singles’ oys-
ter farm, which was an emerg-
ing market.
“The single oyster that’s sold
raw. It’s the cream of the crop.
And traditionally they were
culled out of tons of other oys-
ters that were destined to be
shucked.”
He explained that the hatch-
ery would set that larvae on
ground-up oyster shell, so that
the baby oysters would grow off
of a grain of sand and be ‘sin-
gles’ from the get-go. Moore
would then put them in the nurs-
ery and grow them out until they
could be planted in the ground
and grown to about 3 inches
long before hitting the market.
A new challenge
It’s been a year and a half
since he decided he’d spent
enough of his young life — he
turns 30 next year — out on
the mudlats, and a year since
he decided that custom metal
work was what he’d rather be
doing.
“It is hard work. It’s physi-
cally demanding,” Moore said
of his new gig. And this is com-
ing from someone who is not
physically large. “One hundred
thirty-four pounds. Been that
way since 2006, probably.”
But doesn’t that limit his
ability to do this kind of work?
“There will be times during
installation and transportation
of projects when I need several
more sets of hands,” he agreed.
His most recent project was
also his biggest so far — the
new iron fence at the Colum-
bia River Heritage Museum in
Ilwaco.
“With the fence, for exam-
ple, I needed (friend and Ilwaco
High School teacher) Steve
Blasko to stop by once or twice
a week for a little while so that
I could lip these 200 to 400
pound panels to work on the
other side of them.”
The fence was a heavy proj-
ect — around 2,400 pounds of
material before it was painted
— with a lot of grinding. Before
welding heavy pieces of metal
together he irst had to grind
away a whole bunch of mate-
rial so that there was a void to
ill with molten material.
“The weld has to penetrate, it
can’t be a surface glue, because
that won’t hold,” he explained.
And in order to grind that
material away, Moore used an
angle grinder, a very high RPM
machine that its in the hand and
vibrates, a lot.
“There’s a pretty stiff gyro
effect,” he said. “When you turn
it on it wants to twist out of your
hand. So when you rotate the
thing (you’re working on), that
gyro resists it. You actually have
to exert some real force just to
rotate it in space.
“If you just hold it there gen-
tly it’ll take all day. You’ve gotta
press way into it and just, ‘Meer-
rrrrrrrrrr!’” he says as he does an
impression of the sound. “You
really expedite the process.”
“There is a lot of other fun
stuff to do and sometimes you
get into steps in the process you
don’t necessarily want to do,”
Moore said of some of the more
tedious tasks. “I keep my eye
on the surf report and even if
it’s not that good sometimes I’ll
decide I better just close up and
go catch some waves.”
Moore said that suring does
tend to be the one thing that
pulls him away from work most
often. “In terms of recreation,
yeah. It’s either surf or garden-
ing. But it’s really the surf.”
Does this freedom come
with regrets though?
“I would say if a deadline
is looming I’ll be a little dissat-
isied,” he said of having gone
suring when he should have
been working.
But Moore doesn’t have to
look far for inspiration on how
to manage his time and a bur-
geoning business. His wife,
Madeline, has owned and oper-
ated the Pink Poppy Bakery and
Farm since 2012. You can often
ind Jacob illing in for her at
their stand at the Long Beach
Farmers Market on Friday’s
and the Port of Ilwaco Saturday
Market. Not only can you buy
one of Madeline’s baked goods,
but you can also purchase some
of Jacob’s micro greens that he
grows or some of his metal jew-
elry. His micro greens have also
been featured at local restaurants
including Pickled Fish, Bridge-
water Bistro and Buoy Beer in
Astoria.
And Moore is the irst to
agree that going from work-
ing in natural science to metal
working is a pretty big change
career-wise.
“(Back then) I wasn’t spend-
ing any time doing metal work,
but it’s been a hobby since I was
a freshman in high school,” he
said.
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teacher, practiced blacksmithing
and he was intrigued.
“He did this thing, called
‘Tool of the week’ and he would
bring in a tool that most of us
couldn’t identify and we’d talk
about it. The tools he brought in
were mostly handmade tools for
cutting wood. He made his own
drill bits. They were beautiful.
Very sharp.”
Moore said the idea of heat-
ing up metal until it was yel-
low-hot and sparkled was
“really interesting to me.”
“To this day, I still think
there’s something really moving
about a glowing piece of steel.
It just looks cool and it’s hot as
hell.”
Some of Moore’s jewelry
pieces resemble those hand-
made tools.
“It’s inspired in the sense that
it’s hammered and I like to leave
hammer marks on there. Tools
forged by a blacksmith always
have those imperfections that
you can see.”
His father-in-law gave him
a book on fold-forming, a tech-
nique for shaping metals, which
has inluenced his jewelry work
so far, a facet of his business that
he is still expanding.
“I have a set of tools for the
light work and another for the
heavy work. They don’t over-
lap. Two totally different types
of work,” he explained. “I really
enjoy it and it takes practice.
When I spend some time doing
it I get a burst of interest, kind
of like practicing an instrument,
you see yourself change and
improve and you gain inspira-
tion from that.”
And Moore knows some-
thing about that, too, having
been a top trumpeter with the
Ilwaco High School pep, con-
cert and jazz bands and now as
a guitar player.
Moore has a short list of
smaller projects that have been
waiting in the wings in antici-
pation of his completion of the
museum fence project.
“All of (the clients) have
been quite patient as I was
stressing over the fence. But I
have a lot more time now, and
it’s cooking right along.”