Blacksmith’s Shortcut: AI Turns Photos into Metal Patterns

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Welcome back to Makaker's Journey Workshop. I'm Benjamin Davies and today we're talking about how I use AI as a blacksmith. Stick with me. I'm not telling you one way or another whether you should use it or not use it, but I'm going to tell you today how I use it and how it helps me and let you make up your own mind. First, we're going to talk about how I took an image off my phone and how I was able to use AI to help convert that to a DXF file, clean it up, and take it straight to my plasma table and cut it out. Have you ever seen some images or just beautiful shapes out in public that maybe you weren't quite capable of drawing? I know I've ran into that a lot myself. And now with AI here, it's something we can just snap a photo of, talk to the AI a little bit and convert it and we can have that image.

[00:00:44]We can use it for templates for sketches, things we want to incorporate.

[00:00:47]Sounds funny. Can't draw, but you can bring it out with a hammer. That's how I've always been. I had to learn sketching after I learned how to forge.

[00:00:55]It's not something that came as easy or naturally to me as forging. I find myself using a lot of things like a French curve set, rulers, guidelines, spacing just to get things perfect. It's something I have to spend hours on often just to get one simple rendering that usually I'm not pleased with. When I talk about using AI, I'm not talking about using it as a plagiarizing tool or something to create something I couldn't do. I'm talking about using it to fill in my deficits where I'm weakest at because I know so many times I can see things in my head. I can bring it out in the shop with my hands and a hammer, but to put it from pen to paper I really struggle with. So, not only is it going to be awesome for cutting out on the plasma table today, but it's going to be extremely helpful doing renderings and things like that if you're getting into larger custom work. You know, whilst I'm loading up my thicker plate here, we're going to cut some 3/8 inch thick plate.

[00:01:48]Today, I'm going to share with you a couple hacks that have really helped me along the way. One of the first things is this 2in bar. I've got a lot of 2 in by 1/4 in bar sitting around in my shop that I use all the time. And what I do is I butt it up right here on the sides.

[00:02:05]And that's my guy. That's for me setting to make sure that my material is going to be square.

[00:02:10]Second hack.

[00:02:12]I don't have a forklift. I know. I know.

[00:02:16]So, whenever I order big material, thicker plate material, watch my fingers, I try to order in flat bars. And so, I use this 8 in by 3/8 in thick flat bar for a bunch of my base material for fireplace stands, lamp stands, uh, toilet paper stands, paper towel stands.

[00:02:35]I like it to be thick. I like it to be heavy. And a lot of times I'll leave this stuff plain, but if I'm doing something more ornate, it's great to have, too. hack about getting this in flat bar is it'll come in a 20 foot length that I can usually slide off the truck by myself. I understand that might be difficult. Uh be careful. It's extremely dangerous. It's pretty dagon heavy, but it gives me the opportunity to cut it in half and be able to start to navigate this piece and bring it out to my plasma table so I can cut it up the way I want to without having to pay a few hundred to rent a machine for the weekend just to do that. Now, I will rent a machine from time to time and I will try to coincide some big deliveries with that machine and that way I maximize the most out of it. It's usually a skid steer doing some cleaning up around this property here and receiving big old sheet metal for my plasma cutter. During that time, what I do to capitalize on that since we're on hacks is I usually order 5x10 sheets. I try to knock out my full cuts for things that I make on a regular basis and get those sheets off of there. And the rest of them I'll cut up in half and that way I can navigate them around the shop by myself and every now and again have help if I need to. All right, let me show you how I use AI and we'll cut out a few bases. If if you're still watching and you hadn't smashed that subscribe button, smash that subscribe button.

[00:03:48]Yeah, smash that subscribe button so we don't make that guy angry. All right, let's get back into it. Now, I'm going to show you how I used AI to help me convert this. Here's the picture I started out with.

[00:04:01]Just something simple. Saw it in our sanctuary. I thought it was beautiful. I was like, man, that would make a gorgeous lampstand candle base or something. Take me forever to cut out by hand. But with AI, it got me from this little image to here really quick. And this wasn't exactly what I wanted because it still wasn't symmetrical. You can kind of look at it and tell with your eye that it's not perfect. And one frustration I had because AI is not perfect. I'm not saying it is. You kind of have to be able to filter and understand what's good, what isn't. And that was something I had to do. So after I downloaded that image, I tried to refine it a little bit. And and this is the second image it gave me, which I wasn't exactly crazy about because it just it gave me these weird egg shapes and left a connection here. And I felt like even after deleting that connection in my in route software that this was a little bit too close and I wasn't going to know how to fix that in in route. I'm not an AutoCAD designer. I'm pretty basic. Bought that thing for circles, squares, and simple shapes. And it's paid for itself doing that for me so far.

[00:05:02]So, I deleted out that conversation and I went back and I had a third conversation with AI. And here it is right here. And before, so there's some stuff you're missing right here.

[00:05:11]Beforehand, because I'm such a slow typer, uh, and if you're going to upload photos, you have to be kind of in the type mode with Copilot. I'm sure all that is going to change drastically.

[00:05:20]It's just getting smarter and quicker and quicker and that's something I love about it. So beforehand I did have a conversation telling it what I was looking for and it said sure we can clean that up and I'll let you read this part right here. Just pause it if that's something you want to read and I'm going to go ahead and kind of scroll down to the next part. And so I uploaded that design and I said you know let's focus only on the outline image in the right up above. I said, "Will you clean it up?

[00:05:44]Make it symmetrical." And uh that's what it ended up doing right here down below. It did exactly what I want. I didn't have that weird egg shape anymore, as you can see. And I still had a border around it, but for me, that was good enough. And so from there, I took it to my In route software right here at my big computer.

[00:06:07]All right. So, so let me show you what that looks like here. So, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go file.

[00:06:11]We'll go down to import and we'll go down to here we go. Here's that image.

[00:06:18]And that's what it originally looks like. So, I'm going highlight that image now. And I go up to here and this is called my vectorz. And that basically just turns this PDF DXF uh turns this image into a file that we can start to edit and transfer to a cutting file. Not all files do this. Sometimes I've downloaded things from the internet and they do not do this.

[00:06:40]This one does. So, just deleted that. Control X. Sorry.

[00:06:46]Here we go. Boom. And now I'm left with this. Now, I'm going to highlight this and I'm going to show you just with my cursor real quick. I'm not going to make you sit I'm not going to make you I'm not going to make you sit.

[00:06:59]Sorry, Mike. I'm not going to make you sit through the painstaking process of watching me edit this, but highlight and you can see the lines. And so one of the things I had to do was I had to delete this entire red outline right here. Uh because that essentially just made it like a really thin frame that would have cut out. And I don't even think that would have cut out well on a plasma table. Maybe on a laser table, but and so I ended up deleting a bunch of this stuff. I deleted the outline, kept my circle, got rid of the border, and here's what it looked like. I'm going to go ahead and delete that one cuz I don't need it anymore. And I'm going to show you. And this is what I cleaned it up as. So go through and you have to a lot of those lines are just segmented little lines. So that border even though it was just one big thing along the inside there. I ended up having to go through and delete one by one. There's probably a quicker way to do it. That's just the way I know how to. And then I went through and I edited my tool pathing so we can cut it out. So I don't need this anymore. Highlight that. Crl X. We're going to delete it out. And I'm going to move this guy back over into my cut piece.

[00:08:06]All right, we got that in the center. So hopefully you can see that a little bit better. And I like to use my cursors, my little arrows on my keyboard to center things up because you can move it up, down, you know, left, right, and that's super helpful for me. And I try to position my stuff as close to the center as possible. All right, let's cut this out.

[00:08:25][music] [music] Heat.

[00:08:39][music] [music] Heat.

[00:08:54][music] >> [music] [music] >> Heat. Heat.

[00:09:17][music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> from picture to this.

[00:09:53]I'm some kind of tickle pink.

[00:09:56]Without AI, I would not have been able to do that today. AI gave me time back.

[00:10:00]That's one of the biggest things that I love about AI. And it made this that much simpler for me as one man shop, trying to be everything that my shop needs. As you start to grow, if maybe you're already there, you realize that you're no longer just a blacksmith. In fact, forging and doing good work in the forge is just a small fraction of what it takes to keep your business going.

[00:10:22]There are so many different hats that you have to wear and you have to wear them somewhat decent. You're not going to wear any of them great. And the best thing you can do is as you get bigger, start to delegate, hire people to fill in where you have deficits. AI is a great way to supplement that in between stage and as you continue to grow and onboard people. I'm sure it's great for that, too.

[00:10:43]>> [snorts] >> I won't know until we get there, but we're on our way. Before I tell you the other ways that I like to use AI to help out in my blacksmith business, be sure to join us next week because we're going to do some tooling and add some form to this to really bring it to life to take it from, you know, a boring cutout, even though it's a beautiful design, a boring cutout piece, to something that has some life and texture and some shape. Let me put that down real quick. So, what we did today is just really a fraction of how I use AI in my day-to-day business.

[00:11:08]I use AI to give me time back and to fill in where I have deficits or where I'm weak. I used AI for this right here two years ago. Yeah, I'm not good at graphic design and I was struggling with that and it was a friction point for me getting my first video posted. I use AI to help me troubleshoot, use things like Canva that I have to use on a daily basis to navigate it and so I can do the things quickly instead of struggling and clicking and trying to learn it on my own. I just cut down my education gap and my timeline of that education and I can get to those things very quickly.

[00:11:40]Now, I use AI for making these videos. I don't use any kind of software to edit the content for me because I still kind of enjoy having control over that myself, but I use AI and I give it all the information of the things that I want to talk about and it's able to help me compile it into a good video where I'm not just rambling on and I'm focused on one topic. A lot of times, especially in our earlier videos, some of those things should have been broken up into three or four videos. Instead, I'm just making a bunch of things because I'm excited about bringing the information to you. I use it to workshop ideas and things that, you know, I want to work on some goals and and kind of strategize and it gives me access to be able to talk about topics I'm unfamiliar with [sighs] and an audience I don't have access to about business and things like that and it gives it to me on demand.

[00:12:27]So, I get to choose when and where and a lot of times I'll do that while I'm walking during lunch just trying to get some things out of my head. Now, it's not perfect and you have to account for that. AI is a little bit creative and takes some of those liberties. Uh, and so it's okay to double check it and, you know, fact check your stuff. I wouldn't at all recommend using it to replace anything. I use it kind of like an assistant more than anything to fill in where I'm short. Well, that's why I like AI and I think it's making my life easier, especially as a small business.

[00:12:57]Until next week, I'm Benjamin Davies and this is Makaker's Journey Workshop.