Legal aid, recovery, and possible replacement fund.

I’ve been good at a lot of things, a lot of my life.

I’ve never been good at business. I want to please everyone. I spend countless hours helping people for no pay, I rarely charge enough for consultation, I feel guilty billing for my hours when I do on site repairs, because those bills seem like they’re so much, and generally give people big breaks. I’m terrible at paperwork and record keeping outside of the notes I take about what’s wrong with a hammer or what I’ve done to fix it. I’m not very good with scheduling, something always seems to come up, things always take longer than expected, I almost never get anywhere on time. I used to spend about half the year on the road, in spurts from a couple weeks to several months, and the other half at home working on small projects, or doing infrastructure in the last couple of shops I’ve been in, but these days everything is so expensive, it’s impossible to be home for very long, and saving money is difficult. My lifestyle is not lavish.

At the end of 2016 the landlord of a large building with several shops in it including mine, decided he wanted everyone out, so I started calling people to whom I had promised work to explain there would be a lengthy delay. One of those clients and friends, responded with photos of a large shop with some clean rooms in the back in which I could live, a shower, and laundry hook ups. He said they were preparing a five year lease, but he didn’t have it yet, and he planned on staying there indefinitely, extending that offer to me. I started paying him rent in august 2017, and in November of 2017 shipped a 52 foot flatbed of my ten largest items and a hammer that he had purchased, up there. My portion of the shop had no power aside from a few 110 outlets. Since i wouldn’t be able to work on his hammer for a time, I wired in a circuit to the back and set up my 2B so he could use it until I was in a position to fix his. In March of 2018 a 53 foot box trailer took the rest of my shop stuff to Washington. By October 2018 the last of my household stuff was there and i started working on wiring the rest of the shop. June 2019 I got the laundry hooked up. In the entire time of renting the space, the most time I had spent in it at once was four months, and I had only done that one time. November 2019 I was working on wiring, maintenance on some of my shopmate’s equipment, and broke down the last of my crates from the move before heading back out on the road to work. December 2019, from the road, i spoke with him

about finishing the wiring and getting on his hammer when I got back to the shop, to which he agreed. At the end of January I heard through the grapevine he was going to sell his hammer, he had decided he would be better off with a press, he had been using my hammer the entire time. I got back in February 2020 and he told me it wasn’t working out and I should find another place, he had disconnected the wiring to the back of the shop, and moved everything of mine that was stored on top of the bathroom and other places into my part of the space. I flew to Arkansas to retrieve a car, drive back to the coast with Irina and look for shops on the way. The day I flew out of Seattle, Covid hit. My shopmate blocked me on social media, and the last time he responded to any attempt to contact him was then. I started renting another shop space, and continued paying rent to him, in Washington, for another year. I’ve made numerous attempts via telephone, text, email, messenger over the time between then and now with no response whatsoever. I set in to figure out how to move 130,000 pounds of stuff, without having to interrupt that effort with work. In the interim, my mother in law had a massive bypass surgery, pneumonia, knee surgery. There have been deaths in the family. It seems like every time I’ve been able to put enough money together to work my way back to the coast, some disaster has happened keeping me from leaving long enough that I then had to go back on the road to fix some hammers.

I’ve struggled just to stay alive and put enough money together to drive west, hoping to be able to earn enough on the way back to Washington to pay for loading three semi trucks and shipping them to another location, knowing that I wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the shop while packing everything back up. Then another one from the second shop in Oregon, where a few things had been moved, for which the rent had doubled. It’s been overwhelming, debilitating.

At some point we decided that staying in the center of the country would be better than settling back on the coast, for a number of reasons. My mom is in her eighties, Irina’s mom has been in poor health, and it’s a bit easier to travel by car to more places for work. A couple of months ago we found a building in Oklahoma with plenty of shop space and an apartment in the front. It needs some remodeling and new wiring, but nothing I can’t handle myself. I decided that I’d sell my Nazel 2B, something that I’d previously not been psychologically capable of even considering, because that hammer seemed to be part of my identity. I’ve had a tattoo of it on my arm since the ‘90s, before I even owned it. But I realized that would be the only way to retrieve my belongings, and settle up on back rent. While it would still be difficult, I at least would be able to pay for the shipping. I called and texted my former shopmate with no response. A few days ago, I heard that all my possessions had been sold or disposed of. Everything. I’m not just talking about some machines, every nut, every bolt, every drill bit and tap, machinist tools I’ve had my entire career, every forged sample, tools I’d made in high school, every wrench and socket, every lifting eye and chain, the big German anvil I inherited when my mentor, Toby Hickman passed, with some of his remains buried in the stand, every hammer and top tool, every specialty die and piece of press or hammer tooling, the test part that won state competition in machining in 1989, the little hammer I built in 2000, that’s featured in my book, the 40 ton press I designed and built, every gift, every artwork, every photograph, every record, all the notebooks containing the history of the hammers Ive serviced, every hammer whisperer t-shirt and whispered tag for machines l service, my bed, sofa, the Harley sportster I had been rebuilding in California, my truck which I’m still paying taxes on. All of it. Gone. Who would abandon those things? I had reached out to the only person with control of that stuff, many times, asking him to not dispose of anything, telling him I’d come for it.

Not one person called me. Not one piece of mail. Not a single notice that I was about to permanently lose my entire life and ability to earn money at home. Nobody in that community of blacksmiths that I’ve helped so many times even bothered to call me. I found out that not only had I not been given notice, but that the plan to sell was actively concealed from me, that someone who attempted to purchase it in its entirety in order to make a deal with me to get it beck, was prevented from doing so. He was refused the sale because those selling didn’t want me to get any of it. He didn’t tell me either. If someone had told me that they were planning to liquidate all my belongings, I would have found a way. I would have asked for help. I would have done something else.

I was irresponsible. I shouldn’t have left it so long. I should have asked for help. I should have sold that hammer a few years ago. I should have figured it out. I didn’t. I was too proud or too embarrassed to ask for help. I was too optimistic that I could do it on my own. I was too attached to that hammer.

I do know that if someone had alerted me that in one month I would lose my every worldly belonging and means to earn a living at home, I would have acted, I wouldn’t have let it go.

I’d like to get legal help to see if any of that stuff can be recovered, and if not, maybe try to replace the tools I need most to earn a living.