This brings up an interesting piece of technique that I'll share with you. I normally wear only one glove. The hammer tends to hit the metal, and if you're paying attention, you don't miss, and your hand doesn't hit anything hot or sharp. If you're not paying attention, then bad things happen, but you shouldn't be forging anyhow. The free, or "work" hand (my left hand in this case) hangs onto the work or a pair of tongs, and gets rather close to the forge fire. Hence the glove. Putting on a normal work glove for your hammer hand tends to actually reduce friction, and when I first started out I wound up flinging my hammer clean across the yard a few times before I figured this one out.
This does pose a problem for bystander safety.
Not wearing a glove, however, tends to put a nasty little blister on your hand after a few hours at the anvil.
Solution: Sand your handles nice and smooth, and warm them over the forge fire. WARM - not roast! Then apply a small amount of wax, preferably bowling alley paste wax, and you wind up with a very nicely preserved, and rather easy-on-the-skin handle. It's waterproof after this, and won't turn gray, and the wax tends to lube the high spots in the grain so that your skin can wiggle and slide just enough during hammering that you don't get a blister. Keep it (the whole hammer) waxed or oiled lightly with some boiled linseed oil, and you'll have a hammer that lasts a long time and won't chafe your delicate [Fe]male skin ;-)
On another safety/user-friendliness note: The red goggles make for easier daytime viewing of color temperature. It takes a bit of "getting used to", since the flames and the incandescent metal itself will look a bit odd, but you're basically cutting out all the blue and green light from the sun, which makes the red/orange/yellow quite a bit easier to see coming from the metal. What might look black in sunlight will show up as a faint glow with the goggles on. Also, they block UV and just having something in front of your face will block IR radiation, and they're dark enough that the bright white-hot of welding heat gets knocked back down to a bright orange and doesn't leave you with a floating BSOD in the middle of your field of view when moving back to the anvil for a forge weld.
So, get a bunch of gloves, and find someone with an opposite dominant hand, and split the pairs with 'em. Then go to Harbor Freight and snag a pair of their red safety glasses. A pair of flip up welding goggles would be good too - especially when working in a dark area where you're not light-adjusted.
Have fun, be safe, and come to the next demo!
