TheElderBrother

About TheElderBrother

Biography:

I'm George. I am that dork who got picked on for skipping metal shop in the eighth grade and made fun of for taking sewing class instead, until I told the guys while they were making lamps that didn't work, I was spending an hour a day with all the girls to myself.

(I really did it just so I could handle sewing all the merit badges I was racking up, and to tailor my own clothes. I'm a pituitary monster, and clothes are tricky.)

But these days, following a hospital visit in 2016, I am much more intrigued with metalwork. I spent three weeks going down a blacksmithing and knifemaking rabbit hole on YouTube while the nurses got me healthy enough to dismember. (This is that story: bit.ly/HeroForgedbyFire. It's a nice profile, but just remember, they didn't interview anyone who thinks I'm an utter jackass so it can feel a little one-sided.)

Anyway, after seeing a documentary about how we are losing twenty-two combat vets a day to suicide, and losing four of my former Scouts to the Global War on Terror, I started a nonprofit workshop called The Elder Brother's Forge to teach knifemaking as a kind of art therapy to disabled veterans. We have grown a workshop comprised of a small machinist vise bolted to a tree stump in my driveway, an angle grinder, a bunch of clamps and files, and a mess of sandpaper into a very respectable workshop with a lot of professional machinery, all donated to us, and which is about to be run on propane through a tri-fuel generator in its own standalone building.

Thanks to Alabama's Governor preferring to adopt the California/New York approach instead of the better reasoned and less authoritarian Texas/Florida attitude, the pandemic slowed us up a good bit. It also slowed us down. (I have no idea which is correct but they both produced the same result.)

But we are relaunching and hoping to do great things, especially with the generous help of our friends on this forum. And that is ver serious. The people on this forum, including its owners, have been fantastic and incredibly generous, and I thank you all!

Location:

The Land of Cotton

Occupation:

Professional Troublemaker

Homemade Tools Builder Page: