North Platte, Ne - Over 300 people came to watch the first Fire On The Prairie at North Platte's Prairie Arts Center. Three bladesmiths came to the PAC to create blades from Belleville, Kansas, Independence, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska. The competition was loosely based on History Channel's "Forged In Fire".
The event was judged by past contestants of "Forged In Fire", Peyton Ramm, Chris O'Brien and Garrett Elting. Elting was featured on the show on seasons 6 and 7 and told the POST he got into forging blades when he was in the Marines, he said "I had a friend of mine that got a custom knife sent to him and I thought it was the coolest thing, and I wanted to buy one and they were crazy expensive, so I decided to find out how to make one. I did a bunch of reseach when I got out of the military, I talked to my dad, and he said you wanna start making knives? And I said, let's do it, and we both put $200 together and built a forge."
The competition began around 9:30am Saturday with a crowd watching in bleachers set up in the Prairie Arts Center parking lot. The three competitors starting by cutting off a peice of a large spring off a rock tumbler. The steel on the spring was roughly an inch and a quarter thick and round that they started with, then they had 3 hours to pound the steel flat, utilizing there own fire forges to get the steel hot enough to flatten, and eventually turn into a blade with a handle.
Tyrell Wilson helped the Prairie Arts Center organize the workspaces and brought much of the equipment the competitors used. Wilson brought a power hammer he said was built in 1906 and hadn't ran in 40 years. Little Giant Power Hammers who build the power hammer is still a company in Nebraska City, and Wilson said you can still get parts from them for machines like this. He said he had personally spent over a thousand dollars to get it running and working again. One of the Anvals he brought was built in 1917. Wilson said these are working antiques that are over 100 years old, and his pasion is revitalizing his tools to make them work and be worth something to people.
Once the blades were completed, they were put to the test by a challenge of cutting a hanging rope, chopping on a fence post with barbed wired attatched to it and finally on it's sharpness but slicing through another rope.
At the end of the day, the judges picked Todd Ludacka with Foxhole Forge from Belleville, Kansas as the overall winner. Kevin Neubauer was second and Daniel Yoka was third. The blades were auctioned off at the end of the competition with the winning blade fetching $300 which went back to the Priarie Arts Center.
Executive Director of the PAC, Holly Carlini was happy with the first ever event and is already planning for 2025. In 2023 they did a demonstration of the forging before diving into a competition this year.