Tom Joyce, who describes his education as “life experience,” spent his childhood summers in New Mexico, working for a printer and helping to salvage and repair old tools and machinery. He trained with no one, teaching himself first to be a “blacksmith” and then an “architectural blacksmith,” titles that he felt he “had to earn” (American Craft, February/March 1995). Joyce figures out how things are made by studying them, and believes that a discarded tool carries its own history inside it. The artist also believes that the iron has a “life-force” that is ignited by the strike of the hammer (Metalsmith, Summer 1999).