Alec Steele

Alec Steele’s channel began the way his craft did: a boy in Norwich, England, who discovered blacksmithing at the age of 11 and never really left the forge. Fifteen years of videos later — 1,199 of them, watched by 3.36 million subscribers — the channel has become one of the great documents of modern craft: Damascus steel, tools, machines, and the patient business of learning how things were made well enough to last a century.

The project this library is built around is the one he waited half his life for. In the summer of 2026 he finally acquired a 1958 Massey 500-weight Clear Space power hammer — serial C1788, a machine that spent its working life with the National Coal Board and then spent 20 years abandoned outdoors, seized and rusting. It is, by his account, the exact make and model he had dreamed of owning since he was 11 years old. The machine weighs 5¼ tons; just standing it up in his workshop took a foundation poured in stages, on the order of 30 tons of concrete. Across 16 episodes he strips it to the last bearing, frees the ram and piston rings, re-times the valve gear, tensions the belt drive — the original design called for ten belts; his engineering says six — and, 70 days in, brings it back to life and forges with it.

Running beside the Massey is an older soul: a 1915 Massey steam hammer, the subject of a 13-part re-restoration series of its own, which he fires on compressed air through a 40 kW compressor and a workshop replumbed for the purpose — and then, because he is who he is, tests against a forging examination from 1910. The library rounds out with the oldest power hammer in the world and the Giant Pilkington, a 1921 pneumatic hammer he rescued from Falmouth Dockyard days before it was scrapped. Taken together, the 33 episodes are a masterclass in what restoration actually is: measurement before force, documentation before disassembly, and the refusal to let industrial heritage go to the scrapyard.

Disclosure: Steele sells tools, equipment and merchandise through Alec Steele Co. and teaches through his Begin Blacksmithing school. SGV presents his products as his, the machines’ histories as he tells them, and his restoration judgments as his craft — attributed to him throughout.

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