Kiddicraft Herocraft – Dwarven Forge Building Set KC1503

Kiddicraft's Herocraft Dwarven Forge is built from 433 pieces — a workshop with ore smelter, anvil and a working waterwheel, plus living quarters and a sales counter. Four KIDDIZ figures: three dwarf blacksmiths and one orc attempting to interfere. Helmets, weapons, shields and tools included. Age 5+.

The waterwheel is the reason a forge sits on a stream

It looks like scenery. It is the most important piece of equipment in the building.

Forging iron means striking it repeatedly while it is hot, and a man with a hammer can strike perhaps sixty times a minute at a few kilograms of force. From the twelfth century onwards, European ironworks solved that with the trip hammer — a waterwheel turning a shaft with cams on it, each cam lifting a hammer head weighing a hundred kilograms or more and letting it fall.

The same wheel drove the bellows. A charcoal fire has to be forced with air to reach the temperature that softens iron, and doing it by hand is exhausting, uneven work. Mechanical bellows made a hotter, steadier fire than any smith could maintain.

That is why medieval ironworking sites are on watercourses rather than in villages, and why a forge was built where the water was rather than where the customers were. The blacksmith at a village anvil is the later, smaller version of the trade.

A dwarven forge with a waterwheel is therefore more historically literate than most fantasy architecture.

The orc is a design choice

Three dwarves and one orc in a four-figure set is not padding. It gives the scene a conflict built in, which a workshop with only workers in it does not have.

In the Herocraft range

Set KC1501 is the Knight's Castle, KC1505 the Knight Outpost, KC1502 the Orc Hideout, KC1504 the Orc Battering Ram and KC1506 the Ranger's Cabin. Figure packs KC1409 and KC1410 add orcs and knights.

Specifications

Pieces: 433 · Figures: 4 KIDDIZ · Series: Kiddicraft Herocraft · Working waterwheel, smelter and anvil · Age: 5+ · Compatible with leading brick systems