Hey been a while since the last Experimental Drekeology! Not for a lack of wanting to do so! Just simply... I have had no free time and the comic has taken priority.

About 3 months ago I casted a copper bar with the intent of cold hammering it into a tool and I *finally* got the time to do so. I wanted to demonstrate some cold working techniques to better show what manufacture from a raw piece of native copper into a final object might look like, but as it's hard to get native nuggets here and this would be my first time cold working a non scrap piece into a final shape, a bar filled the gap.
I cold worked it with an hour here or there with what little free time I could spend that wasn't already filled with other projects on the bar. Hammering it flat, elongating the bark and making its profile thinner until just a few days ago. I had left my job as a janitor for a better scheduled job at Walmart (for a short time) and since I've had some free time I figured I would finish this project I had left on the backburner months ago. So I used hot hammering techniques to work it the rest of the way into a knife and just got it sharpened up last night.
The knife is all pure copper, with a 3 inch blade and a tang that will serve as the handle until I can find a suitable material for a handle, its a lot heavier than my prior knives at about a 1/2 pound, mostly considering the construction is a simple bar smithed into a crude blade this shouldn't be a surprise. It does cut about as well as any of my other blades though it definitely is a lot harder to bend or break and I have used it to baton through some wood (though resharpening was a pain in the ass).

A lot of drekir metallurgy is hammering already preexisting pieces of copper and a lot of ruins have copper and aluminum scraps that, from the pulse and consequent intensely hot fires and magical heat, have melted down into their own sorts of "nuggets" that can look and function a lot like native metal nuggets. These are easy to find and work into tools through cold/hot working techniques, though casting metal into "blanks" to cold/hot work is also very common.

Often, cultures will do both cold and hot hammering as there isn't much of a gap with what sort of tools you need, and the advantages/disadvantages are very complimentary. Cold hammering as I've discussed is hammering the copper at room temperature to form it, and anneal by heating and cooling it to keep it soft and workable. The advantage here is that you can safely hold the copper as it's cold, allowing a lot more control and precision in hammering it. The disadvantage of course is that this is a pretty slow process. It's less soft in a cold state and annealing is a waiting game.

Hot working is what you might be more familiar with, getting the metal hot and hammering it while it is hot, a wood fire can be used to get the metal hot enough to hot hammer. This needs more tools such as tongs to safely hold the metal and a hafted hammer instead of just a hammerstone. Tongs can just be a wet piece of split greenwood, something that has appeared in a lot of copper working societies in our world, and a hammerstone could simply be hafted to a handle for a hafted hammer. The advantage is the oppossite of cold working, hot hammering is very fast as the metal is hot, soft and annealed throughout the hammering which cuts down the process while also making each hammer strike do more work. The downside is that simply, you can't exactly hold a piece of metal that is 700C hot so it's harder to precisely manipulate it.

So drekir often do one, the other, or often both. A lot of cultures may only cold hammer, and some may integrate hot hammering to do more of the bulk work of a project, using cold working to have more precise control over the object, do final shaping and to work harden edges if needed.