Bradley Collingridge
My story began in Dubbo and its surrounds with a lot of exposure to the farming lifestyle of rural Central NSW. Growing up, I liked to keep my hands busy, playing guitar, video games, camping and tinkering with building kits. Both sides of my family were farmers and were quite isolated, needing to be adaptable and self reliant to fix and overcome day to day breakages with limited tools and resources. Watching and learning from them, particularly my father, and my general curiosity of how things work, ignited my passion for working with my hands…. so I went to university and studied forensics! (curiosity got the better of me).
During that time I stumbled across a medieval re-enactment group, got hooked into combat and started to use the skills I had learnt from high school and my father to build armour. It wasn’t pretty, but it changed my mindset of metal as a medium and eventually led to me diving deep into blacksmithing.
It has been several years now, and I am lucky enough to have turned my passion for Blacksmithing into a full-time career, teaching classes and starting my own forge and small business as Brad The Blacksmith.