How 2 Blacksmith

Okay, first thing you need is a workshop. A space about the size of half a garage is enough, but anything bigger is better.
Next you need the basics: anvil, furnace, stock, hammer, tongs and safety gear.

The anvil is the hardest part to get, because a good anvil is fuck expensive. Luckily you don't really need an actual anvil unless you want to make hella complex shit. For basic smithing, a section of rail or an I beam offcut will do. If you want to go further but can't get a good anvil, get a block of 5160 steel with a hardy hole plasma cut into it, but that is only if you want to use hardy tools, which is more complex. A good anvil will have a flat, uncorroded, smooth striking surface, a clean hardy hole (the square hole on the side away from the horn) and a horn. The anvil must also bounce your hammer off it when you hit it, and it must ring when you hit it, otherwise it might have a crack and at that point you may as well be using a block of mild steel.

Next is a furnace, which you should make yourself. We use an old propane tank, that has had the ends cut off and a hole cut into the side and a pipe welded to it where the burner is inserted. Clad the inside with refactory cement, it's cheap and does burn away over time but it's cheap so w/e. The burner is a length of galvanised steel pipe about 15cm long, with a large hole cut into one end to allow air to be taken in. I'll attach a picture of what a burner should look like. You attach the burner to a propane tank, which will heat your furnace once you light it.

For stock, familiarise yourself with the different steels. Mild steel is steel that has no, or very little carbon, and is soft. This is suitable for armour, tongs, decorations and sword hilts. Medium carbon steel is stuff like rebar, which is good for knives, but is too soft for anything longer. High carbon steels get a bit more interesting, and generally have codes like 5160 or 1060. These refer to the different % composition of different elements, like chromium, vanadium, carbon etc. 1060 is good for swords, 5160 is good for tools, generally. You can go to your local industrial area and see if they have a laser cutting firm that's willing to do small jobs, and get your blanks laser cut so all you have to do is final shaping, rather than going through a fuckton of hassle to shape something from square bar or something crazy. Don't attempt damascus unless you want to spend an entire weekend on making a single billet that can be used for a knife, buy it from someone with a powerhammer.

For a hammer, you'll want a blacksmith's hammer. A heavy ball peen hammer is actually pretty good, you can look up rounding and planishing hammers if you want to make something custom.

For tongs, make yourself a set of farrier's tongs. That's actually an ideal first project, after a knife or something simple, but tongs are actually probably more important. Take two lengths of mild steel, square or round bar of 1cm diameter and flatten the ends to about 5mm thick. Then flatten another section 90 degrees from the jaws about 2-3 cm away from the jaws and drill a hole through them. Get a piece of mild steel that is close to the same diameter as your drilled hole, but a liiiiitle bit thinner and peen the edges over to keep the tongs together. Make them tight, as they work they'll loosen up.

For safety gear, don't wear anything nylon, if it catches fire or melts it hurts like a bitch and sticks to your skin so you rip skin off when you rip it off which ain't fun. Get you some construction/gardening gloves made of pigskin, the more industrial the better, these see some wear and tear. If you can get the ones that cover your forearm too it's ideal. Get an apron made of canvas or some other thick fabric, leather is ideal but expensive unless you buy it direct from the tannery. Get safety glasses that fit over normal glasses if you wear glasses, otherwise just normal safety glasses will do. Steel toecaps are good if you don't have good reflexes, but generally so long as you don't try and catch the red hot steel with your foot you should be fine.

If you can get a handheld belt grinder it is a godsend. If you can get a standing belt grinder, you're actually pretty much set to do anything in blacksmithing. Otherwise get used to constantly buying new metal files because you keep grinding yours down to get an edge on a knife.

Aside from that, just sort of keep doing it until you get good enough to do the things you want! There's blacksmithing fora where you can ask questions and learn new techniques, the dude I work for has been smithing for 6 years and still needs to ask more experienced smiths for advice on specific stuff, but you can learn how to do most smithing stuff in a few months. I've been doing it for 3 months now and I've made 5 swords, a lot of knives and i don't even know how many fire pokers and other bullshit.

Godspeed, sir.