Our next stop on the tour takes us from the rim-rocking action on the court to the fire of the forge where Master Bladesmith Kevin Cashen is turning red hot raw materials into beautiful blades.

We're off to the village of Hubbardston where Kevin's childhood dream of swordsmithing has become a reality at a level few achieve.

- [Chris] Located roughly 40 miles north of our state capital is the village of Hubbardston and its population of 350 folks or so.

Around the corner from the post office and down the street from the anglers casting lines, you'll find Master Bladesmith Kevin Cashen at his forge, turning his appreciation of swords into historical works of art.

This is the way Kevin Cashen creates swords.

- The reason I even got into all this is I've always been fascinated by swords.

And so I've traveled around the world a bit and studied swords in original collections and museums, and then I try to recreate them as accurately as I can, learn as much as I can about them.

You join the American Bladesmith Society as an apprentice smith and you must be an apprentice smith for three years.

There's ways to accelerate that program if you take classes 'cause the American Bladesmith Society has schools that they send instructors to.

If you take one of those courses, you can reduce it down to two years.

Two to three years apprentice smith, and then you're allowed to test for journeyman bladesmith.

And then you must practice as a journeyman bladesmith for two years until you can test for master smith.

I became a master bladesmith in 1995.

As a child, a young boy, for some reason I was fascinated by swords and armor, particularly in the medieval period.

I remember I was a geeky young boy at that age, I was actually reading "Le Morte D'Arthur" (laughs) and the Arthurian legends.

And swords just really sparked my imagination.

And so I decided, well, I'd like to make some swords and I gave it a try and found out that I was biting off way more than I could chew.

And so I started just general bladesmithing, knife making.

By the time I was 18, I had actually started producing forged knives and started selling them.

And probably 20, 25 years later, then I thought I was finally ready to revisit swords and I got back into it.

- [Chris] Now the quest for knowledge comes in many forms for Kevin.

He loves the smell of books and he considers the vaults at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one of his favorite places on the planet.

But the path to master swordsmith involved trial and error.

- I'm actually entirely self-taught.

When I started teaching for the American Bladesmith Society, I brought something fresh and new to the table in that all the techniques that I developed are self-taught.

And as you start connecting and associating with other bladesmiths around the world, you pick up techniques from them, and we all share.

That's the idea behind the society and things like this.

We're constantly sharing information and it's worked wonderfully.

If you look at master bladesmiths work today, it is unbelievable.

We've went from just sort of recreating the craft and doing some really nice pieces to doing spectacular pieces today.

Bladesmithing is producing some of the best blades I've, that the world's probably ever seen today because of the sharing of information.

Trying to recreate things from the past teaches you the techniques because as you're working, you realize there's only so many ways that this object can be created.

There's only so many ways to do it with the limitation of the materials.

And so you start to get an idea of the way things were done a thousand years ago.

You really have to study swords to recreate a sword.

You can't just look at pictures, you gotta handle and study swords.

- [Chris] A lack of raw materials doesn't dull the edge of Kevin's devotion to his craft.

In fact, it's just another conundrum he's been able to conquer.

- I've even made my own steel from, went to the upper peninsula in Michigan, dug the ore out of the ground, brought it back and I smelted it the way it would've been done in the late Roman Empire or the early Dark Ages.

And just to better understand the techniques.

In Michigan, currently there are two master bladesmiths.

I was the first in Michigan, and there's another fella, a good friend of mine, that got it a few years later.

Worldwide, currently I think we're hovering around 135 master bladesmiths worldwide.

- [Chris] Kevin is the first to say that perfection is not attainable, but that's still the goal for each creation.

- Do you need to make that piece as well as what you're making if it's only ever going to be in a display case?

Well, my name is on that piece, and 200 years from now, maybe a thousand years from now, somebody might be studying it, somebody might use it.

I want them to say, this guy, he was doing really good work.