Enzo Cinquegrana has swung his share of hammers. As we tour the outdoor forge of LV Iron & Steel, we pause at a huge rack of them.

“If you go into a forge in Europe, this would take up an entire wall,” he says, motioning to the collection of tools. “We have a lot to work up to, but this has gotten me through 20 years of forging on my own.”

Cinquegrana, with his barrel chest and black overalls, looks the part of a craftsman you’d entrust your weapons to in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The self-proclaimed video game nerd knows it well. But in Cinquegrana’s mind, why play as the blacksmith, when you could become him?

That’s precisely what he did after discovering his love for sculpture and three-dimensional mediums. Cinquegrana grew up in New Jersey as the son of Italian immigrants. His relatives in Italy were stonemasons, so the urge to create by hand was “always around me.” Initially he tried to become a graphic designer, but desk life took a toll.

“After being miserable there, what I ended up doing was taking blacksmithing classes,” he says. “I was always kind of a nerd—blacksmiths, swords and all that stuff was interesting to me. So I would drive two hours into South Jersey, three days a week after work, and just learn from these old guys in a bar.”

He soon started working for the Les Métalliers Champenois, a French firm that redid the Statue of Liberty’s famed torch in 1986. Cinquegrana says he also had a hand in restoring parts of Lady Liberty and owes much of his work to the French and the craftsmanship that machines simply can’t replicate.

Moving to Las Vegas after his wife, burlesque performer Raquel Reed, landed a role in Absinthe, Cinquegrana broadened his architectural work,creating the show’s iconic Green Fairy Garden gate and sets for Reed’s Sin City Burlesque Festival. At LV Iron & Steel, he teaches skilled metal workers and aspiring blacksmiths about the craft and the culture attached.

“One of the cool things is culture didn’t get eradicated from globalization; it just got passed down. So you can be like, ‘A French guy made that. A Portuguese guy made that. I know the girl who made that, she’s from Spain.’ You can literally see the technique and the culture in the work itself. It breathes,” Cinquegrana says. “It’s this hard, difficult material that fights you and kicks and screams and it’s cold, and at the end, it’s organic. That traditional work, it’s held at a high standard, because it’s been polished by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.”