Michael Craughwell has not being laboring in anonymity as he crafts giant swords here on the Vineyard. He has over 10,000 hits on his YouTube videos which show him crafting and wielding his creations, often six feet long and weighing 80 pounds.

Mr. Craughwell makes swords for aficionados of an earlier time when men wandered the land in full suits of armor and the sword was their ticket to entry at the castle gate. But this is not just a tale of the past. Mr. Craughwell is also in high demand from video game makers to design new weapons. His work on Final Fantasy 7 captured legions of new fans, including the Discovery Channel, which arrived on Island this summer to begin filming a series about his work.

The series premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on the Discovery Channel. The premise is this — due to his rising popularity Mr. Craughwell can no longer fill the supply chain of swords by himself. Now he has a team of apprentices culled from the Vineyard community to help him. But they are new to the work, and their skills not quite honed to perfection yet. For the premier episode, Mr. Craughwell and his crew are already way behind in crafting a sword to replicate Zeus’s lighting bolt, commissioned by a group of extreme weather chasers. It seems dangerous to carry a large metal object into the heart of a lightning storm, but perhaps that is fodder for a different series called Really Bad Ideas.

The crew also must create a Chakram, an ancient weapon once used in India, for an Mixed Martial Arts fighter. Now that’s one customer you don’t want to get mad with a delay in delivery.

Watch it all go down tonight.