And this is why iron/steel objects we're so prized before industrialization. The amount of effort to get a small amount of usable material is astounding. Nice video.
Iron production wasn't always this small in scale. Often a master smelter would preside over 5 bloomeries and you'd have 30 bloomeries going at any given time. It was a very long process as seen here but with comparable effort you could produce over a hundred pounds of usable wrought iron.
I love videos like this that dispell myths about swordsmithing. Iron sand was not a type of ore unique to japan, and folding steel isn't a japan-unique style either. Thank you so much
your videos are always great! finding a new video of yours feels like finding gold to me! thank you for the amazing contribution, i hope more and more people will understand the cultural value of your work here!
Thank you for the post and sharing your experience. You may have had a "half failure", but I am learning over here, without having to have picked up a hammer. And that is a success. Again...thank you, teacher.
I wish I had friends who did stuff like that! Wow. I want to learn how to do all of this. I think of it as fundamental research into the history of civilization. We who eat meat and never think of the animal, and we who live lives surrounded by steel and tools and machines and no idea where the ore comes from, and how smelting, and materials we live with are obtained. So fascinating. I think more people should be doing stuff like this so that the knowledge of how we got from this red raw ore to a billet of iron was done.
Warren Postma Just get a job loading paper into a fax machine you rebel! DO you mean to say your heart is not fully alive working a commercial job behind a customer service desk 9-5? K, so if you live by me, we can start together.
Having watch Japanese traditional steel making I am stunned by the similarities between the two techniques, developed separately and within vastly different cultures. The work your doing here is very important you are the essential resovoir of a vital cultural memory. Thanks for your hot and heavy work.
Woah! I had no idea one could MAKE iron. I thought that stuff had to be mined. As always, I learned something new due to your channel. Keep it up T.A !!
Compared to other traditional smelting furnaces I've seen, it deff looked a bit tame, heat wise. That said, you guys have more talent in your thumb than I even hope to have. Great video!!
As usual very cool to watch and very interesting. I loved the beautiful countryside it reminds me of my trip around Europe when I was young. Thanks for the videos and keep them comming
quite interesting,the power hammer looked like a very good tool for this type of work.would love to see more about this particular billet and again thanks for sharing with us!
Definitely. That's a lot of work for a little iron, even with a modern power hammer. It's hard to imagine how we progressed from the bronze age to the iron age. My hat's off to those early smiths who pioneered working with iron using the bronze age tools and technology they had available at that time.
Thank you for this. As a metal worker (goldsmith), I would love the opportunity to pull my materials out of the ground and complete a project from start to finish
This must be incredibly satisfying, if hard work! And it looks like you had a lovely area to work in, and great friends (I assume!!) to work with. All of those things make it worthwhile, plus having something you can honestly say 'i made that'... :)
iT screamed, flux me!@!@!@! and yes to temperature on the cool side, been here before. Got a bigger blast. Also always work Iron hotter than you work steel and always stop before you would normally stop for steel.
Hi Torbjorn: How about a video on the construction of the bloomery furnace please! Also on how it used. Details man, we need details! Regarding the poor bloom quality, could one take and crush amd fractionate the bloom, tjen heat it to melting in an induction or gas furnace to let the iron separate from the slag before pouring into an ingot? Cheers and Happy Easter!
I would love to get into this art. I wouldn't even know where to begin with it though. I noticed how the iron piece you took home sounds very soft when you hit it at first and as you went on it started to compact. I would love to learn to work with metal and how to refine it like that. To learn the way it behaves and how to make amazing things with it. Blacksmithing is awesome.
+Keltic Peak Great! It does not matter where you begin. If you think this is your passion, important thing is you begin somewhere, the rest will follow somehow. Start by picking up some tools maybe, or join a local group of people interested in the same thing.
+Torbjörn Åhman I would love to. I think I have a friend who could introduce me to some blacksmiths and maybe through them I can find a "guild" haha. Too bad industry has killed off this art.
Quite the laborious process. Can imagine how useful that piece will be if forged into hatchet or knife. years of service for the hours of work forging,
Not bad at all! though can I suggest adding a small amount of powdered Borax to your Red-Earth? Not only will it lower the melting point of slag and make homogenization and processing easier, but because it's a naturally occurring crystal it's been used as flux for a very, very long time, making it authentic to the time period too!
Firstly, "Lime" Aluminium?? I'm assuming you ment "like" Aluminium. Secondly, I'm Guessing you've never done Forge pattern welding or worked in a smithy before - Since anyone who has will tell you that Powdered limestone is used as a purifying agent in a blast furnace, while borax is a welding agent (Flux). Furthermore, Limestone wasn't used in the production of Iron until the invention of the blast furnace at the start of the industrial revolution because of the fact that the excessively high heat of that style of furnace made the resulting iron brittle (from an excess of carbon that molten iron absorbs from the air at extreme temperatures) if it wasn't treated. (which is why cast iron shatters if you drop it from too high) Also, Aluminium is made through a chemical process (known as the Bayer process) that produces alumina (Aluminium oxide) which is then Dissolved in solution and distilled through electrolysis. The Bayer process usually involves limestone, so you have it backwards! So if you want to stay authentic to the time period it would have to be Borax!
Limestone is used as flux in a blast furnace, it's not a purifying agent. It helps to form a light slag that floats on top of the molten iron. This shields and reduces the sulfur contamination form the fuel as well as making the slag more viscous and easy to get rid of. Sulfur makes the iron brittle. This is my understanding of it at least. I'm not sure what the historical finds are regarding the use of any flux in a bloomery furnace. There is no need to form a slag in the same way as in a blast furnace since we are not dealing with liquid iron, but the slag properties might benefit form it. The point here is that the different ores produces different slags and that is what makes a good or bad ore together with given iron content.
Yes. Stones have been found which is believed to have been used as anvils. Stones or rocks are still used in 3:rd world countries for forging. I have seen videos of it here on youtube, but I can't find it right now.
Very awesome video! I just came back from school camp and one of our assignments was making a bellow and an oven to melt iron ore! We were able to make a tiny bit of iron mixed with heaps of slag. I told the supervisor that I am a blacksmith and he gave me some bigger bits of iron for me to forge into a billet. I tried forging one of the smaller pieces but it crumbled in tiny pieces with one hit of the hammer :( Do you have any tips on how I can forge it without crumbling? Thanks! You could try to forge a knife out of it with a piece of spring steel as cutting edge :)
knives&stuff Cool! I'm no expert on forging blooms but first of all high heat. Welding temp, and at first light taps to try and mush it together. If it's still crumbling I think it's hard to do anything really. You could crush it and remelt... could end up with steel instead.
knives&stuff I saw in a video Japanese blacksmith covers ores with wet paper, clay and straws. These create an environment such that pull oxides out of steel. Maybe borax could do this job.
Enis Turgut Yalçınkaya The Japanese are late comers to working iron, most of what you see is part of their ritual. They use a sand rich in magnetite which is higher quality of ore than used in this video. I would venture the furnace temp was too low and the temp was not maintained long enough, This could be only a few degrees an minutes. .
knives&stuff You need higher heat and less force on the hammer at first until you get a workable billet. You might try to sprinkle a little borax on it to forge weld it together. Get as high heat as possible. Work fast and reheat often. You have to be patient and keep your billet hot enough to work. Good luck!
Why does the material flake so much as it's being worked? Are these impurities that are supposed to be driven out during the working of the material, or is it good iron that just isn't bonded well for some reason, and is useful mass that you would ideally want to keep?
In this case it is both oxides and slag from the smelting that falls off. The main purpose working a bloom like this is to remove the slag and consolidate the iron. But iron will also form iron oxides when exposed to oxygen during the high heat.
Intressant video! Har snöat in mig lite på smide på sistone och försöker lära mig så mycket som möjligt! :) Får man fråga vad som åstadkoms vid 2:05-2:15? Är rödjorden inhandlad eller upphittad?
+MrProgrock Vi försöker spätta loss luppen från insidan av ugnen. Smidigast om man kan få loss den uppifrån och lyfta den rakt upp, utan att ha sönder ugnen. Inte alltid detta lyckas som synes :) Rödjorden är hittad på känd plats och har använts tidigare många gånger med lyckat resultat. Gäller att få tag på bra jord med rätt innehåll. Tyvärr har jag inte själv varit involverad i jordletandet.
Torbjorn, the grey slivers that fall off during the working process, are they more oxidized metal or slag or a combination of those two? I've always wondered about this and from what I understand the more you work a bloom the less impurities it will have, generally speaking and this question has always bugged me. I live in the city and hence never see these things in person.
+PhilaPeter When working bloom steel/iron I suppose it's a combination. Just working any steel at high temperature will oxidize the surface and "scale" (iron oxide) will form.
Otrolig inspirerande video! Just detta är något jag länge velat göra, hur skulle du gå till väga för att få tag på järnmalm eller Magnetit på egen hand? Jag bor i Stockholms län. Jag vill gärna få tag på mina mineraler på egen hand. Tips tas gärna emot! =)
does not matter. You can throw hot red charcoal from one hand to another, and if you do it quickly you wont even feel its temperature. I often do this trick with my friends when we go hiking.
Torbjörn Åhman : tapping the hot charcoal with his bare hand random dude from the foundry: hold my beer and watch this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-hlwi1XZg2EA.html
Yes, I think you correct in that it was too cold from everything I've read and looking at how hard the bloom was. My guess is that this was on the high end of cast iron at 4% carbon combined with cold shortness.Too much carbon, you were in a way "puddling" that chunk to reduce the amount of carbon to get it to a forgeable state. There is a good documentary on Wootz Damascus and it compares this steel to bloomery. The Damascus had vanadium, was melted in crucibles and cooled very slowly to form spheroidal perlite- all added to the toughness of the steel. Martensite vs. Pearlite.
I don't really have any experience with this, but it's not impossible, look at the Japanese swords. In this furnace however we only expect iron with very little carbon content.
That steel sounds very hard. I'd say at least 50 points of carbon??? Using pretty much the same method, we, too, had trouble keeping the carbon content down. Interesting, though, that you pulled the bloom out from the top. We always pulled it from the bottom, but that required a lot more furnace repair than did your method.
I would say almost no carbon at all actually, but a bloom like this is pretty uneven. It's interesting how different results you can get with different furnace designs.
Just out of curiosity, did you drain the slag from the bloomery? If not I'd imagine that the bloom was sitting in all that crap which may have contributed to the poor quality
I'm not sure we did... I don't think this ore produces that much slag. The issue we had was probably due to moisture in parts of the charcoal we used, lowering the temperature in the upper parts of the furnace.
moreso in Accordance of the poet Mallory but yeah youre right, whoever has in their employ those who can draw swords from stone will rightwise be King of All England.
@@Loverloadgems Thank you for your acknowledgement as you say the myth becomes reality when you see can see it. Ask any boiler maker or black smith the action of heating iron or steel and then hammering it into shape on the anvil is still referred to as 'drawing'
@@cubicinches18 An actual draw knife is used by the act of pulling. There is a real magical feel to metal work and all the old terms/names add to it. Great spin on the legend. To draw it from stone. A certain stone. Which and where!!!!! And how!!! Who is worthy!!! :-)
By our standards, a bloom is the worst material, but we have to start there. You could melt what you have and make crucible steel, but that's harder to work with.
Was it a magnetite or haemitite?I guess it was haemitite right? Your work...its really I must say Excellent... cause it's not at all an easy job.loved every minute of it
Excellent video as always. I have an ignorant question, however. When folding and forging the bilet, wouldn't it be better to flux the billet everytime you fold it?
The ash from the charcoal forms a slag with the silica in the clay and sand. The iron bloom has lots of slag in it already, between the particles. From a more modern forge perspective, the adding flux might help. I'm not sure on how it would help exactly. But the slag should serve some function. They probably dont use it for simplicity's sake. They dont need it, so why make more work?
Troubleshooting Suggestion: I didnt see any silica (sand) being added, nor was there footage of slag being tapped at the end of the run. If that part of the process was skipped it almost certainly would be THE most likely reason for poor bloom quality. Then again I've never smithed, so forgive me if i'm off target. Also, why'd they hot cut the bloom at 3:20 ? It looks like it fell apart when they did it. I always thought that after consolidation you're supposed to get it up to temp and work it, to force out the impurities (kinda like pounding the whey outta freshly churned butter) and homogenize the carbon content.
Torbjörn Åhman You know more about this than I do. There's a great YT video "African Iron smelting" where the setup is very similar, yet they used an alkali rock (like limestone) in large quantities, and this seemed to flux and compact the reduced iron into a denser mass with less impurities, and they were able to forge it nicely. The clay furnace they used was similar. Anyway, great job, I love stuff like this.
My best (most coherent, solid, and easy to work) blooms have been when I added crushed oyster-shell (i.e. calcium carbonate). Limestone should work similarly.
I noticed you didn't use any flux (that or you didn't let us see it) when you were folding over the iron to make a billet, is it not needed? Sorry im not really all that experienced with blacksmithing or iron processing yet :)
+Trenton Cook No, it's not really needed since there are allot of slag still in this piece of iron.The slag makes it easier to weld. However flux could be used to protect the surfaces from oxidation and maybe save some material, maybe....
I thought to myself the fire looks kinda "cold" for melting iron, but dismissed it because it could be just the lighting/camera. Then you admitted that your furnace was to cold^^
I have a placer gold claim in Oregon, USA and one of the byproducts from my operation are large quantities of heavy black iron sands, containing rare earth elements and other heavy metals including sulfides. I would love to do this with a batch of it and see if it would be any good for making blades. Would it be possible to do this on my coal forge? It would seem that adding a flux like borax would ruin it as it would absorb all the iron leaving only precious metals behind.
Rob S Cool. Not possible in a forge. This needs to be done with charcoal. The furnace must be tall enough so the ore spends enough time traveling down to the bloom. If I remember right a grain of ore about 1mm in size needs aprox 1h to reduce fully. Would be interesting to try your "sand"... like the Japanese black sand.
