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New Articles: August 28th, 2010 - Mt. 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| I've always loved the idea of working with metal. I've been cutting, shaping, welding and drilling steel for years, making useful pieces, but I've also been just playing with metal my whole life, even as a child. I'd love to acquire the skills of a master blacksmith, and will work toward that goal over time. But first, one needs metal to work! Yes, you can go buy any kind you could possibly want, but why not start at the beginning? In my travels through the Southern California deserts, I have found many mine sites. Some seem to have especially good iron ore tailings. I collected some of this ore, and took it home to practice ancient smelting techniques. My most recent inspiration are these sites: The Smelter's Art. Bladesmith's Forum Starting with the Smelter's Art designs, I constructed my own bloomery furnace, using fire brick, piping and a shop-vac. Using fire brick rather than a single ceramic unit means I can break it down, and transport the furnace, or store the brick for use at a later time. The shop-vac at full power puts out far too much air, but using a variac, I get fine control over air flow. I used commercially produced hard-wood lump charcoal for fuel, sorting and breaking up pieces by hand. For instrumentation, I am using a commercial kiln pyrometer purchased from a local pottery supply store. Here is my bloomery furnace in full operation, at 900 degrees Celsius: 
The "bloom" of iron, produced in my second smelting: 
The bloom cut in half with my chop-saw, showing the iron deposits: 
Here is my process, as of now (in the first 1/10th of the learning curve):
Here are some more fun/cool pictures of the process: 
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Comments: Bonnie (2010-07-12): Do you know there is a Catalan furnace at Mission San Juan Capistrano? It is the only one in any of the Spanish mission and was built in the late 1700's, modeled after others in Spain. With it, the early settlers here produced wrought iron to repair ships coming into Dana Point harbor and other items to trade. Erik (2010-07-12): Hi Bonnie; no, I did not know that the San Juan Mission had smelting furnaces, but my next-door neighbor is a tour guide there, so I'm surprised I didn't know about them! Thanks for telling me, I'll have to check those out. Stephen Dennis (2010-07-20): When I was at Pirate Cove beach in new port recently I found two magnets in the sand. These were not rare earth type magnets, but were on the upper end of strength. The two of them probably had an ounce of iron particles stuck to them. I wondered about the quality of iron beach newport beach sand could produce. Erik (2010-07-20): Stephen, iron-sand is usually an excellent material to smelt, mostly because it's so easy to get, and to work with. No rock-crushing with that stuff! In fact, the ancient Japanese swordsmiths used iron-sand from a sacred riverbed to make their iron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamahagane Miquel Segura (2010-08-20): Mi nombre es Miquel Segura. Tambien tengo alguna experiencia en hornos de hierro, Seria interesante si pudieramos compartir experiencias. Pudes mirar em mi canal de Youtube y tambien en mis Faboritos... http://www.youtube.com/user/mikquels Saludos, miquel. |
