iron ore under my house?

B

boilermaker

Joined
Aug 26, 2005
Messages
110
G'day all,

i was mucking around under the house yesterday (building a retaining wall) and noticed when i picked up my magnetic level some of the red dirt stuck to the magnets. as mentioned the soil is red rocky clay, are the particles stuck to the magnets a form of ore? magnetite or hematite? could i use this for some tamahagene? this could be an interesting project for the future and some advice would be much appreciated
Cheers:thumbup:
 
interesting, im no expert, but i know the black sand on beaches can and often is collected with magnets to smelt into a bloom of iron, and i believe that bloom is then broken up and used to make blister steel? forgive me if im telling you something you already know. i'll be googling tamahagene, i have no idea what that is. could be an interesting project though, crawl space steel :)
-Lou
 
As you probably know the earth is red from iron-oxide. or Rust, so yes you have iron ore in the earth around your home. I dont know if you can actually use it for anything tho. Good luck findind out about that.
Chris
 
If all goes well I will be smelting some of that good red rock into iron this thanksgiving! If I time it well, the bloom and the turkey will come out about the same time.

-Page
 
L.K.Smithy said:
interesting, im no expert, but i know the black sand on beaches can and often is collected with magnets to smelt into a bloom of iron, and i believe that bloom is then broken up and used to make blister steel? forgive me if im telling you something you already know. i'll be googling tamahagene, i have no idea what that is. could be an interesting project though, crawl space steel :)
-Lou
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Im also no expert smithy but i do watch allot of tv and if im correct tamahagene is what the japanese call their clump of iron/steel,
after being smelted down. it looks like a big rock kinda. seeing that im very new to this all im not sure if its just world wide used term for it. i could be wrong i didnt google it. im late for work :foot: If im right thou the process was pretty intresting taking the workers if i remember 3 days and nights in which the man in charge may stay up all 3 days.
 
sunshadow said:
If all goes well I will be smelting some of that good red rock into iron this thanksgiving! If I time it well, the bloom and the turkey will come out about the same time.

-Page
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You got an extra space at your place Page?:D. Nothing would beat running a smelt THEN gorging on turkey and stuff! Good luck man i hope you get some useable iron!
 
If it was my place we'd figure something out for you Sam, probably on the couch with the cats :D , but I'm doing the smelt at my mother's in Ithaca, and she's got a full house planned. I got the smelter mostly built, and probably 130 lbs of charcoal, I will probably run one more charcoal burn if I can, I'm anxiously waiting for my 100 lbs of magnetite, if it doesn't arrive in time there's a slightly less pure ore the ceramics supply house has 500 lbs of in stock, but I really want the real thing.
Wish me luck!
If it goes well (even if it doesn't really ;D )I will hopefully be doing another in the spring, I'll try to get you up here for that one. I could certainly use another hammer for reducing!

-Page
 
Before you try to smelt it you may want to check to see just how much iron is in it. The magnetic sands around my area are very low and do not smelt out very much iron. The iron is always attached to different minerals.

If you send me a small sample I can look at it under a microscope and take some pics. That will give you a better idea how much actual iron you have.

This is some hematite I bought from a pottery store. It has very little silicas/quartz.
Hematite1.png


This is some of the magnetic black sands from off my place. Even though I used a magnet alot of crap is bonded to the black iron specs.
hematite2.png
 
Vinny203 said:
Im also no expert smithy but i do watch allot of tv and if im correct tamahagene is what the japanese call their clump of iron/steel,
after being smelted down. it looks like a big rock kinda.
Click to expand...

Actually that is kera(bloom), the kera is then broken into steel used for blade making which is tamahagane (art steel). Tamahagane is traditionally made from iron rich sand found in certain parts of Japan (Nihon), but modern tamahagane can be made from iron oxide, low carbon steel, iron ore, and other items of that sort.
 
Just got bad news :( my magnetite is backordered a couple weeks. I'm going to pick up 50 pounds of "red Iron Oxide" to try to cook anyway. The worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't work.
ekibyougami, I'm brnging in 200 lbs of magnetite ore since they are bringing it in from the mine in California. If you want to tag on to the shipment, call Andrew at Clayscapes in Syracuse. He said probably 4-6 weeks.

-Page
 
Thanks for the information. I think my family owns land on the black river (black because of the iron rich sand) so I'm hopefully set if I go traditional with my smelts. I'm thinking of trying barbed wire for my starting material for a smelt, it is just sitting in the woods in piles so why not? I can get about .70% carbon with just a forge and low carbon wire... But alas my car has cut the bottom out of my wallet for the next 4 months so if I do any smelts it will be funded by knives I make. I'll send you an email so we don't drag this topic to far off topic. :o
 
Thanks all for the replies. B finnigan, it would be great to send you a sample to look at however i dont think our respective custom services would be overly impressed:D i think i'll just have to try it out once i get through the 10 000 other things i have to do. I was working on an iron ore ship loading facility in the pilbara in western Australia for a while earlier this year, they were loading hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff every day into ships for overseas export. the pilbara is basically thousands of square kilometers of iron ore. if i could work out how to post pics i would post some to show ya'll what hell looks like:D it sure was hot as, (hotest day while i was there was 53deg C in the shade!)
 
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