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- Sep 9, 2003
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In the past I have shared images of smelts I have done using whatever ore I could scrounge from anywhere around the country, but it didnt take long for me to ask why I was having such a hard time finding raw metal ores in Michigan of all places! For those not familiar with the geology of my state, the Upper Peninsula was once a very mountainous region formed by ancient volcanism, and is thus one of the richest metallic or spots in earth. For a while I used the ubiquitous (in MI) taconite pellets for my ore since one can scoop them up along just about any RR track in the north, but using these preprocessed ore pellets somehow lacked the romance and feel of doing it all from scratch.
In August Karen and I treated the family to a trip into the U.P. for a weekend and it was on the shores of that most forbidding and remote great lake, mighty Superior, that I saw it.
I dont know how many times in my youth while hiking along those cold barren shores that I saw the blackened sand streaks and dismissed them as concentrations of rotting organic material, but this time I had a keener eye for the inorganic. One feel of the mass of that sand in my hand and I knew I had literally hit pay-dirt! It took great effort of both me and my 16 year old son to drag a bucket of the stuff back to a road, but would it make steel?
I had been chomping at the bit to see if the black sand would make steel but my work in the shop left little time for experimenting. I had told Delbert Ealy and Tim Zowada about my plans and they had caught the same enthusiastic bug and requested to participate in the trial runs to learn my methods, and had collected more of the sand for us to try. Tim set the date for November 12th and on that morning I fired the Ferrite Phantom once again and waited for the guys to arrive. This is where I cannot say how glad I am to have designed the semi-permanent smelter so that not only can I reuse it again later with no hassle but I can also run as many smelts as I please, back to back, in one day.
Since we were working with sand I knew we would have much more slag than my other smelts and I was prepared for that. For those not familiar with the process, slag is good and an essential part of the process, but too much tends to fill the smelter prematurely and interfere with the air blast. The first run that day produced so much slag that it interfered with the air flow, and the greater viscosity, which worked well to make steel with the other ores, made it very difficult to tap off. So our first run was a lesser yield but of very high carbon content, despite the very troublesome abundance of silica.
It took all of five minutes to readjust the tuyere and recalibrate things for what we hoped would compensate for the excess silica and fire the Phantom again. In no time we started seeing differences. The process within the burn chamber (you should know me and realize I would not go without a way to directly monitor the process occurring inside
) looked very active with a very good slag pool and highly active iron particulates. Then when the slag reached the mouth of the tuyere for the first time the moment of truth came- I hammered the rod into the slag tap and was rewarded with a highly liquid stream of the finest slag you have ever seen!
Delbert and I watch the smelt progress into the night:
We worked into the night continually tapping off the excess slag in order to maximize our steel yield until finally we saw a distinct change in the smelter exhaust telling us we had maximized the smelt and could go no further. Eagerly we chiseled open the bottom chamber and cleared the way for what lay hidden inside. Form above I hammered and worked harder than I ever have to remove a bloom, whatever was in there, it was big and very solid!
Now steel is steel and however one can get it from a smelter they should take it and be grateful, we are making steel from dirt after all. But the ideal bloom, showing that everything went just right, should form a large solid birds nest shaped piece caused by the perfect sintering in the slag pool with aggregation around the outside of the air blast. If one gets this configuration they really nailed it.
With certain excitement I reached into the darkly glowing recess of the smelter with my bloom tongs and wiggled a huge single mass out of the opening. It was dark out then and we had to wait until I could get it into the light of the shop. This is what we saw:
We had made a perfect birds nest and then continued to yield steel in arching columns over it! I have made more material in one smelt but never such a solid and beautiful bloom! The sand was a total success! We touched it to the grinder and found wonderful sprays of high carbon sparks, while at the same time able to bend and hammer pieces flat. It wasn't lacking of carbon or saturated with it, but it was a nice carbon steel, pearlitic from the slow cool.
In the end we found we had used around 50 lbs. of charcoal and around ½ to 2/3 of a bucket of Lake Superior sand to make it, so the efficiency in my smelts continues to improve beyond what I thought was about as good as I was going to get.
The Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge in August produced a sword from raw ore in three days time, and I didnt know if I could top that feeling of accomplishment. This may not seem more impressive, but it really stirs the imagination and fires me up to think that I can drive a few hours north and hike out to some desolate shore of Gitchigumi to hand dig sand that I can make into a blade.
Edited to add a very grateful thanks to Tim Zowada for taking all of the pictures seen here as well as a good bit of movie footage that will be very useful in the future, then putting them all on disk and sending them off to me this last weekend. I hope the pile of home made steel he took hame makes up for all of this.
In August Karen and I treated the family to a trip into the U.P. for a weekend and it was on the shores of that most forbidding and remote great lake, mighty Superior, that I saw it.
I dont know how many times in my youth while hiking along those cold barren shores that I saw the blackened sand streaks and dismissed them as concentrations of rotting organic material, but this time I had a keener eye for the inorganic. One feel of the mass of that sand in my hand and I knew I had literally hit pay-dirt! It took great effort of both me and my 16 year old son to drag a bucket of the stuff back to a road, but would it make steel?
I had been chomping at the bit to see if the black sand would make steel but my work in the shop left little time for experimenting. I had told Delbert Ealy and Tim Zowada about my plans and they had caught the same enthusiastic bug and requested to participate in the trial runs to learn my methods, and had collected more of the sand for us to try. Tim set the date for November 12th and on that morning I fired the Ferrite Phantom once again and waited for the guys to arrive. This is where I cannot say how glad I am to have designed the semi-permanent smelter so that not only can I reuse it again later with no hassle but I can also run as many smelts as I please, back to back, in one day.
Since we were working with sand I knew we would have much more slag than my other smelts and I was prepared for that. For those not familiar with the process, slag is good and an essential part of the process, but too much tends to fill the smelter prematurely and interfere with the air blast. The first run that day produced so much slag that it interfered with the air flow, and the greater viscosity, which worked well to make steel with the other ores, made it very difficult to tap off. So our first run was a lesser yield but of very high carbon content, despite the very troublesome abundance of silica.
It took all of five minutes to readjust the tuyere and recalibrate things for what we hoped would compensate for the excess silica and fire the Phantom again. In no time we started seeing differences. The process within the burn chamber (you should know me and realize I would not go without a way to directly monitor the process occurring inside
) looked very active with a very good slag pool and highly active iron particulates. Then when the slag reached the mouth of the tuyere for the first time the moment of truth came- I hammered the rod into the slag tap and was rewarded with a highly liquid stream of the finest slag you have ever seen!
Delbert and I watch the smelt progress into the night:
We worked into the night continually tapping off the excess slag in order to maximize our steel yield until finally we saw a distinct change in the smelter exhaust telling us we had maximized the smelt and could go no further. Eagerly we chiseled open the bottom chamber and cleared the way for what lay hidden inside. Form above I hammered and worked harder than I ever have to remove a bloom, whatever was in there, it was big and very solid!
Now steel is steel and however one can get it from a smelter they should take it and be grateful, we are making steel from dirt after all. But the ideal bloom, showing that everything went just right, should form a large solid birds nest shaped piece caused by the perfect sintering in the slag pool with aggregation around the outside of the air blast. If one gets this configuration they really nailed it.
With certain excitement I reached into the darkly glowing recess of the smelter with my bloom tongs and wiggled a huge single mass out of the opening. It was dark out then and we had to wait until I could get it into the light of the shop. This is what we saw:
We had made a perfect birds nest and then continued to yield steel in arching columns over it! I have made more material in one smelt but never such a solid and beautiful bloom! The sand was a total success! We touched it to the grinder and found wonderful sprays of high carbon sparks, while at the same time able to bend and hammer pieces flat. It wasn't lacking of carbon or saturated with it, but it was a nice carbon steel, pearlitic from the slow cool.
In the end we found we had used around 50 lbs. of charcoal and around ½ to 2/3 of a bucket of Lake Superior sand to make it, so the efficiency in my smelts continues to improve beyond what I thought was about as good as I was going to get.
The Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge in August produced a sword from raw ore in three days time, and I didnt know if I could top that feeling of accomplishment. This may not seem more impressive, but it really stirs the imagination and fires me up to think that I can drive a few hours north and hike out to some desolate shore of Gitchigumi to hand dig sand that I can make into a blade.
Edited to add a very grateful thanks to Tim Zowada for taking all of the pictures seen here as well as a good bit of movie footage that will be very useful in the future, then putting them all on disk and sending them off to me this last weekend. I hope the pile of home made steel he took hame makes up for all of this.
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