Mike Blue, Randall Graham, Ric Furrer, making steel at Larry Harley's in May 2006. Lecture and Demonstration. Filmed by Christopher Price of The Tidewater Forge. 9 minutes.
I was born and raised in a steel town (Youngstown), lived but 2 miles from the mills until age 8, my father and all his friends all worked in the mills through high school and college. My grandfather was a boiler engineer his entire life for one of the mills. From all that, did I know anything about how steel was made? No. In this video alone, I've learned more about how steel is actually made. Thank you!
Just discovered this video, I think I have found my new love. Thanks for making this. So awesome to watch how this is done. I will be looking for a class and group that does this kind of thing in my area.
I greatly enjoy videos such as this that give a detailed description in everyday lingo. They really come in handy as light, but educational material for friends with a bit of interest in the subject.
I'm not interested in producing steel for my foundry but it's really nice to get an understanding of the process . I'd loved to hang out with these cool guys to do this tho! Nice video!!!
This country needs more people like this. There's reading about something (most college) and then there's trying something (the rest of college) and then there's craftsmen/women and artisans that perfect processes through repetition, and are confident enough to share their knowledge with others.
One addition I'd like to see is how to find Iron Ore. i.e. where to find it, what does it look like and any visible signs that would help identify the Iron Ore. Outside of that, Great video on how to make steel from Iron Ore.. Thanks for the upload!! :)
You guys did a great job. It takes hard work and dedication to do it the old fashion way. Ive been thinking about picking up blacksmithing as a hobby so learning how to forge my own bars will be really helpful. Great video, keep doing what youre doing!
I'm a metallurgist..they built a primative furnace. They put in iron ore (FeO, etc) and charcoal (C) and let it combust. Air entered through the tuyeres (tubes at the bottom that they were seem cleaning out) that then reacted with the charcoal to form CO and CO2, which heated up the iron ore and allowed FeO, etc to break up into cast iron/steel (depending on exact carbon content) and slag (SiO2, MnO, etc). For more into check out NOVA s35e05 "Making of a Samuri Sword"
Holy hell, your voice is so reminiscent of my late grandfather's voice, the comment on Virginia boys pushed that feeling even farther. I know it wasn't in any way your intention when you made this video but thanks, really gave me a good feeling.
Christopher Price My mistake, thanks for the response. I somehow missed it in my notifications. Probably going to start another binge on your videos. (: Thanks again for the upload.
A TURBULENCE as in a "rocket nozzle" : absolutely brilliant! (I speak in addition to the slow vehicle movement, part t. and no hard schedules, The Box club, publishing on waste receptacles and cans with saying such at stores). AGA9N, BRILLIANT.... PTL Almighty for you on this!
Awesome video. Nice to see Ric Furrer in a more layed back setting like this, and of course the awesome bloom. I'll be making a small scale tatara this winter hopefully, and this has helped a little bit (The sacrificial carbon for the bloom to expand.). Wish I was there.
Looks like a lot of hard, dirty work. But at the end of the process when you finally finish the last bit of grinding and polishing on your totally home-made knife it must be satisfying. Great vid.
Awesome video! It's enlightening and informative, I really appreciate it. I love learning this kind of stuff. I think it's really important normal people learn how to make things on their own. It's the only real way to have any sort of independence in the world.
Roasting and crushing increases the surface area. As Dr. Blue mentions, it's hot CO gas doing the work, so the more area exposed to that gas, the more efficient reduction of the ore into iron. You could take it as far as powdering it, but somewhere between sand and fine gravel is usually good enough. Roasting in particular creates fractures and liberates any chemically bound water, so you get gas pathways and less H2O in the way, as well.
I have one katana made of Tamahagane and the rest are medium carbon steel blades thank you for posting this video I love it. it has me want to make my own steel and forge my own.
This is one of those things I always wanted to get into. Smelting, SCUBA, and flying a helicopter. Well, I may have to be satisfied with just SCUBA but I want you to know I really appreciate this look into smelting the old way. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Another comment below suggests that 6 years ago, the rate was at or above $100/pound. Possibly more these days, but it's hard to say, because few people smelting are willing to sell their material. Also, with all the processing to consolidate the bloom, folding and welding, and final grinding, it takes at least 10 pounds of raw bloomery steel to end up with a 2 pound sword... much is lost to scaling, and compactness of the original material plays a big part in how much metal you end up with.
I can't comment on Japanese law, but my recollection from back then (it was 7 years ago now... wow.) was that the samples were gifts from Japanese swordsmiths on a well-coordinated visit to a university, and through that professional exchange, a few pieces were offered for reference to compare the emerging American work to. Something like that. You'd have to ask Ric, though, for a better answer.
In several countries Iron Oxide lays in abundance in riverbeds or beaches. It resembles a black sand or dirt. The largest source of this material is New Zealand. In Japan they used this in place of ore dug from mines for the most part.
I watched the native Bolivians do this with Silver in Potosi in what looked like strawberry pots. Was really cool. The silver ore was placed in it, directly from the mines around Cero Rico. And then silver would ooze out the little lips all over the pot. I loved that simple design but have yet to Make one. Apparently it’s a very old tech dating back to the time of the Spanish and the Potosi Mint where the miners mined the ore, refined it down to silver puddles/streams and it was carted off to the mint, refined again and then alloyed and struck into cob coinage or large 80lb ingots.
I want to thank the people who got something from this video. I shot it before I fully understood the process, and have tried to add some helpful comments along the way. I've also just adjusted my account to match my proper name and email. Hopefully this will let me respond better to good questions about making steel in one of the traditional fashions.
You're right, and actually, at 1:43, the gentleman who just laid in the iron ore was talking about how the rhythm of the drums was a timing mechanism for older cultures to keep the right pace while feeding their furnaces. This isn't meant to be the complete history of it, just one example filmed almost 7 years ago.
In 1813, Tabitha Babbitt (1784-1854) invented the first circular saw used in a saw mill. Babbitt was working in the spinning house at the Harvard Shaker community in Massachusetts when she decided to invent an improvement to the two-man pit saws that were being used for lumber production. Tabitha Babbitt is also credited with inventing an improved version of cut nails, a new method of making false teeth, and an improved spinning wheel head.
@Rhandahl That's kinda what he was saying. He was explaining that the folding process isn't just to make it look better, it actually has a funtional purpose.
Yes - 2 reasons. The first is probably human impatience, but the practical reason is that usually, the bloom is worked immediately, beginning that compression and cleaning process, and it's very difficult to get it as hot as it is in that furnace it was born in. Typically we quit feeding ore, give it another foot of charcoal, burn it down a bit, then extract the bloom with the air still running and burning the fire - take the bloom to a stump and start hammering it tighter and smaller.
As Dr. Blue mentioned in the video, it must be hammered flat, folded, and welded, over and over several times to get a homogeneous bar of steel, which one can then choose what to do with. For lack of power tools, strong men and hammers will do the trick - it just takes time.
Folding and welding is done, but it's just the manual process for getting from a chunky piece of bloom, to a solid clean bar of steel from which to make swords. There is a lot of hype about how a certain number of layers makes a blade stronger, but that's all it is. The patterns of folded steel are incidental to the desire for a clean, homogenous, slag-free blade.
Best thing to do is read the Bladesmith Forum online, there's plenty of ways to skin this cat, and a certain amount of trial and error is usually required before a furnace master gets a repeatable process with a given source of iron ore.
How small can a blast furnace be? What is the chemical differences between coke & charcoal & would the result of using one over the other be different? Does the charcoal or coke work better when pulverized into dust for combining with iron oxides? Does the impurities seperate for easy removal when molten?
He's quite correct. Folding the steel during forging doesn't necessarily make it magically stronger than good quality steel you can buy off the shelf. What it does, is ensures that the steel's composition of impurities (like carbon) are evenly distributed throughout the entire piece, leaving no weak spots. This steel forms the blade of a katana. Steel is forged around the iron piece. This results in a sword that will not break easily/flex (iron), yet can take an incredibly sharp edge (the steel)
Awesome stuff, I'm truly impressed but I'd like to see more. What I'd like to see is start to finish. Loads of info on the materials you're using to make the steel and how you combine them. This is a new subject for me and I'm very interested in all the info I can get. Any study suggestions you have would be awesome also.
@inkva I believe you can just get the black sands you need from rivers and streams. look up gold panning. black sands are usually a secondary product of gold panning and may be collected or purchased from prospectors.
Hello Christopher, very nice and informative video on producing steel from iron ore. Though I have some questions. How is this tatara smelting process different from European bloomery furnaces? Both furnaces looks identical except for the long narrow end on the tatara smelter, and both furnaces follow the same steps shown in the video. Then why is the end product for the tatara smelter steel, and European bloomery furnaces iron? Also, how is European steel and tamahagane different? Japanese steel had to be folded to make the carbon content homogeneous, but what about European steel? Did they also fold their steel like the Japanese, or did they have a different approach to produce homogeneous steel? Thank you for this interesting video.
DerpTheGreat Materially, less difference than one might think. First it's important to distinguish the level of refinement needed for swords, vs. everything else made of metal in the same time and place. The key difference in the making, is the height of the stack, and the rate of air/charcoal/ore which is the balance that manages the end product's chemistry. In the Japanese case, the stacks were a little taller, which gave carbon more time to find its way into the iron, making steely bloom, where a viking furnace would usually be shorter, run faster, and not take up carbon as much in the process. That said, carbon can be added later through hearth refinement, taking bloomery material and re-melting it in a short charcoal-burning hearth, and a smith familiar with this process can adjust carbon content and melt out impurities without all the hammering and folding the Japanese process is famous for. Just different ways of skinning the cat, and despite the constant pressure of people wanting to know which is "better," there is no good objective answer to that - the craftsmen did what they needed to in order to create the tools and weapons in demand by their cultures in their time. Those of us who study historical metalcraft see the overlap in techniques among ancient cultures, but one has to remember that they were working in a world without a scientific understanding of carbon's role in steel, nor the impurities that grant certain properties when alloyed through smelting, native to the ores used. They also certainly didn't exchange information freely among themselves across continents like we do today, the knowledge of good steel production was guarded like nuclear secrets were in the 20th century. Such secrecy and reliance on traditions, accidental observation, and (what would appear to us today) very low tolerance or appetite for experimentation, builds an easy foundation for myths, legends, and wonder at the end product. Make no mistake, this is alchemy, magic to those who don't understand it. Even educated modern smiths can still marvel at it and feel a little "touched" by being able to turn rocks into the finest edged weapons known to man.
thanks for the reply , supose that was a semi-expected answer working with the metal wile hot only makes scence & wanting to know how your metal turned out is both curiousity & impatience i supose , are there any benetits to the steel in doing so that you know of other then keeping the momentum as far as working with it? . ps. sorry about any spelling/grammor mistakes im half asleap curently. lol
Raw Tamahagane is the large lump, the bloom extracted from the bottom of the furnace. The process of folding and welding, the manual cleaning process, is what produces a bar of steel that can be used to forge a blade with. This folding and welding is what produces the patterns typically seen in old japanese swords. Having done this myself several times, I'm not sure what the controversy is, Sadnessroams.
I was born and raised in a steel town (Youngstown), lived but 2 miles from the mills until age 8, my father and all his friends all worked in the mills through high school and college. My grandfather was a boiler engineer his entire life for one of the mills. From all that, did I know anything about how steel was made? No. In this video alone, I've learned more about how steel is actually made. Thank you!
Just discovered this video, I think I have found my new love. Thanks for making this. So awesome to watch how this is done. I will be looking for a class and group that does this kind of thing in my area.
I greatly enjoy videos such as this that give a detailed description in everyday lingo. They really come in handy as light, but educational material for friends with a bit of interest in the subject.
I'm not interested in producing steel for my foundry but it's really nice to get an understanding of the process . I'd loved to hang out with these cool guys to do this tho! Nice video!!!
This country needs more people like this. There's reading about something (most college) and then there's trying something (the rest of college) and then there's craftsmen/women and artisans that perfect processes through repetition, and are confident enough to share their knowledge with others.
I really enjoy this! thank you for putting this great video up!
In the iron age with that knowledge, this man would have been a rich privileged man.
Granite XD
Apparently the European blacksmith was often regarded as a kind of sorcerer.
Depends, in India they made really good steel, like damascus steel
Granite lol
+Yin Look Damascus steel would have been made from something very much like the bloom resulting from this method shown here.
It's nice to see people doing cool old world art. Much respect.
Wonderful video! Thank you for sharing this!
Great video! I have always been fascinated with this process, and you make it easy to understand. Thanks!
holy shit! I recognize the guy that made the ULFBERT sword. saw a documentary. that guy is an amazing blacksmith
Ric Furrer. That’s him.
Good eye! I have the documentary of making the sword on dvd but I didn’t know it was the same guy.
"Anyway..."
Flawless intro.
For something I expected to be rediculously boring to watch, this was actually something amazingly interesting to watch.
Amazing. Great video guys.
Thanks for posting this.
So many beards. So many beer guts. Keep up the good work gentlemen.
got lost in youtube and bumped into this vid.. thought it was boring but ended finishing the vid// its very interesting thx for the post good sir
absolutely fascinating!!! Loved this.. thank you!
One addition I'd like to see is how to find Iron Ore. i.e. where to find it, what does it look like and any visible signs that would help identify the Iron Ore. Outside of that, Great video on how to make steel from Iron Ore.. Thanks for the upload!! :)
Thank you for sharing this video and this incredible knowledge.
.
Fundamental secrets of human technical culture revealed. THANKS for an amazing video!
Man that looks awesome, making and doing things like this.
So awesome :)
looks like a gathering of the masters!
would love to tag along some year and just stand back and learn.
Thanks for sharing!
This is absolutely amazing.
Very interesting, thanks for the video!
very cool in a hot fashion, thanks for sharing
Thank you Christopher!
Hey guys, thanks for a great video.
Happy men at work. God bless you guys!
this is really great work!
You guys did a great job. It takes hard work and dedication to do it the old fashion way. Ive been thinking about picking up blacksmithing as a hobby so learning how to forge my own bars will be really helpful. Great video, keep doing what youre doing!
Very interesting and very educative. Thank you
makes sense. thanks for sharing - the vid and information is very cool!
Thank you very much for sharing
Great editing, kudos.
We all have to love these people.
So badass. I've always wanted to learn the depths of metalworking, forging in particular. I hope I get to try this out one day.
That was very interesting, thank you.
You can see this does not look like anything like a knife - that guy is funny!
great job mike! thanks!
The very same, and one of my several teachers of ancient steel-making.
I'm a metallurgist..they built a primative furnace. They put in iron ore (FeO, etc) and charcoal (C) and let it combust. Air entered through the tuyeres (tubes at the bottom that they were seem cleaning out) that then reacted with the charcoal to form CO and CO2, which heated up the iron ore and allowed FeO, etc to break up into cast iron/steel (depending on exact carbon content) and slag (SiO2, MnO, etc). For more into check out NOVA s35e05 "Making of a Samuri Sword"
Holy hell, your voice is so reminiscent of my late grandfather's voice, the comment on Virginia boys pushed that feeling even farther. I know it wasn't in any way your intention when you made this video but thanks, really gave me a good feeling.
That's Dr. Blue talking. I was the student then, filming and trying to learn a few things. I believe he resides in Montana now.
Miister Cloud l
Christopher Price My mistake, thanks for the response. I somehow missed it in my notifications. Probably going to start another binge on your videos. (: Thanks again for the upload.
Celine Merhen You? :b
Miister Cloud eedeeesdśssś
absolutely amazing
A TURBULENCE as in a "rocket nozzle" : absolutely brilliant!
(I speak in addition to the slow vehicle movement, part t. and no hard schedules, The Box club, publishing on waste receptacles and cans with saying such at stores). AGA9N, BRILLIANT.... PTL Almighty for you on this!
Awesome video. Nice to see Ric Furrer in a more layed back setting like this, and of course the awesome bloom. I'll be making a small scale tatara this winter hopefully, and this has helped a little bit (The sacrificial carbon for the bloom to expand.). Wish I was there.
I have no experience with metalworking, but this was fascinating to watch!
what a fascinating processes!
Looks like a lot of hard, dirty work. But at the end of the process when you finally finish the last bit of grinding and polishing on your totally home-made knife it must be satisfying. Great vid.
Awesome video! It's enlightening and informative, I really appreciate it. I love learning this kind of stuff. I think it's really important normal people learn how to make things on their own. It's the only real way to have any sort of independence in the world.
most beautiful thing i have seen so far involving fire
Very nice bloom you have there, sir.
Fascinating! I would love to do something like this.
Roasting and crushing increases the surface area. As Dr. Blue mentions, it's hot CO gas doing the work, so the more area exposed to that gas, the more efficient reduction of the ore into iron. You could take it as far as powdering it, but somewhere between sand and fine gravel is usually good enough. Roasting in particular creates fractures and liberates any chemically bound water, so you get gas pathways and less H2O in the way, as well.
Nothing brings the men together like a huge lump of red hot steel. Cool video :D
Wow that is very cool.
Congratulations.
like the Red Ballons, designed to make us feel good. Thank you.
I have one katana made of Tamahagane and the rest are medium carbon steel blades thank you for posting this video I love it. it has me want to make my own steel and forge my own.
This is one of those things I always wanted to get into. Smelting, SCUBA, and flying a helicopter. Well, I may have to be satisfied with just SCUBA but I want you to know I really appreciate this look into smelting the old way. Thanks so much for taking the time.
thank you for the vid. thinkin of makeing forging a new hobby and this looks to be like somthing i'd have to try
Aesthetic accident - I like that phrase.
this is awesome. nothing like making something right from the beginning
Old but gold 🥇
A lot of work for what you guys produce, good on ya!
I loved this video so much i wish i couldve been there to learn
Another comment below suggests that 6 years ago, the rate was at or above $100/pound. Possibly more these days, but it's hard to say, because few people smelting are willing to sell their material.
Also, with all the processing to consolidate the bloom, folding and welding, and final grinding, it takes at least 10 pounds of raw bloomery steel to end up with a 2 pound sword... much is lost to scaling, and compactness of the original material plays a big part in how much metal you end up with.
where do you get the iron powder from?
Either crush it from iron ore/bog iron or find it naturally like as an ironsand. Not sure where the best place is to buy it today.
I can't comment on Japanese law, but my recollection from back then (it was 7 years ago now... wow.) was that the samples were gifts from Japanese swordsmiths on a well-coordinated visit to a university, and through that professional exchange, a few pieces were offered for reference to compare the emerging American work to. Something like that. You'd have to ask Ric, though, for a better answer.
Not that I am aware of, but the community of people doing this has expanded greatly since this video was made.
Very nice guys👏👍👍👍👍👍
In several countries Iron Oxide lays in abundance in riverbeds or beaches. It resembles a black sand or dirt. The largest source of this material is New Zealand. In Japan they used this in place of ore dug from mines for the most part.
I watched the native Bolivians do this with Silver in Potosi in what looked like strawberry pots. Was really cool. The silver ore was placed in it, directly from the mines around Cero Rico. And then silver would ooze out the little lips all over the pot. I loved that simple design but have yet to Make one. Apparently it’s a very old tech dating back to the time of the Spanish and the Potosi Mint where the miners mined the ore, refined it down to silver puddles/streams and it was carted off to the mint, refined again and then alloyed and struck into cob coinage or large 80lb ingots.
Cool video. A big clump of human will and ingenuity.
I want to thank the people who got something from this video. I shot it before I fully understood the process, and have tried to add some helpful comments along the way. I've also just adjusted my account to match my proper name and email. Hopefully this will let me respond better to good questions about making steel in one of the traditional fashions.
You're right, and actually, at 1:43, the gentleman who just laid in the iron ore was talking about how the rhythm of the drums was a timing mechanism for older cultures to keep the right pace while feeding their furnaces.
This isn't meant to be the complete history of it, just one example filmed almost 7 years ago.
In 1813, Tabitha Babbitt (1784-1854) invented the first circular saw used in a saw mill. Babbitt was working in the spinning house at the Harvard Shaker community in Massachusetts when she decided to invent an improvement to the two-man pit saws that were being used for lumber production. Tabitha Babbitt is also credited with inventing an improved version of cut nails, a new method of making false teeth, and an improved spinning wheel head.
@Rhandahl That's kinda what he was saying. He was explaining that the folding process isn't just to make it look better, it actually has a funtional purpose.
Yes - 2 reasons. The first is probably human impatience, but the practical reason is that usually, the bloom is worked immediately, beginning that compression and cleaning process, and it's very difficult to get it as hot as it is in that furnace it was born in. Typically we quit feeding ore, give it another foot of charcoal, burn it down a bit, then extract the bloom with the air still running and burning the fire - take the bloom to a stump and start hammering it tighter and smaller.
As Dr. Blue mentioned in the video, it must be hammered flat, folded, and welded, over and over several times to get a homogeneous bar of steel, which one can then choose what to do with. For lack of power tools, strong men and hammers will do the trick - it just takes time.
I'm happy to disappoint you, then! Glad you enjoyed it.
Folding and welding is done, but it's just the manual process for getting from a chunky piece of bloom, to a solid clean bar of steel from which to make swords. There is a lot of hype about how a certain number of layers makes a blade stronger, but that's all it is. The patterns of folded steel are incidental to the desire for a clean, homogenous, slag-free blade.
its also amazing how much steel you can get from one fire!
Best thing to do is read the Bladesmith Forum online, there's plenty of ways to skin this cat, and a certain amount of trial and error is usually required before a furnace master gets a repeatable process with a given source of iron ore.
Awesome.
Thank you for the clarification.
How small can a blast furnace be? What is the chemical differences between coke & charcoal & would the result of using one over the other be different? Does the charcoal or coke work better when pulverized into dust for combining with iron oxides? Does the impurities seperate for easy removal when molten?
Whats your smithing lv?
Famila Senpai 99
someone here plays runescape I do as well lol
Skyrim reference
@@soulsreaper7145 the cape.. the old sandlot with three iron ores.. good times
I believe you meant "Metallurgist level". ;)
He's quite correct. Folding the steel during forging doesn't necessarily make it magically stronger than good quality steel you can buy off the shelf. What it does, is ensures that the steel's composition of impurities (like carbon) are evenly distributed throughout the entire piece, leaving no weak spots. This steel forms the blade of a katana. Steel is forged around the iron piece. This results in a sword that will not break easily/flex (iron), yet can take an incredibly sharp edge (the steel)
Awesome stuff, I'm truly impressed but I'd like to see more. What I'd like to see is start to finish. Loads of info on the materials you're using to make the steel and how you combine them.
This is a new subject for me and I'm very interested in all the info I can get. Any study suggestions you have would be awesome also.
I work on a similar furnace known as a BOS furnace, so seeing something of this scale is really interesting
The real teachers here. Thanks for the knowledge. It's only shaping from there.
For those wondering what the "dirt" or powder is, it is eventually Fe3O4 (Black iron oxide).
This looks like fun.
great vid
i have a question. what do you do different to get steel out the bottom in stead of iron .
@inkva I believe you can just get the black sands you need from rivers and streams. look up gold panning. black sands are usually a secondary product of gold panning and may be collected or purchased from prospectors.
Hello Christopher, very nice and informative video on producing steel from iron ore. Though I have some questions. How is this tatara smelting process different from European bloomery furnaces? Both furnaces looks identical except for the long narrow end on the tatara smelter, and both furnaces follow the same steps shown in the video. Then why is the end product for the tatara smelter steel, and European bloomery furnaces iron?
Also, how is European steel and tamahagane different? Japanese steel had to be folded to make the carbon content homogeneous, but what about European steel? Did they also fold their steel like the Japanese, or did they have a different approach to produce homogeneous steel?
Thank you for this interesting video.
DerpTheGreat Materially, less difference than one might think. First it's important to distinguish the level of refinement needed for swords, vs. everything else made of metal in the same time and place. The key difference in the making, is the height of the stack, and the rate of air/charcoal/ore which is the balance that manages the end product's chemistry. In the Japanese case, the stacks were a little taller, which gave carbon more time to find its way into the iron, making steely bloom, where a viking furnace would usually be shorter, run faster, and not take up carbon as much in the process.
That said, carbon can be added later through hearth refinement, taking bloomery material and re-melting it in a short charcoal-burning hearth, and a smith familiar with this process can adjust carbon content and melt out impurities without all the hammering and folding the Japanese process is famous for. Just different ways of skinning the cat, and despite the constant pressure of people wanting to know which is "better," there is no good objective answer to that - the craftsmen did what they needed to in order to create the tools and weapons in demand by their cultures in their time. Those of us who study historical metalcraft see the overlap in techniques among ancient cultures, but one has to remember that they were working in a world without a scientific understanding of carbon's role in steel, nor the impurities that grant certain properties when alloyed through smelting, native to the ores used. They also certainly didn't exchange information freely among themselves across continents like we do today, the knowledge of good steel production was guarded like nuclear secrets were in the 20th century. Such secrecy and reliance on traditions, accidental observation, and (what would appear to us today) very low tolerance or appetite for experimentation, builds an easy foundation for myths, legends, and wonder at the end product. Make no mistake, this is alchemy, magic to those who don't understand it. Even educated modern smiths can still marvel at it and feel a little "touched" by being able to turn rocks into the finest edged weapons known to man.
thanks for the reply , supose that was a semi-expected answer working with the metal wile hot only makes scence & wanting to know how your metal turned out is both curiousity & impatience i supose , are there any benetits to the steel in doing so that you know of other then keeping the momentum as far as working with it? .
ps. sorry about any spelling/grammor mistakes im half asleap curently. lol
Raw Tamahagane is the large lump, the bloom extracted from the bottom of the furnace. The process of folding and welding, the manual cleaning process, is what produces a bar of steel that can be used to forge a blade with. This folding and welding is what produces the patterns typically seen in old japanese swords. Having done this myself several times, I'm not sure what the controversy is, Sadnessroams.
thanks again the reply is apretiated.
What materials did you guys use to form the stack? Fire bricks and fireplace mortar?
Looks like a hell of a time though!