IRON from SAND - Oldest form of iron smelting
2024 ж. 20 Мам.
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Bloomery forges are the oldest form of smelting iron first used thousands of years ago. In early to mid 2019 a group of volunteers at The Crucible in Oakland, California did a series of smelts to make their own iron from iron-rich sand. This smelted iron was used for an art piece which will be the subject of the next video
No wonder alchemy became an obsession of those times. This was an era where people were learning how to make iron out of dirt and copper from green rocks. Lead into gold must've seemed like a perfectly reasonable goal to ancient people.
"Lead into gold" was a fundamental misunderstanding by people who weren't let in on the trade secret: lead is used in a more-or-less consumable fashion during the process of refining gold, and to a casual observer it *appears* that the lead is turning into gold. In reality, the lead is basically separating the impurities from the gold and carrying them away.
@@noiwonttellyoumyname.4385 is this gold-mercury amalgamation you’re talking about?
@@drakesmith471 No. Mercury can vaporize at room temp, so it's gone by the time gold melts. Lead melts at slightly lower temp than gold so it absorbs most of the contaminates, when the lead and gold solidify, giving you a purer form of gold.
But here's my big question (about so many things): how/why did anyone think to do this in the first place? What made some man think, "I want to make a material that doesn't exist and that I know nothing about and, I have an idea of how to do it?" Like, whaling: what sailor, upon seeing the largest creatures on the planet (swimming in the ocean) said to his captain, "Hey Ahab, I've got an idea."
@@leonardothefabulous3490 такая вещь есть, называется голод. Подвести под голод и можно выполнить.
I was smelting Iron 15 years ago when Skip was one of a small handful. Now smelting is more common. Every apprentice I have is taught how to make their own steel, charcoal, and tools from essentially nothing.
Can you please teach me how to smelt iron ore
Demon king Scott I'm trying to teach myself as well, friend. From what I've seen, If you don't have a big fancy forge, you might be able to make a little one furnace out of just mud and bricks ect. I think you kinda just crush up the iron ore rocks and put them in the little furnace, then find a way to pump it or fan it with air to get it as hot as you can. Then you pull out whatever hot mess is inside and hammer it a bit and look for little metal bits and break them off. Then maybe try heating those up alone and hammering them together, or melt them if you can get it hot enough. Just the stuff I've picked up from watching KZhead videos, I haven't done anything myself. I may try to learn from a blacksmith at some point
You people should learn how to also make coke from charcoal and also add some wood ashes (calcium carbonate, more commonly known as limestone). If you make the bloomeries a bit bigger and recycle its heat back to preheat the intake air, you can easily melt iron like a blast furnace.
Bob Gatewood Wood ashes in particular are something I've been interested in lately. I don't know much about coke though
@@andrewprahst2529 coke burns a lot hotter than plain charcoal, it is a purer form of carbon: m.kzhead.info/sun/YK2qnsmaf2akZ6M/bejne.html About the ashes, the mix of calcium carbonate and potassium carbonate will react with the silica and silicates in the iron ore, binding them and easing the process of removing impurities from iron. Ashes from sodium rich plants, such as glasswork, work best. I recommend to also make clay molds so that, when you tap the slag, it can be poured into these molds, producing some beautiful glass (making glass is also a challenging process, so I facepalm at how much of it is wasted by metallurgists).
Sorry for the problem with the audio. There was a technical issue with the lav mic and I ended up having to use the camera mic which was less than ideal. I tried to de-reverb it as much as possible without distortion and here we are. If you are having difficulty hearing, I went in and cleaned up the Captions so hit the CC button and you should be able to read and follow along. Thanks for watching!
@Buro Dackel good luck in life.
@Buro Dackel Are you okay little person? Where is your mother? Are you lost?
Thanks for the great service putting this together! I used headphones and it was fair enough but that's just me - kudos for going the extra mile on the captioning!
The music playing constantly makes this issue way worse. The talking is actually fine the few times the music drops out but I find this basically unlistenable with the music and the youtube compression.
@Buro Dackel Omg, you are so cute! Does your mommy know you watch youtube? She should really talk to your teachers about your spelling and grammar though!
What an incredible job you did capturing this project! Thank you for your great work telling this story from our Blacksmithing Department.
I appreciate all of your cottage efforts doing the real hands on deal...I got to see enormous heats and the entire process working at Bethlehem steel, Sparrows Point in the 70's to 2000's...
IRON MAKING VIDEOS kzhead.info/tools/5zGSn-svPs9QETPcYMAOzg.html
they cant simply DO IT. !
3 suggestions: Use 2 grates to sort fuel by size. Secondary containment will protect workers as well as concrete from spall. Masks to prevent silicosis.
Bloom iron is such a rare thing to see these days, and I'm so happy to see you all keeping that process alive while teaching people about it. Thanks for all the hard work!
making crucible steel is better OwO
So true and many fail to achieve what they have achieved...it was truly incredible
kzhead.info/sun/fMx8gdKphWuiZ5E/bejne.html
@@lordblack9984 years, but crucible steel is flawed sadly. Since it has a really high carbon content, a treated crucible sword would essentially be like wielding a giant file
Thank you. For me that was historic and gave me a sense of understanding what our forbearers experienced in their pursuit of iron.
Thank you for this presentation. I discovered my pyromania at an early age and focused on jobs around furnaces and welding. I have never done what I saw you do. You're a keeper. Enjoy
That's an awesome community you have there. If you're part of it, I just want to say that it's really cool that you have people you can really enjoy a passion with for the most basic of human endeavors for the sake of "square one" know-how. Farming, metal-working, and carpentry are the tools on which civilizations are built and can be REBUILT.
It was actually sphengum moss that we used. Not peet moss. I don't know why I said that
Hi Celeste. Nice job. You are a lovely and talented woman.
Celeste you are are the best part of this whole video, your enthusiasm is contagious!
@@laurenmabe4932 thank you! It's also a testament to good editing.
Sphagnum moss is peat moss
Have you tried adding a hot blast system to the intake air?
That is good to have an organization like this. Keep our knowledge alive among the masses.
That was great. It’s really interesting to think about those people, so long ago, who had to understand that there was something they could do that they never did before. Smelting iron requires so much more heat than copper alloys, or silver or gold. It was an entirely new technology they invented, from almost scratch. How long did these early efforts take before it was worthwhile and reliable? We have to remember that smelting Bronze Age ores was something that happened by accident, when people found bits of melted metal in their cooking fires, and realized that this was useful, and so deliberately put ore into fires, until they had it working well. But that doesn’t work with iron, so from the very beginning, they had to figure out that so much more heat was required. Then they had to figure out the principle of blowing air into the fire to heat it up. Even noting that wind heated fires. That’s a big step. But the understanding that iron was so important, and had so many advantages over bronze, brass and copper, spurred on this major revolutionary effort over decades, until it became reliable, with enough quality for a major use category. We sometimes think we’re so much smarter than these much more primitive people, but we’re not. In many ways, considering where they were starting from, they were so much more advanced in their thinking than we are today.
They were the great minds of their day. We still have people like that, we just don't hear about them and they aren't glorified on reality tv and the like.
How they made iron tools, rings, etc, in the ancient ages?
The Crucible is a terrific place, thanks for sharing this.
Hi, really enjoyed the video. Thanks so much for taking the time to film it all and share.
Something just so cool about making things from scratch.
Iys called 'the sense of accomplishment' you get at the end after you sweat your ass off for hours lol
I think it's a sense of independence. Knowing that you have the knowledge to create anything you want with some effort. Being dependent on companies to provide for you feels limiting. This sharing of knowledge is very liberating.
Jerry Whidby can you share me any knowledge, I’m studying chemistry and I’m way in over my head and i think sand has a lot of meaning if I could melt it
Jerry Whidby it's not though...everything they've done was using modern methods and tech...they basically used a leaf blower bellows and also used a magnet to extract iron from sand lmfao this wasn't an experiment it was literally just playing around with iron smelting. If they wanted to do it for real they would have built a kiln, built bellows, and had someone manually bellowing, heating iron ore, crushing it up, heating etc, not...this...this isn't historic lol people didn't have magnets, they heated up pure sand which worked because it was flax and iron already.
that’s why our modern lives are meaningless as fuck.
Wow! What an amazing organization. I've never seen a bloom produced from sand before. I'm used to seeing larger pieces of iron ore. It was very interesting and informative to watch the process. Thanks for sharing!
You should watch some videos from Japan on traditional tamahagane smelting ... they use black sand.
Love your video. It's great to hear about your challenges as well as your successes. Such a detailed process description too. Very enjoyable to watch. Thanks for posting!
5:30 "Beautiful, beautiful thing that happens" Lava looking Slag explodes into the air
*fucking dies*
I've been at The Crucible a number of times for woodworking tool events. It is a real gem of a place.
What a great shared story of iron, we enjoyed this video. It is very interesting to watch. Thank you. Lance & Patrick.
Hi Celeste, glad you’re doing well in your artistic pursuits. I went to high school with Celeste and she was a very talented artist whom at that time was mostly practicing 2D art from my memory, but has become a badass blacksmith. Hella cool.
Nice to see another video from you!
I feel like humans have always loved, since very ancient ages, making iron or steel from iron ore, charcoal and fire using the same process, all over the world , and this pleasure still continues .... thanks for the nice video.
Celeste what an artistic and passionate soul
It is great that you have had this enriching experience. Thanks for sharing it.
Used to volunteer for the crucible in the toolshop. Tons of fun, learned a lot.
did you ever produce metal from ore? or was it only used for melting/remelting?
@@supersonic060 when I was there we only forged from stock or scrap metal.
We've done this over on our channel several times. Always good to see more interest in such a fundamental process. JB
Awesome smithing vid Celeste. The crucible program sounds really cool. The Japanese have been using iron sand throughout the past feudal ages to make all of their awesome blades for Katana/Naginata/Yari..
Her enthusiasm for doing this project is very sweet. Literally like a child opening presents Christmas morning. Lovely to see and enjoy.
I worked for Valley Mould & Iron back in the 70's . We made moulds for the steel mills.I was at the Cleveland works.
that is the most intelligent informative discussion of smelting, with well edited illustrations i have seen!
i just wanted to say that i think what you do is very important and these skills must never be lost..i am a master mason in stone and brickwork and i know how essential it is that these skills be kept and taught...thanx..gday from oz...Ty
Thank you for sharing your video, Iron from Sand. It was more explanatory than most I have seen. If you plan to do this again I would be interested in signing up for a smelting class or at least volunteering. I have been experimenting with smelting here in Alaska with several mediums that have become saturated with iron from ground water , same theory as Bog ore. Each time I learn something new but I would like to see someone else's operation in person. Rick
6:20 - damn, you just might have solved a very, very old question. An Assyrian king wrote to a Hittite king asking for iron. The Hittite king replied that it was a bad time of year for making iron. That's always seemed like a puzzling thing for him to say. But if it's winter (Anatolia gets snow in the winter, and is ringed by mountains) and the air used in the bellows(?) was too cold, so that you can't heat up the furnace enough... suddenly that statement makes sense! P.S. I pass by the Crucible on BART all the time!
Very intriguing!
That is interesting, except for 2 things. First, the ancient hittites and egyptians lived at a lattitude that never saw snow ... winters were/are very temperate in their region. Second, with the temp inside the forge pushing 2300-2500F, a few tens of degrees difference on ambient air aint gonna have a lot of impact.
Indeed even modern Blastfurnaces heat preheat the air
But colder air also means more oxigen per volume.. Also heat looses through the walls get increased when colder...interesting!!
The poor timing probably more relates to their own personal weapon-making tempo. "Sorry, bro. This is the season we devote to the military contracts, try again later."
Really great. Thanks for taking the to make the video and share it
I'm a new subscriber of yours, and I am blown away by your visuals. Thank you for the work you do!
Very cool, thanks for sharing!
I just found this channel.... no posts for a year. Where did everybody go!?! Please some back....
Check his website. The follow-up vid is there, and a few comments about why he pulled it from youtube. I expect he'll be back here soon.
Please some back what?
Dr. Lex Winter *come Also didn’t know you had a website. Will check out immediately. Thanks for the replies.
Looking forward to seeing the art piece. A fascinating journey.
It won't disappoint. It's just unspeakably awesome.
Thank you for a great video on iron making!
Very cool! 😁 Thanks for the video.
Reminds me of my old hippie days doing pottery. This is obviously far more difficult. Great video. Glad to see folks teaching themselves this stuff.
It's pretty closely related. We handbuild the furnace and the treat iron like clay
Such a fascinating and beautiful process to watch. Thank you for sharing 🙏🏻
Beautiful video. Keep up the amazing work y'all do.
I was worried we'd not get another video
🦐
I was worried we would 😂
@@americanlivesmatter-BmanWild And yeah, this was the last one...
"Gently hit it with sledgehammers" lol. Cool video.
as a former metal worker and demolition specialist, when it comes to sledgehammers... there is no such thing as gently
Her enthusiasm is hearthwarming.
Hey Machine Thinking, I miss your videos! They are great, come back to make some more when you can!
What an amazing community project! I'd love to get involved in a project like this!
Super cool video! This is exactly how the feudal Japanese swordsmiths made their blades. They didn't have a reliable source of high quality iron ore, so they used iron sands in a bloomery furnace. The resulting iron was then chipped off, flattened and then formed into ingots, which would then be folded hundreds of times to evenly distribute the carbon content, making primitive steel.
They did have high quality ores such as mochi tetsu, which is basically high purity magnetite/lodestones. These were abundant and easy to aquire. For folding, only about 10 or so times depending if it was iron or steel.
Current day Japanese swordsmiths use the exact same technique… (yes, they still exist).
Love it ! Love the history part and the fire truck. You looked so happy and excited. Use to live by a park in Jersey and they had an old blast furnace for making iron for cannon balls.God bless you and your family Aloha
Aww. Thank you. It's a labor of love
Thanks for sharing, I loved watching the process!
Awesome! Reminds me of the late Christopher Roy's videos on West African iron smelting.
Buro Dackel You're an epic dick.
Very well explained. Especially having enough flux. With some of those big peaces how do you bring it back up to heat for forge welding?
We have large natural gas forges
@MrLeading Entertainment there’s no way to know for sure who was first. One thing is for sure, the whole world benefits from it today. The world doesn’t benefit from hyper sensitive, constantly offended, history revisionist liberals. So take another pill and put your mask back on. FYI - Trump, the man of steel, is getting four more years because of voters like me.
@MrLeading Entertainment Not taking anything away from the independent discovery in Africa but the Hittites were the first to smelt iron about 1000 years before the Haya did. They first smelted iron around 1500 bce not 500bce as the time table you supplied for the Haya. However if they were reliably making steel at that time that is an impressive accomplishment at that period. Universities were created first by the Ethiopian empire though.
They had white africans back then?
@@oldstudbuck3583 oh yeah , bring that devil of a being into it. Someone should smelt a piece of lead and give it to him yesterday. Give it to him fast , like super sonic between the eyes. Trump can F off to hell. He won’t be in Whitehouse again thank glob.
This is a fantastic effort. Loved this video.
I liked it. Thank you Loader. I have not done it in a long time. But it's a lot of fun to go through it step by step.
A fantastic video. New Zealand Steel still makes steel from iron sand but they don't use a blast furnace, instead they use a rotary kiln to reduce the iron to avoid some of the problems you discovered.
You don't really want to make rust by letting it oxidize
This is amazing I've love to be a part of this, even as a volunteer
kzhead.info/sun/fMx8gdKphWuiZ5E/bejne.html
Great to see you back
I love this school and this Woman’s energy
Its a Goood Day when Machine Thinking releases a new video!
A lot of hate in the comments so far for this one! Who woulda thunk that primitive iron smelting would be controversial? Of course there can always be improvements, but it's an informative, interesting, and I'd argue *good* video. Thanks!
The negative comments are from people who have never done anything in the real world. Looking through some of their channels it looks like they are just virtual activities, gaming.
@@tinayoga8844 couldn't be that the "___" have insulted and memory holed so many people that anything associated with them is going to be attacked.
I don't see them
A group of us Tucson Neotribal Metalsmiths did this some years back, using the same materials and processes. Great fun and a respectable bloom that eventually became a very handsome knife!
NICE! Do you have any photos from this time?
@@sagebrushrepair I didn't take any pictures of the festivities. It took place at Tai Goo's workshop out in the desert north of Tucson. Tai's a Master Bladesmith and has a website that may have some shots from the weekend some years ago.
Great work Celeste.
HI Great video. The way to get a hotter melt is to make a double walled furnace and direct the air between the two walls so it pre-heats before it enters the burning zone in the furnace. the hotter the air for combustion is the hotter the melt will be.
goldassayer93555 The long iron pipe taking the air in would also heat up and would begin to pre-heat the air fairly quickly but just not as well as a double-walled furnace.
I once got sand out of sand. It was slightly anticlimactic.
I hope you got it on video!
@@MrUbiquitousTech it is classified now. Them Saharas do not want me to share the secret of sand.
@@1337fraggzb00N Darn, that could have been revolutionary!
@@MrUbiquitousTech indeed, old chap, indeed.
@Joe Devola No waiting involved, it's just what she said every time after our carnal interludes. Great video, but you can't lob me up a free shot alike that and expect me not to take a swing at it.
Well the job done successfully wasn't that easy to achieve at all...that was really just incredible congratulations to all your team💎
I miss this channel
Very interesting and great to see a new vid from you 👍 Imagine the frustrations of the pioneers of this process without the benefit of hindsight. Thr history and science of metallurgy are truly fascinating and one of the pillars of modern society.
A new Machine Thinking video? I've got so much time for that.
Great video, much love, God Bless you ALL
OMG! This was so amazing!
The best thing ever. Thanks bless for sharing. God bless.
I'd never heard of using flux in these, that's cool to know. Thanks!
Yep, without the flux you will need to burn much hotter.
If you use iron ore, there are a lot of silicates in it. These would normally be the flux, they only had to add Sand, because their Source of iron was very pure.
Your channel is awesome 👍!!! Keep up the good work!!!!
Practice makes perfect, I'd say it was a huge success. Imagine this process being improved through generations upon generations
I'm all over this video. Soo content right now :)
There is a smelting festival every year in Ireland!
There's got to be a joke in there somewhere...
they do it twice ,, to be sure to be sure !!
I bet it always smelt bad
Fascinating! Thank you!
Is good to bring back alive of a old traditional blacksmith trade. I was a blacksmith since 7 yrs old for almost 32 yrs following my father in Spore. We use to manufacture crowbars, hand tools, tongs, spanner, etc. but the gov had deter the trade by not issuing anymore license. I still remembered using the church hill spring leaf forger which have more impact power than the pneumatic type. Is so good that someone is rejuvenating the blacksmith trade where the young ones does not know what is it.
I wonder, how much time and effort did it take for people to first come up with those techniques in ancient times? It boggles the mind!
Being as it meant life or death you can say the motivation was there.
Bog ores the mind.
2000 years.
She's so dreamy! A lady that knows her iron. 😍
Absolutely captivating.
Okay, post viewing comment :) This was a great video. I learned a great deal about the actual process of smelting and it makes me even more excited to try it someday. Celeste is a great speaker, and explained things wonderfully. I'm saying 'great' a lot. Must mean I liked it ;)
I would like to suggest a video for the whole school to watch called ( Smelting Iron in Africa (A DEMONSTRATION) ) it was filmed by the people of the village that built the smeltery they used for the film and shows the basic's of very old smelting technic's similar to the version you built not to crack on your's but as a sampler of a native smeltery as it was done for century's
I can second that recommendation.
May be totally out of the topic, but one , can't but wonder were that iron comes from & what level of purity it have..... Hey can it actually be use to make steel?? from my humble perspective there's tons of possibilities... great job!!
Wow! Thanks so much for such an incredibly interesting, well presented vid on the process. I learned something new today.
You're not bad at smelting, it's just hard! 🤣 The bounce house pump is BRILLIANT! For my much smaller setup, I use air-mattress pump and I always worry it can't handle running continually for hours and it'll burn out.
Small correction: while Hittites conquered Babylon once, their homeland was in central Anatolia (central strip of modern-day Turkey) and not Mesopotamia proper.
Thank you for that. That's what I get for trusting a social sciences text book!
4:01 - The chimney looks like something straight out of an alien movie.
True, like a spine of some sort. Unique, nevertheless.
@@Blackridge. Yeah, right!Or a ribcage or something
That’s fantastic!! Great video!!!
Really makes you appreciate the difficulty that people in the ancient past must have had to get going on producing useful quantities of useful metals. To start out from nothing, inventing and building the processes from scratch. Some very smart, inquisitive and very stubbornly patient people must have been involved.
Dude imagine making a dagger out of a meteor before iron was even invented
Only the worthy can wield the meteorite dagger of legend
Iron was not invented
@Michael Otten and super cool
fitofight non-stupid people understood what the comment meant. did you understand?
Iron itself is foreign to earth, it could be the meteor ur talking about, however no one invented iron as it was discovered no created.
Where does the Iron rich sand come from?
You can find it in most Rivers. Goldrefiners love the black sand, because it also contains a lot of gold.
FourFive Bootneck They've been making steel in Seki City since the 1200s.
Clay
I’m going to be making bloom iron from bog ore and I’m excited. This was super cool!
great project thanks for posting
Wait! Why was the fire department there? Did someone call because they didn't know what you were doing with a furnace? If so, what did you tell them?
Schools these days are so obsessed with safety. At my school we had a campfire at the end of the semester and they had the fire department there to supervise it.
Well, some might say it's.... their department. Really though it's because someone called them and said there's a huge amount of fire coming from behind a building down the street after business hours.
@Supreme Leader Spock And all the Helicoptering Parents were probably nervous too. 🤪
The fire department is the law enforcement arm of the EPA and AQMD. Any visable smoke produced is a violation of the clean air act.... you're lucky you weren't fined and jailed. ;) jk.....
Most likely it is because of the sparks blowing out of the furnace. They can start fires elsewhere. And if it is not the sparks, then it is people being people.
What is the logic in breaking and sorting the charcoal by hand when there are machines that do this, but using modern technology (a magnet) to separate out black sand rather than by panning?
Panning to get black sand would work of course, but so would a loadstone (natural magnet). Both methods were likely known to the Hittites.
Wow! This was so much fun to watch!
Sensational! Well done - most inspirational