Charcoal making and iron smelting? Well, almost.

Marveltone · Jun 15, 2011

Limestone? Thanks! I'll pass that information on to Dean, as he's the brains behind the madness. A few changes to the furnace may help, as you say, but we don't want to use any propane. The original premise was if the ancient Romans could smelt ore with charcoal, so could we. We already cheated quite a bit as it is, but we want to stick to our guns with the fuel. We have lots of homework to do before we try it again... probably next summer.

Thanks for the heads up on the IR rays. Good thing to know! I see goggles in the near future.

Joe

DAY · Jun 16, 2011

Thanks for the tip. I was actually wondering about using a kiln for such a purpose. Now... Who in my area has a kiln?

Just about any college or high school art department will have a ceramics class. If they don't want to "play" with you, they will know a potter who does! Cone 10 is 2400 degrees, hot enough to 'git 'er done'.

forgeblast · Jun 16, 2011

Iron Furnaces
Festival focuses on overlooked origins | Go Lackawanna, Scranton, PA
we have an iron fest/art fest every year. the iron furnaces are huge!!
Congrats, there are a lot of backyard metal casting sites. They also have a lot of different forge/casting designs.
I melt aluminum, and have iron forms that i cast them into thats fun also.
You can do vaporization casting once you get it up to speed, using styrofoam forms burried into damp general purpose sand. Just cast these outside.
I have poured bronze, aluminum, silver(lost wax), and glass. Once you get that forge fired up your hooked.

Egon · Jun 16, 2011

Just about any college or high school art department will have a ceramics class./QUOTE]

Ceramic kilns are not high fire.

AndyG · Jun 28, 2011

I don't think that a Kiln will work. You must have the blast of air to smelt the iron from the ore.

forgeblast · Jun 29, 2011

The smelting furnace we had in college was rigged from an old vaccum cleaner.
before I had my welder, to cast my aluminum, I had a local welder make me a steel crucible, and some molds. its basically some pipe with a bottom welded on and two chain links (one at the top, one at the bottom) welded so that you have something to grab. I use tongs, and the hook from a turkey frier to move the crucible when its hot.