August 17, 201114 yr I found this material on my land and i would like to find a use for it. It is magnetic and heavy (in the iron family ) it doesn't seem to rust though. I had 2 pieces analyzed and they came back, the first 1) 73% fe, <0.003 C and the remainder is oxygen other metals ARE MANGANESE .43 silicon .76 al .65 the res is trace amounts. the second 2) fe 65% .001 C, MANGANESE.34 silicon 2.6 al 3.08 titanium .24 the rem is oxygen I would like to sell this if i can ,and i would really like to know what it is. I can also upload the analysis sheet if necessary. thanks in advance Genopictureshttp://files.enginee...Picture_102.jpghttp://files.enginee...2&file=Ore1.jpghttp://files.enginee...4&file=Ore2.jpghttp://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=5ebfb781-3d32-4c38-93fb-2f
August 17, 201114 yr Welcome Geno. From the pic it looks like a pile of rocks. Does that mean that is what they are? Sorry I could not help it Do you have a forge to try to heat one and see what happens if you hammer on it? Also you should update your profile to show your location, maybe eight people down the road will be able to help out. Rob
August 17, 201114 yr I do not have a forge, but there use to be an iron works back there Where is there?
August 17, 201114 yr Sounds like an iron ore with that much O2---is that a weight per cent BTW? How many tons do you have? Scrap Steel is under $200 a ton, ore would be much much cheaper! If the Si was higher I'd think it was a slag. If it is an ore you might be able to sell some of the nicer samples at rock shops.
August 17, 201114 yr Author I just sold scrap steel for 300 a ton 2 weeks ago. There is in my back yard . It use to belong to rolling mill factory, i think they built railroad spikes and iron plates . part of the old tredagar iron works, dating back to the civil war. the recycling plant testes with the rx gun and it cam back as 97% fe . the chemical analysis, i dont know if that is weight per cent
August 17, 201114 yr Author i have several thousand tons of this. the ground is also is also black , with iron filings
August 17, 201114 yr Author Sounds like an iron ore with that much O2---is that a weight per cent BTW? How many tons do you have? Scrap Steel is under $200 a ton, ore would be much much cheaper! If the Si was higher I'd think it was a slag. If it is an ore you might be able to sell some of the nicer samples at rock shops. We thought it was ore at first, but there aren't an nasty impurities to it. it all trace amounts of mostly everything and someone burned off all the carbon somehow . i cant tell if its weight per cent . not sure what that means if it is or is not .
August 17, 201114 yr Author Sounds like an iron ore with that much O2---is that a weight per cent BTW? How many tons do you have? Scrap Steel is under $200 a ton, ore would be much much cheaper! If the Si was higher I'd think it was a slag. If it is an ore you might be able to sell some of the nicer samples at rock shops. I went back and look at the analysis and it states "The chemical composition that was performed only provides the amount of each individual element that is in the material based on weight percent "
August 17, 201114 yr I'm ~90 minutes north of you. I wouldn't pay a lot for this stuff, but I'd sure like to get some. Iron making is in my future, and I have had limited success finding decent quality local ore sources, at least ones that are accessible to me. (I have learned some cool history in the process of searching for the stuff, though.) Shoot me a PM if you'd be willing to part with some. I'm afraid I can't take thousands of tons, though. I'm thinking more along the lines of hundreds of pounds.
August 17, 201114 yr My first thought was Spiegeleisen from that one shot but with the original amount of O2 and the low amount of MN it doesn't seem likely. Hmm specular hemetite? Now who says ore has to have nasty impurities in it? The ore I use in my bloomery is almost 100% magnetite that stuff has a lot of other compared to what I use! One of the problems seems to be that the analysis is jumping all over the place. Much more common with an ore than with a finished product. Have you taken it to the local university's geology department and gotten their take on it? Matt are you planning a bloomery run? If so that's not a good ore to use you will have to crush it finely to make it usable. I've crushed hard ores by hand and it's not an easy task even after pre-roasting them. Talk with Lee Sauder about what they are using for ore!
August 17, 201114 yr Yeah, crushing it is the hard part. I haven't quite figured that out yet. I have a five gallon bucket's worth that I collected at the site of a very old ore pit out in West-by-God Virginia, but it's in big chunks. It breaks up reasonably easily after pre-roasting, but shrapnel flies everywhere and I haven't yet devised a way to avoid losing a bunch of it. (Not that it should be terribly hard.) I have communicated with Lee a little, but he's a good distance from me. By the way, when you say, "finely," how fine are we talking? I've never had a very good handle on exactly how small it needs to be.
August 17, 201114 yr Some of the best smelts we did using Y1K techniques used 100 mesh magnetite or "iron sand" collected from the shore of a lake with a magnet. (That was coarser than the 100 mesh but was still in the sand grain size range. ) We also used some earthern ore before, goethite as I recall.
August 17, 201114 yr Author btw i have all size material , the lumps , aggregate size and fines. so no breaking up required . doesn't hemetit have more of a rust color . these are grayish blue to black in color. Matt i will give you some if you want to melt it . i want to know what this is how it melts anything i can find out . if you cant see from the picture the tops of these are flat as if they have already been melted.
August 18, 201114 yr I thought some of those bigger pieces looked kind of slaggy and molten. The iron content seems high for this, but I wonder if you have a slag heap there. At any rate, 65-70% iron is enough for what I'd like to do. The goal would be something like this: http://iron.wlu.edu/Bloomery_Iron.htm Not melting it, exactly. Just stripping away the oxygen to turn it into metallic iron. If the stuff you sold a couple weeks ago came back 97% iron, I wonder if it was wrought iron. Modern mild steels would be around 99% Fe. Was it really rusty? I'll shoot you a PM about getting some of this to try smelting with. The fines are magnetic as well? I could build a riddle to screen out the bigger stuff.
August 18, 201114 yr Ah, I see Thomas already rejected the slag idea. Hmm. Well, regardless, it's mostly iron and oxygen, and that's all I really need to hear. :)
August 18, 201114 yr It looks like slag from a blast furnace or some operation like that. The high concentration of oxygen would come from the oxygen that is blown into the molten matt to burn off excess carbon and make steel.
August 18, 201114 yr Author what is slag , to me slags are generally used as a waste removal mechanism in metal smelting
August 18, 201114 yr Rather high in Al too; which is added to kill steels. The Si is within wrought iron levels but the O2 looks too high for that and the Si looks low for most of the slags I have been involved with. (like Fayalite---Fe2SiO4) (note that the scrap price for steel *is* higher on the coasts as the shipping costs are lower compared to in rural NM)
August 18, 201114 yr Author i ADDED THE SPECS FROM THE CHEMICAL ANALYSIS TO THE FIRST POST , I ACCIDENTALLY ADD THE SAME ONE TWICE BUT I HAVE FIXED THAT KNOW . ...SRY FOR THE CAPS
August 18, 201114 yr It looks kind of like some slag that was broken up near Lead, SD where they put a road through a bunch of it from the old dump sight near one of the old gold mines. Interesting looking stuff, I hope it turns out to be a useful pile of "rocks" for someone.
August 20, 201114 yr Lee Sauder says it looks like slag to him. I didn't ask him about the chemical analysis, though.
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