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I Forge Iron

Micah Burgin

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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Rhode Island, The one squiggly bit
  • Interests
    Metalwork, both hot and cold, machining, and computer graphical and game design

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    gtvpc.officer

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  1. Now that is just incredible. And educational! I'd never heard of non-shoe reeboks before this post. The more you know!
  2. Sorry about dropping off of the face of the earth for a few months there. I was going to billet it (Which I believe is the correct term for ingots forged from blooms) but my lack of tongs struck again... Channel locks did not help very much. Sill, I got it reasonably well formed before things started burning and I decided proper tools are pretty much necessary. Anyways, I'm currently working on setting up a fire clay bowl for my forge and getting some charcoal to light it a bit more easily but once that's done I'll be getting back in the swing of things with summer coming up.
  3. Yeah, I'm planning on getting some known steel for the next one. This one was mainly designed to look good, and I needed to test the ability to normalize, so I used this for both. Turned out quite well, actually. I just left it in the forge right after the blower had been turned off for the day and the steel was held at curie for probably 30~ minutes and then gradually cooled to resting.
  4. Suprisingly well balanced, this miniature Kukri is a birthday gift for a friend. The finish was mainly left so dirty to make it noticeably hand forged, since the friend in question is a scout and has many knives, making a unique design much more exciting. I'm going to make a matching leather sheath, pics when completed. I left the blade unsharpened because of my friend's preference of blade geometry for sharpening being a bit odd. But we're here for pictures! The knife is pretty small, about 4" of blade and the same in the grip. Quite well balanced with the bulged tip accounting for the thicker base. The steel is left pretty soft, because I would prefer blade folding over shattering since it's easier for me to repair, and I have no skill in heat treating but I know how to anneal well. That said, it still held an edge through being thrown at wood, so I think it'll do fine. All he has are commercial stainless knives anyhow, so this is an upgrade, This was mainly an exercise in shaping practice. If it weren't for rebar's frustrating texture, this would not have needed so much grinding work after it came out of the forge, but it still worked well enough. Personally, I like the smooth look of hammer finish more than the end grinder finish though.
  5. Yeah, I'm working on that, also trying to source waste oil from the chic-fil-a my sister works at. Problem is, I can't pull the six-pack trick, being under the age of 21... Now that, that is exactly what rebar is, Actually, we were driving to new york at one point, and I saw a truck carrying 2+ inch rebar and my brain was going mile a minute with the things I could do. Just imagine, rebar horn for your sledgehammer head anvil. The ultimate homemade anvil setup on the cheap, :3
  6. Yeah, I can't wait to get some known steel. Hopefully christmas comes through, that was essentially my christmas list right there, welding gear and known steel, :3 I tested this stuff, actually, it appears to be relatively high carbon. It's not going to be used for too much heavy duty stuff either, otherwise this would just be the prototype!
  7. ... so I figured, piece of rebar, bit of time, and I've got one! I took a piece of rebar a little over two feet long, and made an out-of-my-depth attempt at a pickaxe, so I realized that wouldn't work halfway through and looked at my interestingly shaped apprentice mark. Thought about it a second, and went, "Wait, wait, I got real lucky here, this is definitely a crowbar!" So, I made a crowbar. This thing isn't half bad either, I got my workbench (A 200# bench without anything on it loaded down with the majority of my shop, so let's say... 400#) an inch off the ground with it, so I'm calling it good. I needed a pickaxe (TP knows why, I've got dreams of iron ore!) and a pry bar for rock moving (That one's just to make getting clay easier though) so I was very happy with the results. I also ended up with my approximation of a micro-pick, but sadly, the weld didn't take. Usually my welds take, but the fire must've been dirty. (Did I mention that the first thing I got good at was not missing the metal with the hammer, and the second was forge welding? Yeah that happened) Anyway. the shovel end didn't work out so I had to just grind the spike and I'm planning to use the back to crack apart partially broken rocks. Anyway, here's some pictures for the curious. I'm still leaving hammer marks but I managed to only leave three or four on this one, and I'm re-mounting my anvil tomorrow so that should solve (*some of) my issues .
  8. So, I made a magnet sluice, and it works great. I'm going to set up a slurry maker (Bad term, I know) which can filter the rocks out of the dirt and then I'll cycle the water (Let settle and siphon with a pump) in order to keep from wasting it. The slurry will probably get run through the magna-sieve two or three times just to be certain all the magnetite is out and then I'll just use it as clay (Which it appears to be... A low temp clay that melts really easily) from there. Hopefully as I get deeper the magnetite concentration will get greater (Sampling the dirt from different layers has suggested this will happen) but I have gotten a fair bit of the stuff already (Not much, but considering dirt from my backyard is the source of it, a lot for twenty minutes of work) Hopefully, I can set up a well oiled system from ground to bloomery, and hopefully this clay will work for bloomery outer walls. The inner will need to be some sort of non-melty clay though.
  9. You could probably just burn some peat and check the ashes (With a magnet, of course) in order to find out if a bog precipitates iron. I mean, that's not much of a hassle.
  10. Nice! I'm going to go down to the nearby beach and see if I can pick up anything from the sand. Nice part is, it's on the side where the runoff is coming from (I'm on a peninsula, and we have beaches on both sides, so I can see which is best) so it's likely to have something there. On to the exciting bit: There's magnetite in the dirt! Tiny bits, sure, but there's some sort of magnetite deposit under the clay or something like that! Considering that the geological survey says that our quartz is all mixed up with the three oxide ores of iron (I can attest to this, there's always black stains, yellow inclusions, and rusty bits inside of any sort of quartz you find here) and there are some magnetite mines somewhat near me, so it's at least believable that I'd have some under my house, but now I at least know there's something to look for.
  11. Alright! I've been smashing up some of the slag and getting little globs of iron out (Magnet to extract) so at least I can get the iron back. I'll post some pics of the slaggy masses I've been getting. I have not gotten a chance to burn down a slag pile all the way, but the slag actually lights pretty easily (The coal in it has been mostly burnt) so I can just keep on burning it bits at a time if need be. I can't believe I forgot to check the geological survey, should've done that first! I'm going to dig down through the seam to see if I can find some sort of stone bearing iron or something that may be leaching up through the ground/had been weathered down to form the claylike deposit. I live in a coastal area (Within walking distance of the beach, no less) so that opens up a lot of mineral wash-up possibilities if my geology isn't as rusty as I thought, so the survey may not have anything on it. I'll be back with some pictures of the slag and what the survey has to say about ore concentrations in warwick. There's the trick! It's washoff of cumberlandite! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumberlandite Apparently, my state is so cool, it has its own iron ore, XD On a more serious note, geography aside, I'm in the Narragansett bay area (I live off of the bay itself, that is) so this is probably some sort of weathered clay that came out of that rock. Hopefully some more digging (Both information and dirt) will help me get to the bottom of this. I also have a friend in cumberland, so we're going prospecting next time I'm at his house... :3
  12. Alright, I'm not going to get very far with this testing until I have a proper baking drum for cooking the ore prior to dropping it in the bloomery and I need some sort of sifting tool as well, so what do you say I use one of my flat-rate USPS boxes to send you some of the stuff to test? I've got a huge seam of it and if it's hematacious earth you can probably get something out of it and help with processes for me to use. I've got quite a few boxes lying around and I can package up 5-6 pounds so you can really test it out. My best guess from the coloring is that if it's an iron ore pigmenting it, this is hematite based, so 30% of whatever content it has would convert, correct? By that metric, we can see exactly how much other stuff is in there.
  13. Oh it was just an example reaction for balancing, nothing more. Anyway, I've got sulfur burning around the edges of the fires so I'm fairly certain it's reducing something. I need to get a stack so I can charge it properly but once I do that it'll probably work better.
  14. Ahh! Okay, so no limestone. My chemistry book lies apparently. XD
  15. Haha, I'm sure "They" are! I'm doing some more testing, but I am consistently getting some sort of iron oxide or sulfide residue binding pieces of coal, which means I'm going to need to burn it in the presence of limestone if I remember correctly in order to convert it to iron oxide or do something similar to that. Also, seeding with a bit of rebar was really helpful and allowed more beads of metal to collect as opposed to just the sulfides. I didn't get a proper bloom like last time, but I still have more to sift through before I'm sure I didn't just miss it.
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