Hello everyone, this is my first post after browsing for a few days looking for an answer to my question. I couldn't really find the answer I was looking for, but perhaps I didn't look hard enough. I work at a living heritage museum called Furnace Town, outside of Snow Hill, MD, where in the early 1800's, people smelted iron from bog ore they dug up out of the bottom of the nearby creek. I do demos for people regularly, especially for school field trips, showing them how blacksmiths back then worked and dressed and the tools they used, etc. etc. After years of doing this, I have accumulated buckets of steel (we mostly use mild and carbon steel nowadays) that are too small to use for anything and I have wanted for a while to melt it down and form ingots out of them to then hammer into bars and then whatever it is I want to make from that. I know that this is the foundry/casting forum but casting steel is the last thing I want to do. I don't have the want or desire to mess with molten steel in a tiny crucible cup and try to pour it into a mold and end up spilling it onto the floor or have it melt a body part off, etc. Instead, what I wanted to do was what people here did with the small bits of iron they couldn't work with anymore, which was to dig up a bucket of clay which is common around here, add things like dried shredded grasses and wood ash and envelope the small bits of iron in a clay ball. They would then either make a clay/brick enclosure, fill it with charcoal and place the clay ball into the center of it or dig a hole in the ground, fill it with charcoal and again, place the clay ball into the center of it. The hole in the ground would then have either more clay or more likely, mud laid over the charcoal to enclose it. Then they would use a small bellows to pump air into the side of the enclosure, or down a trench that was dug next to the hole for supposedly at least half a day to make sure the iron melted together. This idea just seems a lot safer than pouring molten iron/steel into a mold so myself and an older blacksmith wanted to get other's opinions on the matter seeing as how there are not any classes on the topic anywhere nearby. Any of the self-proclaimed curmudgeons on here have any advice on things like the amount of ash/shredded grass to mix with the clay, or how thick to make the ball surrounding the metal, or how much charcoal to use for this (I was thinking about a couple of buckets of charcoal at least). Thanks for any advice and I have posted some pictures of the old furnace and the blacksmith shop in my profile for those interested.
I'm pretty sure that people here back then also melted iron in a crucible and poured it into molds, but there hasn't been any evidence of this discovered so far and most of the records of this place, which were stored in the courthouse in Snow Hill, were lost in a fire during the turn of the 20th century, so things like census reports, tax information, and whatnot were all lost. There are also old pictures of people sitting atop of the furnace working on the pipe bellow as well as standing on top of humongous charcoal mounds that were covered with mud. Once they get scanned I will upload those as well as anything else I can scrounge up. Thanks again for any advice.
Oh this is definitely not a money saving venture, we were just curious about what it would be like and to see how the possible ingot would turn out and if it were workable at all. When it comes to it being dangerous, this whole trade is dangerous. That's what I tell people when they ask me questions such as, "Isn't this dangerous?", "Won't you get black lung?", and "Why aren't you wearing gloves?" It just always seemed a little too dangerous to try to cast any type of metal really, let alone steel, hence why we never wanted to do that. There is a bunch of protective equipment, from safety glasses to face shields and welding helmets, aprons and large welding gloves and jackets, although I wasn't quite sure any of it could withstand molten steel exploding out from the clay ball/enclosure if it indeed would ever do that. Thanks by the way on looking into Steelmaking before Bessemer, lots of good info about that and you're right about it sounding like blister steel. There are archaeology students from a nearby college who do digs here every now and then and I was told that between their professor and an older blacksmith here that could have been a possibility that they might have tried something like what I was referring to, although again, like I said, they haven't unearthed any actual proof of it as of yet.