So yes you're right, but it's all based on the heat issue.

Ferrous metallurgy is vastly more complex than you seem to believe. You can keep cast iron molten all day long, and the phosphorus will stay put unless you have the right chemistry.

Do you understand the difference between iron and cast iron and steel?

Just like distillation, melting iron will separate some things and not other things. If you are not aware of this you can go wrong without knowing *why*. (During the last oil crisis a yuppie family had moved into a small town in the Arkansas hills my college roommate was from. They bought a "gasohol still". Setting it up they did a run and got---distilled water! This was told to me by my roommates mother who added that any of the folks in the local church could have told them what they were doing wrong--strong moonshining tradition out that way; but they were too snobbish to associate with the hill folk...)

Heating slowly can just result in more oxidation which can burn off some elements but won't touch others---or it can work the other way and promote carbon uptake---depending.

If you read the history of iron refining you will find it a struggle to learn how to process different ores with different impurities. A lot of processes were limited to what type of ores they could use making them not as widespread as they hype about them would indicate.

Note too that a cupola is not fueled with coal! (That very comment throws a cloud of doubt on the rest of your post(s)) Cupolas use coke.

Melting steel is another kettle of worms! Unless you control the melt strictly what you start out with may not be what you end up with!

I've smelted wrought iron from ore and in studying that process I've learned that just the temperature of the furnace can radically affect the uptake of various elements present in the system---they were hoping that they could "fingerprint" ore bodies and then compare it to the trace element analysis of items and so link the two. Only to find out that just raising the furnace temp several hundred degrees C could change the uptake of something like Mn so much that there was no good trace element link between Ore and Item.

The coal/coke mistake is probably mine, Thomas. Never having run one, I assumed the coal to coke transformation occurred in the top portion of the cupola.

No that would result in a solid lump clogging the system up! One of the massive forward leaps of the industrial revolution is figuring out that you can pre-coke coal and then use it for various pyro processes. Up until Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale figured out how to smelt iron ore with coke it was done using *charcoal*---say 500 years after smiths had started using coal in their forges!

Massive amounts of charcoal for iron smelting resulted in some of the early ecological laws in England in the time of QE-I forbidding the construction of more iron smelters as they were running out of wood for ships!

Of course some of the highest grade iron was still smelted by charcoal until fairly recent times---As I recall the last charcoal fired smelter in the hanging rock region of Ohio stopped around WWI. Some of the State forest lands had been the fuel lands for the smelters and so kept unbroken until the state could purchase them intact. Charcoal has the lovely property of being sulfur free, a problem that coke has to varying degrees.

(Another leap was "cast steel" something that Europe lagged about 1000 years behind areas in central Asia)

No that would result in a solid lump clogging the system up!

Of course it would. Derrrrr. Thanks!

try it in baby steps... melt 8lbs of steel in a crucible and cast it into a dry mold... its just a small run and couldn't be too much trouble..

- if you do well then scale it up

it takes awhile to know what your doing... and in my case its just fooling around with crucibles... never mind the casting part which i think is dangerous (at least too dangerous for me to risk my butt on )

i think anyone trying it on a small scale will quickly realize the problems of doing a 300lbs steel melt.


for that... i'd gladly stick it out with my old PW's for which the most i payed was 150 bucks


Greg

Pouring that much steel is not going to happen in your backyard end of discussion. But if you really want to do it make a pattern and take it to a foundry, I get stuff cast for my business all the time I dont get very good rates because I am doing a very small run. I have stuff cast in 4140 and it is done by lost wax method I pay about 10-15 dollars a pound which is fine since I cant do it myself and they do great work. An anvil would be best done by sand casting which is much cheaper. I cant imagine it being below 6 bucks a pound though. A 300lbs anvil unfinished as cast will be about 1800 dollars. I might do it just to say I made my own but I will need a spare couple of grand first.

If you do it, Kevin, make it a cool one. Church windows, gargoyle face cast in the side, something like that!