Here is a great Vid of this Years ore to knife class, Two smelts, one a siderite magnetite smelt to make iron and then building a furnace and running a magnetite smelt   to make steel and then forging a knife from the results. thanks To Drew Henson for filming it and putting it together.

 It was a great week and I had fun with the class , and we made some cool knives from rock!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjqPMkfAwoM&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for the link.  Good one.

Owen - you sure do have the fun on your side of the pond, - superb video. Looks like you got the smelting down to an easy process. Some day I'd like to visit your shop for a hands on class like that, or any pointy thing class.

Out-STANDING!  Very cool video of an even cooler class!  I really hope I can force things to align so I can participate in one in the future!

Update! Managed to attend the ore to knife class this past July and it was AWESOME!  Ran two smelts, forged two practice blades and a tanto from the bloomery material, gave it a walnut handle. Check it out!

huge thank you to Owen for providing such an incredible opportunity!

non-smithing related photos removed due to amount of bandwidth to show others your lunch

 

 

 

Very cool!   Did you guys have analysis done on your resulting steel?  I'm curious about the carbon content you got with that method.

Spark testing was about as sophisticated as we got.  The core was the 'student' bloom, which was primarily specular hematite. The skin layers were multiple folds of the bloom we ran under Owens guidance, which was a mix of the hematite and sidarite recovered from a nearby streambed, and the remains of a bloom that Owen had from a different smelt he attended in the states, which all I recall was being higher in phosphorus, so it reads as a lighter grey.  The edge metal is estimated to be 'medium carbon'