How to turn small pieces of bloom into wrought iron

[jacksonmbower]

I have done quite a bit of research but cannot find a good solution to my issue. I had smelted some iron ore for the first time and am now left with a good amount of small pieces of bloom which I have been trying to figure out how to refine into wrought iron because the pieces are so small I am worried that I will lose a large amount of the iron during the process. I Have amateur experience in forging but I have never forge welded.

[ThomasPowers]

Well forge welding is what is required.  For small pieces it helps to have a wrought iron "paddle" you can stack the bits on and weld them to it building thickness as you go. (A lot like how Japanese swordmakers start off with the bits of tamahagane and weld them up into a billet.)

Once you get your muck bar; you then cut, stack and weld and forge it out  into a merchant bar

Once you get your merchant bar; you cut, stack and weld and forge it out  into singularly refined Wrought Iron.

Continue until you get the level of refinement you want---or run out of material!

[Steve Sells]

and YES you will lose a fair amount of material in the process

[Stash]

Ditto the above 2 responses. There is a surprising amount of slag in fresh bloom bits, especially from the outside. Getting  them up to temp you will see the slag just boiling away.

Steve

[Frosty]

A lot of the material in the bloom you WANT to lose, it's slag and other crud.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

There's a reason "Muck Bar" is called muck bar!

[Frosty]

Don't you need to hit it pretty gently until the worst of the inclusions are driven out and the bloom consolidated? I've only read about the process but I recall one method was to hang a log from a spring pole and use that as the hammer to start a new bloom. A Viking method IIRC. The blows would be heavy slow impacts to prevent shattering and scattering the bloom. Later after it's mostly iron instead of slag switch to sledge hammers.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[ThomasPowers]

Depends a lot on the bloom; I've worked one that was more "iron soup" from using crushed taconite pellets as the ore.  We used a wooden mallet to start consolidating it on a wooden stump as the slag content was such that it would "splash" if you hit it with a metal hammer on a steel anvil rather than welding it together.  Most of our magnetite blooms were consolidated with a steel hammer on an anvil.

[Frosty]

I recall one edu. program about a Scandanavian reenactment group refining iron from bog iron and they used hammers on a log. Started with large wooden sledges and progressed to sledge hammers but nobody was really hitting it hard.

Another program was a group in Nova Scotia that made iron from cut peat blocks burning stack after stack on an iron plate until they collected enough little iron(ish) pellets to run in a type of bloomery. IIRC that's the one they consolidated in a dished stump with a log on a spring pole until it stopped squirting.

I even recorded them but who has a VHS recorder anymore and the tapes don't last many years. <sigh>

Frosty The Lucky.