Peter's Valley Craft Centre
October 7, 2006.
This is just a fast note on one of the many smelts undertaken at Early Iron this year.
On Saturday, Early Iron overlapped with an annual public event the 'Pig Iron Roast' at Peter's Valley. The organizers asked if the team leaders could provide a public demonstration smelt. To that end, TWO furnaces were built on Friday and fired the next day. Lee Sauder and Mike McCarthy constructed one of the same 'Flue Tyle' test furnaces that the participants would themselves build Saturday and fire in three person teams on Sunday. (With excellent results I should say!). Mike would be primarily responsible for conducting the smelt in this furnace - and produced a large bloom of nicely workable iron from it.
I took the opportunity to test two variables which I was interested in. First, I wanted to test a slightly smaller sized furnace based on the standard North European model. Normally the interior diameters we have built in the past were on the range of 25 - 30 cm (10 - 12 inches). This text furnace was only 20 cm interior.
(loki exterior)
The second variable was to try using a potential 'Bog Ore' type. I had gathered about 10 kg of a pudding like red oxide out of standing water in a drainage ditch near Minden Ontario the summer of 2005. Although I was certain the material contained iron oxide, I had no good way of knowing if the concentration was high enough to make for a viable ore.
I have posted up the raw data of this smelt on the main Wareham Forge - Experimental Iron Smelting area.
more to come....
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