Tracy, I really like the idea of making a knife from ore as well, I'm probably going about getting started making knives backwards from the way it's supposed to be, but I kinda like starting out making my own metal first. I'd be making better knives by now if I had dedicated as much time to finishing knives than to making metal, but I have alot of fun doing it.
I'm starting to process some of the bloom from this smelt. Alot of the botttom portion of the bloom was pretty much just fluffy slag interwoven with strands and foils of metal. Those parts were broken off and will be resmelted. The more I got to the top of the bloom, the more solid the metal was. This I put back into a side draft charcoal forge to heat up and split up as best I could. I pulled the bloom, placed in up on a stump and went after it with an axe and a 4.5 lb hammer, I wish I had a striker or two when it comes to this, as it's a ton of work by your self. Here's a long boring video of me splitting up the bloom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQmt4wZwHFs
Last night I took some of the more solid pieces that fell off the bloom and used Ole Evenstad's method of processing, which basicly involves remelting of the bloom in a hearth. I skipped the first step in which he describes placing the tuyere 1" from the floor to melt alot of the slag out of the bloom and make iron, and instead started with the second step using higher placement of the tuyere. Really for no other reason as I'm running low on charcoal and I'm aiming for steel not iron. Here's the simple forge hearth that I used
I kept the small chunks in the heart of the heat, when they'd fall a bit as the charcoal burned, I picked them up with tongs to keep them hot, when they were hot enough I'd place them closer to the tuyere and pile charcoal up around them. They would melt and fall to the hearth. Here's the forge running, you can see I'm blowing pretty hard to get things good and hot.
I charged about 750 grams of raw bloom and once extracted and all the outer slag was knocked off I had about 430 grams, so I lost quite a bit, but I believe that it was mostly slag losses.
Here's the puck up on the stump after pulling, kinda a fuzzy pic, but I was doing this late at night.
The nice part about this process is that you can remelt the smaller bits of metal that have fallen from the bloom and get a nice workable puck of steel that's easly placed in a propane forge. Here is a pic of the puck next to a knife that I'm working on made from my steel from the last smelt. That smelt produced a low carbon iron, so I mixed it with it's own weight of W1 and brought it to about 20 layers, turned it on it's side and forged it out.
I'm gonna have a go at trying to forge out the puck in a few days, It seems pretty solid, but one never can tell with bloom steel until it's under the hammer, or press
I'll keep this updated as I go, I'm gonna save all the little bits that fall off to run through the hearth process again, and hopefully I can save as much of this as I can. The rest of the bits that are magnetic, will be run through on another smelt. Hopefully before October, once I set a date for the smelt, I'll post it, if anyone wants to come over and watch. I'm definatly hooked on this stuff now.
Zeb
