Smelting iron

What does "a crucible steel" mean to you?

The subject line says "smelting iron". This implies you want to wrest the iron from iron ore. ---"Smelting" is not the same as the melting that you mention in your second paragraph.

What IS the resultant project?

If you are truly smelting iron, then about the only choice you have is to select the carbon content. And that takes the rest of us at least a dozen or so tries to get any control at all. It may even take several tries to get any iron at all, let alone reliable control of carbon content.

As far as a cupola melting EXISTING iron (or steel), about the only way you get that to work is to produce cast iron, whose melting temperature is about 2500 degrees F. This of course, is not steel because it has 'way too much carbon. Many steels don't melt until about 3500 degrees F.

You might go to Rockbridge Bloomery for more detailed info:

All in all, this is not a casual undertaking. I have spent days and days tending these things (smelts to produce blooms)on and off over the last 14 years and still don't even consider myself a novice.

If I totally missed the point, please forgive my ramblings, Pete Stanaitis

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Chilla wrote:

Hi Pete,

There are no such things as ramblings ;-)

Steel made in a sealed crucible or wootz :-)

I don't come from an industrial background, so some of the terms I use may be a little off.

Melting or re-melting means get an existing product and melt it down (to me).

Smelting means getting raw materials and making the metal (to me)

As you can probably gather, by the use of the term wootz, is that I want to make true damascus items as opposed to pattern welded items.

I realise it's not a casual undertaking, and am prepared to do a lot of research and experimentation before I start. I have been alloying non-ferrous metals for some time and am in the process of making a 30 kg capacity reverb furnace for larger bronze castings. So take things slow and safe.

I would like to wrest the iron from the ore, but more practically I should start with sorrel high carbon iron. Making the wootz cakes (a 1" thick by 4" diameter "hockey puck" of damascus steel) is my goal.

Regards Charles

spaco wrote:

You pretty much want to be talking directly with Don Fogg and his lot, they pretty much re-invented the stuff, and did the metallurgical research to determine the alloying components that were required to get the grain growth characteristic of wootz steel.

You're playing in a pretty small field, with few players.

Cheers Trevor Jones

============= see

Unka' George (George McDuffee) .............................. Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be "too clever by half." The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

John Major (b. 1943), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Observer (London, 7 July 1991).

And

And while you're at it...not damascus, cryptically named, VERY worth a read, or 17:

and the more obvious:

Never met the good professor, but I like the stuff he writes, and was happy when someone else mentioned it.