This is proof of concept that the natural draft furnace can make iron (the iron prills at the end of the video). I'd made a natural draft furnace before but this is the first time I was able to make any iron. There are many factors to getting a good smelt with this method but it is possible as there are records of natural draft iron smelting furnaces in ancient times. The benefit of such a furnace is the lack of bellows needed and so less labor is used. I've read these furnaces use more charcoal than forced draft furnaces which is understandable as the extra fuel is seemingly used to produce the draft. More experimenting needs to be done to obtain better iron yields but I think it's possible. Any questions about natural draft operation let me know. Thanks.
the next target should be an air heater! For example - divide the furnace section four times. 1/4 for venting and the rest for smelting. Preheating the air reduces the energy of the process and allows you to get a higher temperature.
Would it be possible to dig a catch basin that sits lower than the tuyeres so that the slag will drop lower than them and not clog the draft, or would that mess with the draft too much?
@@MauriceULTRAKILL Yes, it would also prevent air getting into the cracks which would be a bonus as well. Save having to seal them with clay. Probably build a "log cabin" structure around the furnace and fill the space between with sand or wood ash. Thanks.
Wasn't it because iron ore was plentiful while copper/tin for bronze was rare/not in the same location so required trade? When bronze is scarce enough to be doled out to well trained warriors (it's an investment!), but iron is plentiful enough to be used for *tools* in the hands of the common man
@@RogueLich That would be the case. A big deal of the Bronze Age collapse was that a lot of copper came from Cyprus, a lot of tin came from (I think) the Hittities and from farther north (we're talking British Isles sort of distances here). After that ancient trade network collapsed, people had no choice but to rely on iron (and iron tools were already made even during the bronze age, it's just it was harder to manufacture and forge).
Very true. However, normally, from what I understand, it wasn't common for single individuals to be trying to scratch out iron from ferro bacteria without any tools other than the ones they made from the surrounding environment.
@@tulipalll Certainly not, though it might've been *one* early method. And there are the more esoteric methods of meteoric iron (Tutankhamun's sword) or bog iron (used by the Norse and other tribes of the locale). People got creative with this stuff.
@@RogueLich Iron was /is more plentiful, but it takes a lot of work to get a useable material. Copper and tin is more rare, but smelting it is straight forward in comparison.
I'm a carpenter and do high end finish work. This kind of stuff just blows my mind. I feel like a chump watching the simplicity and creativity of these builds. I have thousands of dollars in tools and this guy is making complex things with sticks and stones. Mad respect.
all of our technologies had to start off somehow, he simply recreates what people have been doing for thousands of years, mad respect for him i have, i've learned a lot by watching his vids :D
I grew up in north/western New Jersey where there was about 96% forest and 4% development. Deep in the forest we found an old iron forge or furnace similar in concept to the one shown in this video. It was about 50 feet tall, narrowing towards the top; about 20 feet wide at the base with 4 openings on each side and a wide shaft running up the center. There were numerous rusty slag piles in the surrounding areas and a range of old diggings where iron ore could still be seen on the surface. From the looks of it it was a pre-18th century operation. As a kid I imagined it in operation, then and while watching this video.
West Milford, Clinton rd. If we’re thinking of the same place. That’s where they smelted the iron for the chain they used across the Hudson River during the revolutionary war. A lot of history there, a lot of which I’m sure was forgotten; haunted AF too lol.
@@Broose__Wayne That is precisely correct. I grew up a few miles away in Milton and my backyard was the Watershed Reservoir. I knew about the chain across the Hudson, but didn't know it was smelted there in West Milford. Thanks!
Honestly what impresses me most about this channel when I think about it isn't just the physical labor. That's obviously impressive. What I'm surprised by when I think about it is the camera work. It's VERY effective use of camera
@@larnregis all that and more. John clearly is working super skeleton crew. Obviously he has basic equipment like tripods and maybe a shotgun mic but capturing the molten heat without destroying his equipment either means specialized tools or specialized skills and either way I'm impressed because of how seamless it looks. I'm glad he's back I remember when this channel went dark for a while and when I compare any of these videos with the 'others' the authenticity just sticks out like a sore thumb.
It doesn't matter how many times I see you build firplaces/pits, I still enjoy it every time. The rainforest sounds definitely help make it kinda relaxing.
It’s the same old videos nowadays. He doesn’t build anything epic anymore. Just building furnaces, making charcoal, iron pellets. That’s all we see anymore.
@@Docstantinople the methods he uses to do it are different, but I wouldn't mind seeing him build some weapons or clothing like shirts/pants. His older videos were definitely more diverse, but he's into the metal age right now, that cool with me, and I can wait until he decides to move onto something new. Plus, he's kinda done everything there is already, so I'll take what I can get as long as it's enjoyable. I know these videos take awhile to make. Just the charcoal takes atleast a day to make, the things he builds out of clay can take days to finish. I appreciate the fact that he does it how it used to be done and doesn't "cheat" and use any tools he hasn't made himself from nature.
@@Docstantinople I do miss the food videos. Those ones were my favorite. I am sure PT is spending all this time to make all this iron to build something grand.
I thought the same thing, but maybe because the ore he is using doesn't have as high a concentration. Bog iron is mud scraped out of the bottom of swamps where I think it collects and condenses more. Could be wrong. Regardless of ore quality it is still a very labor intensive process
Cast iron tools are not superior to bronze tools. Quite the opposite. Well-made bronze holds an edge better, rusts more slowly, and has higher tensile and yield strengths. The reason why iron took over for bronze in the iron age is because iron is 20x more abundant than copper and ~600x more abundant than tin. And since decent bronzes used 12-15% tin ... well. Once iron-working was mastered, bronze went obsolete because iron was just so damned much more accessible and cheaper. Good steel is better than bronze, definitely, but that's a level of metallurgy that is well outside of the scope of this conversation.
@@simonnilsson8375 Well, it's not veins of iron as much as just more concentrated oxides. He could get plenty concentrated ore just by making lots of sluices and strictly using black sand. There are plenty of places in the world where you can literally just dig up dirt, add charcoal limestone and heat, and just create iron.
It's so sad that in the next video this furnace got destroyed by the rain. Simple to build but took a lot of time stacking mud and waiting for it to dry properly.
I would think finding a hematite slag (iron from a meteorite) would be more likely to forge. Something like the Chelyabinsk meteorite that crashed in 2013 would be a more possible starting point. They hit occasionally everywhere. A lot of material in one place to work the metal into practical items like arrowheads, axe heads, knives, and spearheads.
Right!? When he showed the first prill in the slag I was audibly shocked. Went down a small rabbit hole trying to then explain the smelting process to my parents and why this was so shocking haha.
Really amazing work, I've really enjoyed all of the iron smelting experiments (any all of your other videos). One suggestion for future furnaces is to angle the Tuyeres so they are tangential to the inside of the furnace (all in the same direction). This should cause the draft air to spin, like a tornado, and increase air flow.. I built a couple of home foundrys for melting aluminum and this is how the tuyeres are positioned.
@@MascottDeepfriarCould make them L-shaped to minimize how much of the wall they need to go through and just change the direction of the airflow at the last second
Your videos never fail to immediately grab my attention and full focus on whatever you're doing. The growth of this channel and it's quality while still remaining true to roots has been a wonderful thing to watch. Amazing work, thanks for doing what you do
Seeing the "hut where charcoal is stored" i would love to see a video, where you can see every building/workplace that is currently in this area. Would love to know if those are all connected to form like a small village.
@@ineverknowdoyou it was one of the scam ones. im not sure if prim techs site was found yet, but i think if it was found, people would not share it since its such a nice hobby so why ruin it. its probably private property aswell.
in the 'hut burned down' video, he did a very quick 'steadi-cam' shot, where he walked from one hut to the other. as far as i recall thats the only sequence hes ever published that wasnt a hard cam shot. kinda a limited version of what youre asking for
A few tips. Make the tuyeres a bit more cone shaped, it improves air speed. Place them so they are very close to the center of the furnace, you want a good "nugget" of heat right in the center. And use a removable plug as a door to keep poking at the slag so it doesn't lock up. You'll know you've got the right heat when the slag moves at a more liquid state. Outstanding experiment!
I think top of the chimney should be smaller than bottom intake, it would create higher pressure at the top 'pulling' air out increasing air intake. That aside, its crazy how resource intensive the iron production is. I guess its partly due to low quality ore. But also we had nations building pyramids before they figured out iron processing.
@@gottimwiron tools are not necessarily crucial to ancient civilizations to their survival, but definitely a must if any of them wants to outrun the others
This guy's a prime example of why people tend to just like survival games. We love building and creating stuff, moving through stages of progression and improvement. I seriously adore your work, sir.
Over here in Poland such smelters were quite popular at some point. The major difference was that most of them were single use (with only tuyeres being reused) leaving a large fields of old bloomeries, and the walls were made of more clay than mud.
Really?! That's fascinating! Do you know why they were only used once? And did they really end up making fields of them, just abandoned? What did they do with them after?
@@mrsteamie4196 IIRC it was just easier to break them open when taking out metal/slag, and it would be easier to build new one. Also probably helps with maintenance as it doesn't glass itself over time, and does not form cracks.
sounds like bullshit. easier to build new one rather than plaster few cracks and tuyeres with mud? as for glassing , insulation isnt that bad. Any sources for your information? Also clay instead of mud sounds painfull drying them slow build process. Maybe poeple did one big smelt with multiple furnaces in the area and thats it?@@cola98765
Can we take a moment to appreciate the precision and consistency of his structures and equipment where he’s just eyeballing or maybe using a stick to measure everything. I’ve seen contractors make wonky looking stuff and their using laser and all sort of measuring devices
Well he has been doing stuff like this for over a decade now. You get better at correcting mistakes as you go. Plus, in the contracting industry you're not supposed to make mistakes at all which means you never get good at fixing them. Here with his primitive technology, his inventive process is all about making mistakes that may teach him a better way to do something. If it turns out that the error yields better results, then he's just invented a new way to do something. If it turns out the mistake was costly, then he has learned something he needs to avoid while making things.
@@Handles_arent_a_needed_feature I’ve seen foundation pilings that are more cockeyed and angled when the contractor was using laser levels and molds A lot of modern construction isn’t up to old standards
The optimal design for this type of blast furnace is to have a wider upper and lower part with a narrower middle section. This maybe helps prevent the accumulation of slag in the central area. Additionally, I'm considering tilting the air intake at a 45-degree angle to create a small-scale vortex, aiming to enhance the efficiency of air intake.
I like the vortex idea; that sounds worth a try. I'm wondering if a full 45 degrees would be necessary. Would it work as well with only a 30 degree angle? I suspect that once the rotation was going it would tend to be self maintaining. Do you know any experiments that have been done with this before?
do you have any sources for your info or you just write whatever shit comes into your mind? this guy in the video reads multiple books on these topics, does research on videos probably writes emails to people.
What's with everyone suggesting a friggin vortex? How do you think a vortex is going to form going through a meter of burning charcoal. Is that something that actually makes sense to you?
What @Iron_Masuko is suggesting uses the Bernoulli Principle to increase the speed of flow through the top of the furnace. It is well known in fluid dynamics. No vortex necessary nor produced. What I am unsure of is if the effect can be acheived from low pressure from the exit(how the draft furnace works) or if it must happen from high pressure from the fluid entry. I suspect the latter. If so, then it would not work particularly well in this application. He would have to go back to a blast furnace type setup. Even then it only increases the speed of the fluid beyond the 'pinch' in the furnace walls not down where the slag is. No increase in overall airflow.
@@jaminboomershine9643 Thank you for your professional explanation. I am just wondering to imitate Primitive Technology to create a mud version of the rural iron smelting facilities I saw during my childhood. Additionally, I came across a UA-cam video, ua-cam.com/video/RuCnZClWwpQ/v-deo.html ,showcasing the iron smelting process by people in Burkina Faso. They arranged pipes in the central part of the furnace. I'm not sure about their function. Could you provide some professional insights?
Finally properly tall smelter! Taller stack = higher temperature and it shows on size of your iron beads. If you used leather bellows or more efficient blower you would achieve even higher temperature which would mean more fluid slag and thus even better iron separation. If you have limestone on your property you can crush it and mix it with your ore as a flux, it will lower the melting temperature of minerals and thus more fluid slag. Bonus tip: use a small cup to measure your ore dust, it will be more efficient. Measuring by hand means each refill can have potentially too much ore or too little ore and therefore you are potentially either wasting ore or charcoal.
I think he also need to adjust the diameter of the tuyers to achieve a better wind velocity. And for the flux maybe he will need to add some kind of bauxite to get a even better liquidus temperature (15% w.t. in the slag composition is the best for this low basicity index slag).
You might try forming pellets by surrounding small iron prills with a coating of ore. When heated, the iron in the ore should add to the already formed prill, which should increase the extraction rate during the smelting and make it easier to recover the prills from the slag. I don't think the sunken pit is the hottest point in the furnace. The entering air is cold, so you want it to enter at the bottom and heat up as it rises through the layer of burning charcoal. It will be hottest at the top of the fuel layer, so ideally you contain ore in a crucible at that point.
Seconded. You can see the slag dripping from the coals getting cooled down by the draft. Around 19:16. Maybe the tuyeres should be pointing down along the inside surface of the pit?
@@EverettHaran that’s a very good point. There has to be a way of dealing with the molten slag that maybe takes it out of the equation without removing the iron as well. I’m assuming that’s what the sunken pit is trying to accomplish.
@@EverettHaran maybe have some way of tapping the furnace to let the slag flow? Before you can do that however you would need the ensure the temperature is high enough to allow the slag to flow more easily or add something to the charges to make the slag more runny.
I've seen many one-time-use furnances for iron smelting (as it is popular among some blacksmiths and history reinaction people), but never so pretty and meticulously done one. So straight, with petfecrly even walls. Amazing skill.
This channel is one of the few where I've hit the notification bell and one of the few where I've never been asked to. Always the top of my list when a new video comes out.
As someone else mentioned, you've never asked us to subscribe, never asked us to "hit the bell" or like your videos. And to date you are the only channel I'm subscribed to notifications. Thank you for being top class.
I know it's tedious to record AND explain every single step for a youtube video, but we are extremely grateful that you upload for us to watch AND learn.
Try adding a handful or two of silica sand to the smelt at some point; the white kind you can use for glass. Your ore doesn’t have the silica a more traditional ore would since it’s very pure. Silicon is a reducing agent as well and it might increase your extraction efficiency as well as providing the structural element for an iron bloom you can consolidate like usual, which might be less work than picking the prills out manually. Great work!
So it does some weird stuff with oxidation states and makes the molten ore more viscous. It might act as a flux too pulling impurities out and making extraction easier.
Oops, I’m late. Anyways, normal sand is a mixture of silica and feldspar minerals. The sand in his area looks more brown than white, which leads me to believe that it’s mostly feldspathic sand, which works differently. He’d do well do look for the lightest sand he can find, and make sure it’s mostly quartz when you examine the grains very closely
One of the few UA-camrs I've watched for many many years (roughly 8 years now). Never hesitate to click when I see a new upload. You're the OG and the GOAT. Mad respect, keep doing you man!
I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve loved watching along and gaining a primitive apprenticeship through proxy. Your cumulative technologies have been stacking upon eachother in such a cool way. So fun to watch and learn along :)
Man, watching all these iron smelt videos really makes you appreciate how ancient civilizations managed to create what they did with what they had back then. Sure, there may have been more raw material to work with back then, but they probably had very little in the way of knowing how to capture and refine it more than they did.
Dude, I really love seeing and hearing you work, the sound of nature, your progress, the lack of talking!!!, the experimentation and trial and error etc. Thank you. Thank you.
You know, for the longest time i thought these videos were a "let me show you what i did", because i never had subtitles on. I figured he did it that way so that his video's were able to be watched by anyone, without a language barrier. Now knowing that subtitles are a thing...I'm still watching without them. Because I think the concept of "no language barrier" is cool.
This seems like, by far, the best iron smelt I've seen from this channel! Unless I'm misremembering. It's the first time I've seen enough iron to feel like it wouldn't be a stupidly laborious undertaking to produce enough iron to actually forge something.
The impact you're having is not insignificant. Because of what you do here, I have begun taking steps in my free time to learn these skills by doing them myself also. I'm much farther behind, as I still need to improve the plasticity of the clay I'm gathering to make pottery. I am inspired deeply each time a video comes out, and hope one day to show off the results of my learnings from watching you. Also, seems that you've gotten quite a bit more muscle mass doing this work over the last few months. I will be purchasing your books before long to support you in this adventure, as it's the least I can do for bringing so many back in touch with the roots we've forgotten. Much love!
To improve clay plasticity you want to look into finer grained clays, especially bentonites (AKA smectite or montmorillonite) or ball clays.. Some river clays are very high in bentonite. Add 5% to your body and it will improve plasticity immensely. It's actually how they make plastic porcelain which is mostly kaolin, silica and feldspar, none of which are particularly plastic. The kaolins have a large plate/grain size which is why they're not very plastic. Secondary/sedimentary clays are much more fine grained and therefore more plastic. They also have a lot more iron and therefore tend to have bloating problems at higher temps.
@robertharris1748 I started with some naturally ocurring clay in my back yard that has lots of iron in it, It seems of decent quality to me, I wonder if cardboard box fibers might be ruining my sample (I used it to try to dry the clay quicker)
@@AboveAverageJoeOfficial That definitely won't help! Use a plaster or cement slab to dry it out. If you're willing to put in a bit of work, the best way to prepare backyard clay is to make a pretty liquid slip (slurry) in a five gallon bucket. Use dried clay (absorbs the water better< let it sit overnight, then mix it up with a drill mixer (or a paddle and a lot of elbow grease!). After 5-10 mins pour into a second bucket and discard all the heavy grains of sand etc that have fallen to the bottom. Let it sit for a day or two and siphon off any water that has accumulated on the top. Then pour the slip into an old pillowcase and hang it somewhere the water can drain out. (Or lay it out on a plaster or cement slab - basement slab is fine as long as it's absorbent, non-oily and kind of clean). The finer the clay particles the more plastic. Probably don't bother doing this of you can't at least roll a little coil of clay that mostly wraps around your finger without breaking into pieces (cracking we can work with, breaking up into fragments just doesn't have enough plasticity to be worth it).
@@robertharris1748 I initially took a cooking pot worth to try a proof of concept similar to what was described, and I have a mini clay pit dug out similar to another of the videos our Primitive Technology host has showcased. I think I'll try a new batch that isn't dried with cardboard to see if it does better (I'll also probably not do so many sifts of the original material. I think that increased my grain size too much. I suspect I have excellent rough to work with, just gotta refine the process with my first experiment learnings.) I may even end up creating a few short videos and starting a youtube channel to document my own progress in the future if experiment 2 goes well. I appreciate you taking the time to give me the pointers too, and will be integrating them into the second try. If everything goes well, the end result will be my first from scratch piece of pottery (probably to be used as a gift for my wife)
Been sick as a dog with COVID this weekend and just wanted to say thank you for being a source of comfort during all the downtown that comes with it. Glad to see you're still going strong
Man you are still just making every video so intriguing to watch, it really feels like you're taking us on a journey and i know at some point you'll make some oron tools and thats going to be absolutely nuts
Love to see the collection of iron and just how much work it actually takes for one man to progress with nothing but the knowledge of the people before us can’t wait for the steam engine video once you collect enough iron
Have you considered making a long snaking tunnel along the ground with a fire at one end and a tall chimney at the other? The miners in the olden days days would use a similar device for roasting the arsenic out of ore. There were some called the calciner tunnels at Levant Tin mine in Cornwall.
What is your limiting material in this experiment? Like what’s the hardest thing for you to get/do? Is it making the furnace, getting the unprocessed iron, or the charcoal? I love these videos, these are awesome & you’re amazing.
I'm willing to bet that the hardest part is gathering the wood, simply because of how much he needed. I hope he simply bought some of those coals at least, otherwise that is a crazy amount of work.
This is just mental. All that work, all that science, all that information and intelligence, and considering what we as a species have today; it’s mind blowing.
Been watching you for years young man! Gives me faith that mankind could start all over again with your vast primitive skills! This is the only non-narsisitic share on the entire internet! Good form, and happy holidays brother.
Yesss Im looking forward to this. The ancient way of smelting iron has interested me for a little bit now. I hope one day youre able to forge out a full on knife/axe with primitive tools or make steel and then an axe or knife.
This is the only ""asmr"" kind of channel i really enjoy, it is both educational and interesting front to back. Please never change the recipe, it's damn good sir.
starting to appreciate just how much iron is in bog ore, seeing viking age furnace smelt such as this producing yields many times the size of these experiments. very cool videos can´t wait to see what´s next
Hi @primitivetechnology9550 loved the video. One suggestion: Consider introducing a slight horizontal angle to the air intake funnels (all, either slightly clockwise or anti-clockwise). This will naturally cycle the air throughout the inside of the furnace in a circular fashion, resulting in better heat distribution.
No, no it won't, because that air immediately passes through a mether thick bed of stacked burning charcoal. You might as well be trying to make circular currents through a meter thick sponge.
We definitely take for granted the time and resources that go into processing metal. All that effort for what might appear to be little reward (though it was actually quite a lot compared to past attempts) tells you just how much effort these things require.
I'm so excited!!! We're finally here! This is incredible! Natural draft is clearly the KING, so much easier and less labor-intensive but still giving good results! Can't wait for what you do with all the iron you'll get from this : D
I would suggest to preheat the inlet air so as to increase the core temperature and keep the slag liquid for longer. You could also run longer setting campaigns and crush the charcole into smaler pieces to speed up burning, getting the furnace hotter.
Here are some considerations. If you start burning wood from the top, then the bottom will pre-heat last, so possibly the temperature at the bottom will not be hight when you start putting charcoal and ore. Bigger holes at the bottom > more air flow but minor air speed? And the brick hut looks fantastic, after all this time. You and your videos are the best.
The rotary fan was starting to wear out the arms, huh? That is a really tremendous amount of work for those resources. I wonder if other ore sources might have been more productive in a similar furnace. Thank you for your hard work and educational content. I always enjoy your videos.
i have an crazy idea that might work quite well: could you use natural wind to power your oven? I dont know how it is there, but in the woods i know there sometimes are wind hotspots. especially following streams or dried out streams and if there are bigger changes in elevation. If you could find a place where there is constantly wind, you maybe could funnel it into your oven. i know this is very weather depending, but it might could work.
I love your videos so much! I was wondering if you were planning on making anymore farming/food based videos anytime soon? I always found those ones very fascinating (not saying I don't find the iron ones awesome as well.)
Just going by what is shown I would say the most time consuming part is building the furnace. The ore probably takes one or two days but most of that is just waiting for the water to filter through the porous pot so you could just set that up then do other things. The charcoal would take a few days to build the dirt oven but the actual firing would be one day where you can do other things while it burns, and the oven is reusable. The furnace would take about a week because it's so tall and you have to let each layer dry before you add the next layer.
You need more feedstock since higher volumes into the furnace will increase the overall yield in the bloom. You also need a better feedstock. Iron bacteria aren't composed of iron and aren't going to be an indication of usable amounts of iron. If you're aiming for a primitive approach to smelting you should probably be using black sand as your feedstock. And if you wanna modernize that ancient approach, run a magnet over the sand so you can separate and use just the magnetite.
This method looks much less exhausting to keep running! It might end up being more than would be wise to handle, but you could consider running two natural draft furnaces simultaneously for increased production
I'm curious what temperature is reached inside the furnace, from the bottom towards the top. The slowly moving melted slag was so cool to watch and it's awesome that you captured it.
Love to see your awesome projects going better and better ! I work at iron/steel factory laboratory, and i hope i can give you some further tips and tricks to try, so: 1. You can try to make the iron ore a bit more granular, to get better gas flow. You could try to form some kind of cement from wood ash and powdered ore. Then make a little balls from it. Sized like the tip of a lilttle finger. 2. Try to make the slag flow better by playing with elements like Si, Ca, Na and K. Naturally they are found in quartz, bone/seashell and wood ash. The key is to make the alkalinity just right. However i fear im not allowed to give you any values. And how would you even measure it in stone age? 😅 3. Make a cowper/preheater system to run the process even hotter: Build separate oven next to the main one. Lay bricks criss crossing the inside of it so they store heat but, gases can flow through. Heat it up with the main oven, and when it is hot, blow/make the air flow through the hot bricks and the into the main oven.
4. Also too much oxygen may burn the coal into carbon dioxide (CO2), instead on carbon monoxide (CO). Making CO2 gives thermal energy, but you also need CO as reducer to steal the oxygen from iron oxide.
A useful experiment. Such a large amount of effort with such a meager result demonstrates that in prehistoric times the method of extracting iron from bacterial deposits was unlikely to have been practiced
Slag can be reprocessed to a strengthened building clay. Smelt works in England at that time that produced pig iron used slag to produce road base and cinder blocks as a byproduct.
Have you ever tried using your calcined ash pellets as flux instead of plain wood ash? In a typical blast furnace they add the CaCO3, which then decomposes into CaO from the heat and that acts a flux, but since you’re already making CaO for mortar you could crush it into the ore directly. Just in case that fluxing step is a bottleneck
What's the biggest single piece of pottery/ceramic you can reliably make? Maybe stacked rings made of those could produce a furnace that needs less maintenance in use and could be made taller for a stronger draft. Also, have you tried angling the tuyeres a little to impart some spin to the input air? This might also lower the pressure in the lower part of the furnace a bit, enhancing draft.
Have you looked into milling the slag after each burn so you don’t have to do as much processing by hand? If the slag is as brittle as it seems, then a large stone mill might be able to give you more time to get started on processing another batch of ore.
It's probably not worth the effort to set up a proper mill for the amount of slag he needs to refine. If he decides to experiment with it/ make mass quantities of slag maybe. Good thought
Nice work. I'd really love to see you getting all your iron prills together and somehow smelting them into steel. And then using the steel to make something - tools to start with, then perhaps building materials etc.?
I think you have to add a fusig agent to the ore like ash, slag or lime(snail's shell). The weight of the ore is too low due to its fine powder form. You can also increase the angle of the tuyeres (they need 45° to make more heat at the bottom of the smelter
My question isn't about the furnace but rather the ore. Would you consider using the panning method or a simple sluice box as way to get (arguably) more pure iron in the form of black sand in greater quantities? As I understand it, digging down a foot or so or about 30.5cm should yield a fair amount per cubic yard. Depending your location that is. But due to iron abundance in the world I would guess that it can fairly straightforward to get a few grams in these methods.
He's got at least two sluice boxes, tapered clay trays with grooved bottoms. (One of them is better than the other.) We've seen them in other videos but they don't appear in this one.
You add the clay for the furnace in layers, letting the older layer dry. Maybe roughing up the surface or carving a grove in there would help bind the layers together. I could imagine that the cracks in the walls form in these contact points between layers.
Hey John! Love the videos! Question... I know you're aiming for zero impact on the area you are in, but would tanning potential be something you look at doing? I can only imagine the tech tree hide would open up! Just imagine hide bellows for your furnace!
Hey John, I don't know much about smelting, but it seems pills gather because iron is polarized to itself. Have you considered adding the pellets of iron you already have to the ore in order to draw more iron from the slag?
You think this is insane then you may wanna look up how they made carbon steel in ancient India. Some smart cookies worked out how it was done. Similar setup, but they needed four people and who worked leather bellows in shifts. They also kept the iron and some powders (reducing agents) sealed in a clay vessels. The result is nearly 3 ish days of work and you have a damn near perfect steel ingot. And this was done long before the industrial age. Sadly it doesn't have the ripples as wootz steel but impressive for its time
This is proof of concept that the natural draft furnace can make iron (the iron prills at the end of the video). I'd made a natural draft furnace before but this is the first time I was able to make any iron. There are many factors to getting a good smelt with this method but it is possible as there are records of natural draft iron smelting furnaces in ancient times. The benefit of such a furnace is the lack of bellows needed and so less labor is used. I've read these furnaces use more charcoal than forced draft furnaces which is understandable as the extra fuel is seemingly used to produce the draft. More experimenting needs to be done to obtain better iron yields but I think it's possible. Any questions about natural draft operation let me know. Thanks.
Would insulating it with wood ash help in any way?
the next target should be an air heater! For example - divide the furnace section four times. 1/4 for venting and the rest for smelting. Preheating the air reduces the energy of the process and allows you to get a higher temperature.
Would it be possible to dig a catch basin that sits lower than the tuyeres so that the slag will drop lower than them and not clog the draft, or would that mess with the draft too much?
forge from animals they have more iron than sand of river.
@@MauriceULTRAKILL Yes, it would also prevent air getting into the cracks which would be a bonus as well. Save having to seal them with clay. Probably build a "log cabin" structure around the furnace and fill the space between with sand or wood ash. Thanks.
I'm beginning to appreciate why the iron age was a big step in technology
Wasn't it because iron ore was plentiful while copper/tin for bronze was rare/not in the same location so required trade?
When bronze is scarce enough to be doled out to well trained warriors (it's an investment!), but iron is plentiful enough to be used for *tools* in the hands of the common man
@@RogueLich That would be the case. A big deal of the Bronze Age collapse was that a lot of copper came from Cyprus, a lot of tin came from (I think) the Hittities and from farther north (we're talking British Isles sort of distances here). After that ancient trade network collapsed, people had no choice but to rely on iron (and iron tools were already made even during the bronze age, it's just it was harder to manufacture and forge).
Very true. However, normally, from what I understand, it wasn't common for single individuals to be trying to scratch out iron from ferro bacteria without any tools other than the ones they made from the surrounding environment.
@@tulipalll Certainly not, though it might've been *one* early method. And there are the more esoteric methods of meteoric iron (Tutankhamun's sword) or bog iron (used by the Norse and other tribes of the locale). People got creative with this stuff.
@@RogueLich Iron was /is more plentiful, but it takes a lot of work to get a useable material.
Copper and tin is more rare, but smelting it is straight forward in comparison.
Here’s a reminder to you all that there’s always captions in these videos that goes into the specifics of what he’s doing.
Eight years I've watched him without knowing this, am I stupid?
Shhhh... That's a hidden gem for those of us that like to read.
@@lunaborea no, your smart enough to understand primitive level
I like the mental deduction that not knowing exactly what he's doing provides
Duhhhh 😂
I'm a carpenter and do high end finish work. This kind of stuff just blows my mind. I feel like a chump watching the simplicity and creativity of these builds. I have thousands of dollars in tools and this guy is making complex things with sticks and stones. Mad respect.
all of our technologies had to start off somehow, he simply recreates what people have been doing for thousands of years, mad respect for him i have, i've learned a lot by watching his vids :D
I grew up in north/western New Jersey where there was about 96% forest and 4% development. Deep in the forest we found an old iron forge or furnace similar in concept to the one shown in this video. It was about 50 feet tall, narrowing towards the top; about 20 feet wide at the base with 4 openings on each side and a wide shaft running up the center. There were numerous rusty slag piles in the surrounding areas and a range of old diggings where iron ore could still be seen on the surface. From the looks of it it was a pre-18th century operation. As a kid I imagined it in operation, then and while watching this video.
West Milford, Clinton rd. If we’re thinking of the same place. That’s where they smelted the iron for the chain they used across the Hudson River during the revolutionary war. A lot of history there, a lot of which I’m sure was forgotten; haunted AF too lol.
@@Broose__Wayne That is precisely correct. I grew up a few miles away in Milton and my backyard was the Watershed Reservoir. I knew about the chain across the Hudson, but didn't know it was smelted there in West Milford. Thanks!
Nah, it was just this guy making prototypes
Ah I've been in that general area. Franklin mine, hunting for willemite, franklinite and zincite. :)
Also check out Illinois Iron Furnace in Shawnee National Forest. I live about an 1.5 hours from it.
Honestly what impresses me most about this channel when I think about it isn't just the physical labor. That's obviously impressive. What I'm surprised by when I think about it is the camera work. It's VERY effective use of camera
I'm amazed the camera sensor isn't blown out by the immense heat when filming from top down (e.g. at 10:59).
@@larnregis all that and more. John clearly is working super skeleton crew. Obviously he has basic equipment like tripods and maybe a shotgun mic but capturing the molten heat without destroying his equipment either means specialized tools or specialized skills and either way I'm impressed because of how seamless it looks. I'm glad he's back I remember when this channel went dark for a while and when I compare any of these videos with the 'others' the authenticity just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Too bad its a scam and the majority of work is done off camera often by machines.
@@personaslatesno, you must be thinking of the channels that copy primitive technology. this guy is the original and is legit
@@personaslates Uninformed.
It doesn't matter how many times I see you build firplaces/pits, I still enjoy it every time. The rainforest sounds definitely help make it kinda relaxing.
The daintree is a very immersive place. You feel both separated, and integrated with it in one instance.
It’s the same old videos nowadays. He doesn’t build anything epic anymore. Just building furnaces, making charcoal, iron pellets. That’s all we see anymore.
@@Docstantinoplei think that sometimes but the video descriptions help. each video is still different. this type of stuff never gets boring though
@@Docstantinople the methods he uses to do it are different, but I wouldn't mind seeing him build some weapons or clothing like shirts/pants. His older videos were definitely more diverse, but he's into the metal age right now, that cool with me, and I can wait until he decides to move onto something new. Plus, he's kinda done everything there is already, so I'll take what I can get as long as it's enjoyable. I know these videos take awhile to make. Just the charcoal takes atleast a day to make, the things he builds out of clay can take days to finish. I appreciate the fact that he does it how it used to be done and doesn't "cheat" and use any tools he hasn't made himself from nature.
@@Docstantinople I do miss the food videos. Those ones were my favorite. I am sure PT is spending all this time to make all this iron to build something grand.
The amount of time and effort you put into such a small quantity of iron never ceases to blow me away.
Really shows how much we take for granted in the modern world.
@@NSRexler Really shows how much easier iron is to extract from ore than from scooping up pond scum.
I thought the same thing, but maybe because the ore he is using doesn't have as high a concentration. Bog iron is mud scraped out of the bottom of swamps where I think it collects and condenses more. Could be wrong.
Regardless of ore quality it is still a very labor intensive process
Just imagine eventually making a small tool that could be used to dig at clay better than any bronze.
Cast iron tools are not superior to bronze tools. Quite the opposite. Well-made bronze holds an edge better, rusts more slowly, and has higher tensile and yield strengths.
The reason why iron took over for bronze in the iron age is because iron is 20x more abundant than copper and ~600x more abundant than tin. And since decent bronzes used 12-15% tin ... well.
Once iron-working was mastered, bronze went obsolete because iron was just so damned much more accessible and cheaper.
Good steel is better than bronze, definitely, but that's a level of metallurgy that is well outside of the scope of this conversation.
So much work for so small iron nuggets. Makes me appreciate all the metalwork in the world around me
If he can acquire a more efficient source of iron on his property then he could produce much more than a few tiny droplets.
Reminder that this is from bacteria in some random pool of water.
If you go into an iron mine, you will fine some hella nice looking vines
@@simonnilsson8375 Well, it's not veins of iron as much as just more concentrated oxides. He could get plenty concentrated ore just by making lots of sluices and strictly using black sand. There are plenty of places in the world where you can literally just dig up dirt, add charcoal limestone and heat, and just create iron.
It's so sad that in the next video this furnace got destroyed by the rain. Simple to build but took a lot of time stacking mud and waiting for it to dry properly.
I would think finding a hematite slag (iron from a meteorite) would be more likely to forge.
Something like the Chelyabinsk meteorite that crashed in 2013 would be a more possible starting point. They hit occasionally everywhere.
A lot of material in one place to work the metal into practical items like arrowheads, axe heads, knives, and spearheads.
Those iron prills are GIGANTIC compared to some of the ones I've seen in your other videos! So cool to see progress like this
Right!? When he showed the first prill in the slag I was audibly shocked. Went down a small rabbit hole trying to then explain the smelting process to my parents and why this was so shocking haha.
would be perfect to see products he gonna make with that, knife, spear head.. gears, robots!
@@Science-Vloghe's one of the yt channels that actually does not fake its videos unlike those *cough* pool building ytbers *cough*
if he keeps going like this he can play Boules with em soon
@@Science-Vlog in one video he made a knife out of cast iron
Really amazing work, I've really enjoyed all of the iron smelting experiments (any all of your other videos). One suggestion for future furnaces is to angle the Tuyeres so they are tangential to the inside of the furnace (all in the same direction). This should cause the draft air to spin, like a tornado, and increase air flow.. I built a couple of home foundrys for melting aluminum and this is how the tuyeres are positioned.
that would make it more difficult to open up the bottom without destroying the entire structure.
I think making the tuyeres funnel shaped would also help, air would accelerate in them and the draft would be stronger
@@MascottDeepfriar maybe but with the second smelt it was shown that a lot of the base could be removed without jepordising structure.
@@MascottDeepfriarCould make them L-shaped to minimize how much of the wall they need to go through and just change the direction of the airflow at the last second
@@MascottDeepfriar He could probably make the base of it out of bricks with rest of the mud structure on top?
Your videos never fail to immediately grab my attention and full focus on whatever you're doing. The growth of this channel and it's quality while still remaining true to roots has been a wonderful thing to watch. Amazing work, thanks for doing what you do
I feel like I been watching the same videos again & again
Seeing the "hut where charcoal is stored" i would love to see a video, where you can see every building/workplace that is currently in
this area. Would love to know if those are all connected to form like a small village.
wasent there someone that accedentily found prim techs site with a drone? or was that on of the scam's sites? idk, i also am super curious. ❤
@@ineverknowdoyou it was one of the scam ones. im not sure if prim techs site was found yet, but i think if it was found, people would not share it since its such a nice hobby so why ruin it. its probably private property aswell.
@@punch1t It is private property, in Australia which has strict drone flight laws as well.
@@punch1t ahh, i see, thank you for figureing that out. I should have checked.
in the 'hut burned down' video, he did a very quick 'steadi-cam' shot, where he walked from one hut to the other. as far as i recall thats the only sequence hes ever published that wasnt a hard cam shot. kinda a limited version of what youre asking for
A few tips. Make the tuyeres a bit more cone shaped, it improves air speed. Place them so they are very close to the center of the furnace, you want a good "nugget" of heat right in the center. And use a removable plug as a door to keep poking at the slag so it doesn't lock up. You'll know you've got the right heat when the slag moves at a more liquid state. Outstanding experiment!
You're not his dad gro
how do you know maybe he is :P @@plasmapanasonic4741
@@plasmapanasonic4741and you're not adding anything useful to the conversation
I think top of the chimney should be smaller than bottom intake, it would create higher pressure at the top 'pulling' air out increasing air intake.
That aside, its crazy how resource intensive the iron production is. I guess its partly due to low quality ore. But also we had nations building pyramids before they figured out iron processing.
@@gottimwiron tools are not necessarily crucial to ancient civilizations to their survival, but definitely a must if any of them wants to outrun the others
This guy's a prime example of why people tend to just like survival games. We love building and creating stuff, moving through stages of progression and improvement. I seriously adore your work, sir.
Over here in Poland such smelters were quite popular at some point.
The major difference was that most of them were single use (with only tuyeres being reused) leaving a large fields of old bloomeries, and the walls were made of more clay than mud.
Really?! That's fascinating! Do you know why they were only used once? And did they really end up making fields of them, just abandoned? What did they do with them after?
@@mrsteamie4196 IIRC it was just easier to break them open when taking out metal/slag, and it would be easier to build new one.
Also probably helps with maintenance as it doesn't glass itself over time, and does not form cracks.
A o jakiej miejscowości Pan mówi?
@@СлавикПомников Nowa słupia
sounds like bullshit. easier to build new one rather than plaster few cracks and tuyeres with mud? as for glassing , insulation isnt that bad. Any sources for your information? Also clay instead of mud sounds painfull drying them slow build process. Maybe poeple did one big smelt with multiple furnaces in the area and thats it?@@cola98765
Can we take a moment to appreciate the precision and consistency of his structures and equipment where he’s just eyeballing or maybe using a stick to measure everything.
I’ve seen contractors make wonky looking stuff and their using laser and all sort of measuring devices
Well he has been doing stuff like this for over a decade now. You get better at correcting mistakes as you go. Plus, in the contracting industry you're not supposed to make mistakes at all which means you never get good at fixing them.
Here with his primitive technology, his inventive process is all about making mistakes that may teach him a better way to do something. If it turns out that the error yields better results, then he's just invented a new way to do something. If it turns out the mistake was costly, then he has learned something he needs to avoid while making things.
Can we take a moment to tell the idiots who keep saying 'can we take a moment' to take a hike.
You cant see the mistakes because what hes making isnt being held up to modern standards
@@japersjolly8763chill it man it sounds mundane and repetitive but people like to appreciate this guys work
@@Handles_arent_a_needed_feature I’ve seen foundation pilings that are more cockeyed and angled when the contractor was using laser levels and molds
A lot of modern construction isn’t up to old standards
The optimal design for this type of blast furnace is to have a wider upper and lower part with a narrower middle section. This maybe helps prevent the accumulation of slag in the central area. Additionally, I'm considering tilting the air intake at a 45-degree angle to create a small-scale vortex, aiming to enhance the efficiency of air intake.
I like the vortex idea; that sounds worth a try. I'm wondering if a full 45 degrees would be necessary. Would it work as well with only a 30 degree angle? I suspect that once the rotation was going it would tend to be self maintaining. Do you know any experiments that have been done with this before?
do you have any sources for your info or you just write whatever shit comes into your mind? this guy in the video reads multiple books on these topics, does research on videos probably writes emails to people.
What's with everyone suggesting a friggin vortex? How do you think a vortex is going to form going through a meter of burning charcoal. Is that something that actually makes sense to you?
What @Iron_Masuko is suggesting uses the Bernoulli Principle to increase the speed of flow through the top of the furnace. It is well known in fluid dynamics. No vortex necessary nor produced. What I am unsure of is if the effect can be acheived from low pressure from the exit(how the draft furnace works) or if it must happen from high pressure from the fluid entry. I suspect the latter. If so, then it would not work particularly well in this application. He would have to go back to a blast furnace type setup. Even then it only increases the speed of the fluid beyond the 'pinch' in the furnace walls not down where the slag is. No increase in overall airflow.
@@jaminboomershine9643 Thank you for your professional explanation. I am just wondering to imitate Primitive Technology to create a mud version of the rural iron smelting facilities I saw during my childhood. Additionally, I came across a UA-cam video, ua-cam.com/video/RuCnZClWwpQ/v-deo.html ,showcasing the iron smelting process by people in Burkina Faso. They arranged pipes in the central part of the furnace. I'm not sure about their function. Could you provide some professional insights?
Each time, no matter how impressive the build is, the thing that impresses me the most is how efficiently and quickly you start a fire with sticks
Finally properly tall smelter! Taller stack = higher temperature and it shows on size of your iron beads. If you used leather bellows or more efficient blower you would achieve even higher temperature which would mean more fluid slag and thus even better iron separation. If you have limestone on your property you can crush it and mix it with your ore as a flux, it will lower the melting temperature of minerals and thus more fluid slag.
Bonus tip: use a small cup to measure your ore dust, it will be more efficient. Measuring by hand means each refill can have potentially too much ore or too little ore and therefore you are potentially either wasting ore or charcoal.
tools of measurement are usefull for tools.
I think he also need to adjust the diameter of the tuyers to achieve a better wind velocity. And for the flux maybe he will need to add some kind of bauxite to get a even better liquidus temperature (15% w.t. in the slag composition is the best for this low basicity index slag).
One of the only channels with clips, where i only pause and go back to see something again with zero skip forward. Keep up the good work !
You might try forming pellets by surrounding small iron prills with a coating of ore. When heated, the iron in the ore should add to the already formed prill, which should increase the extraction rate during the smelting and make it easier to recover the prills from the slag.
I don't think the sunken pit is the hottest point in the furnace. The entering air is cold, so you want it to enter at the bottom and heat up as it rises through the layer of burning charcoal. It will be hottest at the top of the fuel layer, so ideally you contain ore in a crucible at that point.
Seconded. You can see the slag dripping from the coals getting cooled down by the draft. Around 19:16. Maybe the tuyeres should be pointing down along the inside surface of the pit?
@@EverettHaran that’s a very good point. There has to be a way of dealing with the molten slag that maybe takes it out of the equation without removing the iron as well. I’m assuming that’s what the sunken pit is trying to accomplish.
@@EverettHaran maybe have some way of tapping the furnace to let the slag flow? Before you can do that however you would need the ensure the temperature is high enough to allow the slag to flow more easily or add something to the charges to make the slag more runny.
@@TheShire26 Limestone is usually added as a flux, to make the slag melt at a lower temperature and make it more runny.
Hot blast furnace made of mud when?
I've seen many one-time-use furnances for iron smelting (as it is popular among some blacksmiths and history reinaction people), but never so pretty and meticulously done one. So straight, with petfecrly even walls. Amazing skill.
He's the Patrick Swayze of Clay furnace building.
One use furnaces arent supposed to be pretty.
Easily done when using sticks from the Queensland Metric Tree for measurement 😊
I love the intense dynamics between the two protagonists of the show, John and iron bacteria
This channel is one of the few where I've hit the notification bell and one of the few where I've never been asked to. Always the top of my list when a new video comes out.
As someone else mentioned, you've never asked us to subscribe, never asked us to "hit the bell" or like your videos. And to date you are the only channel I'm subscribed to notifications. Thank you for being top class.
At 11:37 I was like "all this hard work for that little piece?" Then he start searching for the droplets lol.
I know it's tedious to record AND explain every single step for a youtube video, but we are extremely grateful that you upload for us to watch AND learn.
Learn? I think watch and enjoy. 99,99% of us will never make even charcoal 😂
turn on your captions and you will get the explanations.
Yes he is very clear good points
@@Theodorussfo Thanks for the tip, but my captions have been on for a while ☺. I appreciate it though.
I cannot imagine how long this all took! Amazing work!
Remember to turn on captions for explanations for what he's doing! :D
One tidbit caught my attention at 1:55 "Furnace is 1.5 m tall above the air entries, taking *7 days* to build in dry weather"
I always love seeing UA-camrs appreciating youtube videos from different niches
Eret? What are you doing here?
10:59 The inside of that furnace actually looked insane before the camera focused I couldn’t believe my eyes thing looked quadbillion degrees
Try adding a handful or two of silica sand to the smelt at some point; the white kind you can use for glass. Your ore doesn’t have the silica a more traditional ore would since it’s very pure. Silicon is a reducing agent as well and it might increase your extraction efficiency as well as providing the structural element for an iron bloom you can consolidate like usual, which might be less work than picking the prills out manually. Great work!
So it does some weird stuff with oxidation states and makes the molten ore more viscous.
It might act as a flux too pulling impurities out and making extraction easier.
Any idea how he might source it in the wilderness? Is it the same a regular old river sand ?
i believe he tried it before and had issues with it, don't remember why tho
Oops, I’m late. Anyways, normal sand is a mixture of silica and feldspar minerals. The sand in his area looks more brown than white, which leads me to believe that it’s mostly feldspathic sand, which works differently. He’d do well do look for the lightest sand he can find, and make sure it’s mostly quartz when you examine the grains very closely
One of the few UA-camrs I've watched for many many years (roughly 8 years now). Never hesitate to click when I see a new upload. You're the OG and the GOAT. Mad respect, keep doing you man!
I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve loved watching along and gaining a primitive apprenticeship through proxy. Your cumulative technologies have been stacking upon eachother in such a cool way. So fun to watch and learn along :)
Man, watching all these iron smelt videos really makes you appreciate how ancient civilizations managed to create what they did with what they had back then. Sure, there may have been more raw material to work with back then, but they probably had very little in the way of knowing how to capture and refine it more than they did.
Dude, I really love seeing and hearing you work, the sound of nature, your progress, the lack of talking!!!, the experimentation and trial and error etc. Thank you. Thank you.
You know, for the longest time i thought these videos were a "let me show you what i did", because i never had subtitles on. I figured he did it that way so that his video's were able to be watched by anyone, without a language barrier.
Now knowing that subtitles are a thing...I'm still watching without them. Because I think the concept of "no language barrier" is cool.
He's been actually explaining stuff this entire time?!?!
@@skypuppeteerSame feelings)))
This seems like, by far, the best iron smelt I've seen from this channel! Unless I'm misremembering. It's the first time I've seen enough iron to feel like it wouldn't be a stupidly laborious undertaking to produce enough iron to actually forge something.
The impact you're having is not insignificant. Because of what you do here, I have begun taking steps in my free time to learn these skills by doing them myself also. I'm much farther behind, as I still need to improve the plasticity of the clay I'm gathering to make pottery.
I am inspired deeply each time a video comes out, and hope one day to show off the results of my learnings from watching you.
Also, seems that you've gotten quite a bit more muscle mass doing this work over the last few months.
I will be purchasing your books before long to support you in this adventure, as it's the least I can do for bringing so many back in touch with the roots we've forgotten.
Much love!
To improve clay plasticity you want to look into finer grained clays, especially bentonites (AKA smectite or montmorillonite) or ball clays.. Some river clays are very high in bentonite. Add 5% to your body and it will improve plasticity immensely. It's actually how they make plastic porcelain which is mostly kaolin, silica and feldspar, none of which are particularly plastic. The kaolins have a large plate/grain size which is why they're not very plastic. Secondary/sedimentary clays are much more fine grained and therefore more plastic. They also have a lot more iron and therefore tend to have bloating problems at higher temps.
@robertharris1748 I started with some naturally ocurring clay in my back yard that has lots of iron in it, It seems of decent quality to me, I wonder if cardboard box fibers might be ruining my sample (I used it to try to dry the clay quicker)
@@AboveAverageJoeOfficial That definitely won't help! Use a plaster or cement slab to dry it out. If you're willing to put in a bit of work, the best way to prepare backyard clay is to make a pretty liquid slip (slurry) in a five gallon bucket. Use dried clay (absorbs the water better< let it sit overnight, then mix it up with a drill mixer (or a paddle and a lot of elbow grease!). After 5-10 mins pour into a second bucket and discard all the heavy grains of sand etc that have fallen to the bottom. Let it sit for a day or two and siphon off any water that has accumulated on the top. Then pour the slip into an old pillowcase and hang it somewhere the water can drain out. (Or lay it out on a plaster or cement slab - basement slab is fine as long as it's absorbent, non-oily and kind of clean). The finer the clay particles the more plastic. Probably don't bother doing this of you can't at least roll a little coil of clay that mostly wraps around your finger without breaking into pieces (cracking we can work with, breaking up into fragments just doesn't have enough plasticity to be worth it).
@@robertharris1748 I initially took a cooking pot worth to try a proof of concept similar to what was described, and I have a mini clay pit dug out similar to another of the videos our Primitive Technology host has showcased. I think I'll try a new batch that isn't dried with cardboard to see if it does better (I'll also probably not do so many sifts of the original material. I think that increased my grain size too much. I suspect I have excellent rough to work with, just gotta refine the process with my first experiment learnings.) I may even end up creating a few short videos and starting a youtube channel to document my own progress in the future if experiment 2 goes well. I appreciate you taking the time to give me the pointers too, and will be integrating them into the second try. If everything goes well, the end result will be my first from scratch piece of pottery (probably to be used as a gift for my wife)
Dude. Please keep doing what youre doing forever.
Been sick as a dog with COVID this weekend and just wanted to say thank you for being a source of comfort during all the downtown that comes with it. Glad to see you're still going strong
Man you are still just making every video so intriguing to watch, it really feels like you're taking us on a journey and i know at some point you'll make some oron tools and thats going to be absolutely nuts
15-30 seconds to make fire by hand is amazing. Can't wait for the next video, your progress is captivating.
in the video: having fun doing stuff and building stuff like its 1000bc. whats not in the video: him going home and eating ice cream
Love to see the collection of iron and just how much work it actually takes for one man to progress with nothing but the knowledge of the people before us can’t wait for the steam engine video once you collect enough iron
Have you considered making a long snaking tunnel along the ground with a fire at one end and a tall chimney at the other? The miners in the olden days days would use a similar device for roasting the arsenic out of ore. There were some called the calciner tunnels at Levant Tin mine in Cornwall.
What is your limiting material in this experiment? Like what’s the hardest thing for you to get/do? Is it making the furnace, getting the unprocessed iron, or the charcoal? I love these videos, these are awesome & you’re amazing.
I'm willing to bet that the hardest part is gathering the wood, simply because of how much he needed. I hope he simply bought some of those coals at least, otherwise that is a crazy amount of work.
@@DrBernon i seriously doubt he bought anything
@@DrBernon he made all of that charcoal. The whole point of his channel is that he makes everything himself.
Brilliant stuff, as always. Your videos are bloody perfect. No talking, all the information is in the captions, so the viewer can choose.
Just found this channel. This is a goldmine for people learning stuff for the pole flip that will occur. My son and I will be learning alot from you!
This is just mental. All that work, all that science, all that information and intelligence, and considering what we as a species have today; it’s mind blowing.
This is so fascinating.
I am thankful that you do what you do. I gifted your book to my father for his birthday and he was very excited.
I would love to see more horticultural content!!! There’s so much primitive potential in concepts like permaculture and earthworks.
Been watching you for years young man! Gives me faith that mankind could start all over again with your vast primitive skills! This is the only non-narsisitic share on the entire internet! Good form, and happy holidays brother.
Patience is a MASSIVE virtue. Hats down!
Great work as always mate. Keep it up. Thanks for bringing some peace to my day.
Yesss Im looking forward to this. The ancient way of smelting iron has interested me for a little bit now. I hope one day youre able to forge out a full on knife/axe with primitive tools or make steel and then an axe or knife.
Já tem um vídeo dele forjando uma pequena lâmina
I don't know why but I heavily expected him to suddenly bodyslam the smelt at the end 😂
This is the only ""asmr"" kind of channel i really enjoy, it is both educational and interesting front to back. Please never change the recipe, it's damn good sir.
Seconded.
starting to appreciate just how much iron is in bog ore, seeing viking age furnace smelt such as this producing yields many times the size of these experiments. very cool videos can´t wait to see what´s next
Thanks. Love your hard work mate🫶
Much appreciated. I'll keep them coming.
Always fun to watch when it's 3 am
3 am? 10 pm! 😉😁
So much work for such a small yield makes you appreciate it that much more.
Hi @primitivetechnology9550 loved the video.
One suggestion: Consider introducing a slight horizontal angle to the air intake funnels (all, either slightly clockwise or anti-clockwise). This will naturally cycle the air throughout the inside of the furnace in a circular fashion, resulting in better heat distribution.
No, no it won't, because that air immediately passes through a mether thick bed of stacked burning charcoal. You might as well be trying to make circular currents through a meter thick sponge.
@@AtlasReburdened I think it would still make a small difference in air flow.
I love your channel and your work. Peaceful, knowledgeable and fun! Thank you!
We definitely take for granted the time and resources that go into processing metal. All that effort for what might appear to be little reward (though it was actually quite a lot compared to past attempts) tells you just how much effort these things require.
I'm so excited!!! We're finally here! This is incredible! Natural draft is clearly the KING, so much easier and less labor-intensive but still giving good results! Can't wait for what you do with all the iron you'll get from this : D
I would suggest to preheat the inlet air so as to increase the core temperature and keep the slag liquid for longer. You could also run longer setting campaigns and crush the charcole into smaler pieces to speed up burning, getting the furnace hotter.
Here are some considerations.
If you start burning wood from the top, then the bottom will pre-heat last, so possibly the temperature at the bottom will not be hight when you start putting charcoal and ore.
Bigger holes at the bottom > more air flow but minor air speed?
And the brick hut looks fantastic, after all this time. You and your videos are the best.
Another great video mate. The hard work you put into these videos is amazing
The rotary fan was starting to wear out the arms, huh? That is a really tremendous amount of work for those resources. I wonder if other ore sources might have been more productive in a similar furnace. Thank you for your hard work and educational content. I always enjoy your videos.
I was really excited when I saw that big blob of slag drip down at minute 19:20! Amazing project.
i have an crazy idea that might work quite well: could you use natural wind to power your oven? I dont know how it is there, but in the woods i know there sometimes are wind hotspots. especially following streams or dried out streams and if there are bigger changes in elevation.
If you could find a place where there is constantly wind, you maybe could funnel it into your oven. i know this is very weather depending, but it might could work.
I love your videos so much!
I was wondering if you were planning on making anymore farming/food based videos anytime soon? I always found those ones very fascinating (not saying I don't find the iron ones awesome as well.)
Just going by what is shown I would say the most time consuming part is building the furnace. The ore probably takes one or two days but most of that is just waiting for the water to filter through the porous pot so you could just set that up then do other things. The charcoal would take a few days to build the dirt oven but the actual firing would be one day where you can do other things while it burns, and the oven is reusable. The furnace would take about a week because it's so tall and you have to let each layer dry before you add the next layer.
You need more feedstock since higher volumes into the furnace will increase the overall yield in the bloom. You also need a better feedstock. Iron bacteria aren't composed of iron and aren't going to be an indication of usable amounts of iron. If you're aiming for a primitive approach to smelting you should probably be using black sand as your feedstock. And if you wanna modernize that ancient approach, run a magnet over the sand so you can separate and use just the magnetite.
This method looks much less exhausting to keep running! It might end up being more than would be wise to handle, but you could consider running two natural draft furnaces simultaneously for increased production
Love the videos john, can't wait to see what you do with the iron once you are happy with the process.
long time subscriber i can't believe he didn't built a tv from tree or a nuclear reactor from swamp sludge
this guy is national treasure 🖤🖤🖤🖤
I'm curious what temperature is reached inside the furnace, from the bottom towards the top. The slowly moving melted slag was so cool to watch and it's awesome that you captured it.
Iron melts around 1100-1200 degrees or even more depending on the amount of carbon present
You're onto a winner with this design, mate! Looking forward to greater yields of iron ore to come :D
19:53 I like how he gets progressively more covered in charcoal dust as the buckets increase
Love to see your awesome projects going better and better
!
I work at iron/steel factory laboratory, and i hope i can give you some further tips and tricks to try, so:
1. You can try to make the iron ore a bit more granular, to get better gas flow. You could try to form some kind of cement from wood ash and powdered ore. Then make a little balls from it. Sized like the tip of a lilttle finger.
2. Try to make the slag flow better by playing with elements like Si, Ca, Na and K. Naturally they are found in quartz, bone/seashell and wood ash. The key is to make the alkalinity just right. However i fear im not allowed to give you any values. And how would you even measure it in stone age? 😅
3. Make a cowper/preheater system to run the process even hotter:
Build separate oven next to the main one. Lay bricks criss crossing the inside of it so they store heat but, gases can flow through. Heat it up with the main oven, and when it is hot, blow/make the air flow through the hot bricks and the into the main oven.
I could be wrong but making the charcoal more granular might help too
4. Also too much oxygen may burn the coal into carbon dioxide (CO2), instead on carbon monoxide (CO). Making CO2 gives thermal energy, but you also need CO as reducer to steal the oxygen from iron oxide.
This video was awesome! Love your content man, thanks for all you do!
A useful experiment. Such a large amount of effort with such a meager result demonstrates that in prehistoric times the method of extracting iron from bacterial deposits was unlikely to have been practiced
Its always amazing to me how your camera withstands those type of temperatures
Slag can be reprocessed to a strengthened building clay. Smelt works in England at that time that produced pig iron used slag to produce road base and cinder blocks as a byproduct.
Have you ever tried using your calcined ash pellets as flux instead of plain wood ash? In a typical blast furnace they add the CaCO3, which then decomposes into CaO from the heat and that acts a flux, but since you’re already making CaO for mortar you could crush it into the ore directly. Just in case that fluxing step is a bottleneck
Watching your videos as fast as possible every time. Thank you for the great content. You are amazing
1:51 so bro is only 150 cm tall?
What's the biggest single piece of pottery/ceramic you can reliably make? Maybe stacked rings made of those could produce a furnace that needs less maintenance in use and could be made taller for a stronger draft. Also, have you tried angling the tuyeres a little to impart some spin to the input air? This might also lower the pressure in the lower part of the furnace a bit, enhancing draft.
Metallurgy is not primitive at all. Glad you keep at it and teach us so much on the way!
Thanks, I'll keep it up. Much appreciated.
Have you looked into milling the slag after each burn so you don’t have to do as much processing by hand?
If the slag is as brittle as it seems, then a large stone mill might be able to give you more time to get started on processing another batch of ore.
It's probably not worth the effort to set up a proper mill for the amount of slag he needs to refine. If he decides to experiment with it/ make mass quantities of slag maybe. Good thought
Nice work. I'd really love to see you getting all your iron prills together and somehow smelting them into steel. And then using the steel to make something - tools to start with, then perhaps building materials etc.?
He's already done that in the past. He made a knife.
I truly love this series. Thank you.
I think you have to add a fusig agent to the ore like ash, slag or lime(snail's shell). The weight of the ore is too low due to its fine powder form.
You can also increase the angle of the tuyeres (they need 45° to make more heat at the bottom of the smelter
Imagine being his friend and inviting him to hangout on the weekend, nah dude I gotta a loaded furnace to smelt.
My question isn't about the furnace but rather the ore. Would you consider using the panning method or a simple sluice box as way to get (arguably) more pure iron in the form of black sand in greater quantities? As I understand it, digging down a foot or so or about 30.5cm should yield a fair amount per cubic yard. Depending your location that is. But due to iron abundance in the world I would guess that it can fairly straightforward to get a few grams in these methods.
He's got at least two sluice boxes, tapered clay trays with grooved bottoms. (One of them is better than the other.) We've seen them in other videos but they don't appear in this one.
You add the clay for the furnace in layers, letting the older layer dry. Maybe roughing up the surface or carving a grove in there would help bind the layers together. I could imagine that the cracks in the walls form in these contact points between layers.
Hey John! Love the videos!
Question...
I know you're aiming for zero impact on the area you are in, but would tanning potential be something you look at doing?
I can only imagine the tech tree hide would open up!
Just imagine hide bellows for your furnace!
I think he's trying to avoid killing anything, and dealing with carcasses you find in the woods is just nasty.
Getting the video of the slag while it's heated was quite awesome!
Hey John, I don't know much about smelting, but it seems pills gather because iron is polarized to itself. Have you considered adding the pellets of iron you already have to the ore in order to draw more iron from the slag?
seeing you go from stone tools to the ability to produce pig iron has been insane! thank you so much for sharing all of this
You think this is insane then you may wanna look up how they made carbon steel in ancient India. Some smart cookies worked out how it was done. Similar setup, but they needed four people and who worked leather bellows in shifts. They also kept the iron and some powders (reducing agents) sealed in a clay vessels. The result is nearly 3 ish days of work and you have a damn near perfect steel ingot. And this was done long before the industrial age. Sadly it doesn't have the ripples as wootz steel but impressive for its time