Thread: Tamahagane smelt....

Hello all,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randyda...093416/detail/

This is a link to some pics of a smelt of Tamahagane steel. This was run by one of our guys, Mike Blue, and friends of his, Randall Graham and Mariah Clark. They allowed me to watch and ask questions so I was a happy camper!

The smelter was built saturday morning and run the same day until 6PM when we ran out of charcoal. About 6 of the 55 gallon drums of charcoal was consumed and about 70-80 lbs of iron.

Wood charcoal was used as fuel and as a source of carbon. The iron is in the blue pails. It is 96% pure iron that Mike Blue obtained from one of the taconite pellet making companies here in Minnesota. Ask any questions.

This is one very dirty process! charcoal and cinders flying around all day!

The smelt was done at the Tunnel Mill Blacksmiths annual meeting just south of Rochester, Minnesota.
It was hosted by John and Carol Adams. Really good people.

Looks like fun thats for sure

Thanks for the photos.

The measured bloom material that we considered magnetic and of sufficient quality to further investigate was 47.8 pounds. Not all will be good steel. Some is iron that didn't have enough time to be refined, some is charcoal and slags. But one of Randy's pix shows the two best pieces lying on the grass. Those are going to be very interesting to work with. I have to hand off some to my helpers at some point.

Thanks for putting up the photos, Randy. He didn't tell you he spent most of Sunday morning breaking up chunks looking for the little bits.

What a great set of photos! Thank you for putting them up.

Cheers
M.

Wow that's pretty cool, thanks for sharing.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Cheers
Ivo

It looks like a moonshine operation

That's pretty cool though, thanks for the pics. I had no idea you could just build your own smelter like that

I also took some video of the smelt and finally managed to get it on my computer last nite. Using an MPEG2 format it is 150 MB! In the original .avi format the size is 3.4 GB!

I am thinking of making some DVD's for anyone who is interested.

But... would someone tell me how to break up the 150 MB file so I can upload it to Youtube? Do I need to put it into another format???????

Thanks guys,

randy - are you using windows? i'm a mac and linux person myself and can probably figure out the tools for these OS, but haven't gotten a clue what's the easiest way to do it on windows.