Quote Originally Posted by ChrisL View Post
I like it. I have to be careful though; it wouldn't take much for me to go off the deep end and start collecting and building different kinds of forges just for the fun of it!

I travel to Duluth, MN fairly often and I'm always drawn to the mountain sized pile of taconite they have at one of the loading docks you can see right from the freeway. The taconite comes straight from the Mesabi Iron Range. I think it would be cool to build a small furnace, fenagle a trailer load of taconite from the company that ships it, and make a batch of steel.

When I was a kid growing up there, you could pick up buckets of taconite if you just walked along the railroad tracks in east Duluth. It was perfect size and shape for slingshot ammo. They don't use that particular stretch of rail for that purpose any longer so no more free taconite there.

Chris L
I worked in Mountain Iron, MN on the Mesabi range for American Bridge Co on steel erection at their US Steel taconite pellet processing plant back in the '70s. Lived in Chisholm next to Hibbing the bigger town where Bob Dylan was from. Where they had what was then the largest open pit mine in the US if not the world. Something to see that hole in the ground. Nice people out that way.