>Day 2569 of trying to smelt iron>Another handful of iron beadsWhy can't he reach the Iron age?
Because there are not sufficiently pure and accessible iron ore deposits near him?
>>17981867smelting iron is a no brainer, just blow into a fire and dump iron dust inside. I think he's stuck in some mental loop trying to make it from local materials, like homegrown product, but it makes no sense. good ore deposits were top strategic points, and metallurgy developed around those. he's treating it as a stone age economy which it isn'thttps://youtu.be/9yxdUwDe1JM?feature=shared
He's using a poor source of iron ore and is trying to smelt in hand-molded clay furnaces. Iron requires very high temperatures to smelt, and maintaining a very high heat is difficult when you're using clay and mud to build natural draft furnaces or small hand powered bellows to keep the fire hot. The poor quality ore though is the real killer here. He'd have to scrape that whole creek dry to get enough usable ore to make a single ingot probably.
>>17981891>smelting iron is a no brainerIt really isn't. People figured out how to make bronze before they managed to make smelting iron feasible. If it were that simple people would've been mass producing iron without bothering to try out different alloys before they created bronze. There is a real limitation to iron smelting and that limitation is heat. Iron has a higher melting point than either copper or tin, the components for bronze, and maintaining that melting point in a furnace requires more refined techniques for generating and trapping heat, which is why iron smelting took longer to really figure out. Once the proper furnace designs and fuel types were figured out, though, it spread quickly. Iron is a lot easier to find than tin, or copper for that matter, so being able to create usable amounts of metal from ubiquitous iron ore was the real no-brainer. Somebody had to figure out the heating problem first, though.
>>17981893That's the big problem.Iron was "worked"(wrought) not smelted for most of history. As in you got ore of quite decent quality all things considered, put it in a furnace not hot enough to melt it(if it did it would turn into then still useless pig iron) and hammered the shit out if it until you bashes the impurities out.With his bacterial iron he simply will never get enough of it in one piece to do something useful with it.
Bloomery furnaces in the Iron Age reached ~1200°C, where most modern experiments don't get past 1000°C.
>>17981891>just blow into a fire and dump iron dust inside
>>17981867he needs more ironthat’s really all there is to ithe’s one man not a massive mining corporation
>>17981867>iron beadsProof of success. He needs either more ore or purer ore, preferably both.
Wouldn't blame him if he just shipped in some big iron ore boulders or something as long as he is transparent about it. He has been stuck for a long time now and it's getting boring. Either it's a new mud hut, new blower design, or making tiny ironn beads from the bacteria sludge.
>>17981867>>17981891You'd think he'd have access to river bed magnetite.
>>17981867Without the dance of the Minoan women, he is surely to failThera happened for a reasonBro is trying to capture lightning in a bottle again
>>17982995He's running into the same problems that early civilizations did trying to work iron. Only his case is even worse because his local iron deposits are poor quality on top of the usual problems with trying to work iron. This is what drove people to experimenting with other types of metal and creating alloys like bronze. The likelihood of him finding a viable substitute metal on his tiny patch of land isn't great, though. Bronze isn't gonna happen cause tin is pretty scarce but if he could find copper, that was mined even 12,000 years ago with stone age tools. Copper's not nearly as tough as iron but you can still hammer it to fine shapes to make more delicate tools.
>>17982143He didn't even get any iron prills from that latest smelt attempt. The furnace didn't get hot enough for it. He really just needs ore with a higher iron content. He's using stuff that is iron at a molecular level. He's going to have to turn like a literal ton of muddy earth into slag to get a full ounce of iron.
>>17981891>I think he's stuck in some mental loop trying to make it from local materials,Well yeah, he has to make a compromise and decide on how this will work. It's supposed to be a PVRE primitivist approach where he only works with what nature provides around him. If he imports some iron from elsewhere, is he really sticking to the LARP?
>>17981867All good iron was used already. There is no free iron to use at this point.
>>17981897Iron in of itself is not actually a very difficult material to work with in the confines of what he is doing, he is able to get it hot enough for forging. The issue is he has no sufficient supply, the shit he is doing is genuinely worse than the shit the Japanese were doing simply due to the location. The main factor that lead to the iron age was just finding deposits and learning how to actually mine the shit. Steel on the other hand is far, far more complicated and would require a vast leap in technology from what he is currently doing.Also the nigga needs a hammer and anvil if he ever planned on actually working the iron and I doubt he has the ability to make a mold, get sufficient supplies of bronze or iron, and have an effective way of casting these items. These are the genuine limitations but he could make a good sized iron bloom with what he currently has, just no good way to work it from there.
>>17984698he cant make a cast iron hammer, because he doesn't get to the required temps (and a brittle hammer sucks anyways), he can't make a copper, let alone bronze hammer because he doesn't have access to copper and tin ores and he cant forge a iron bloom into a consistent bar, because he doesn't have a hammer.looks like he's bricked pretty badly.
>>17983741Keep in mind that before vast tin trade networks were established in the latter half of the bronze age for most civilizations, arsenical bronze (over 0.5% arsenic, usually made by co-smelting with common arsenic-bearing minerals) or even the basic technology of arsenical copper (less than 0.5% As, often occuring as natural impurities in Cu ore) would allow for vastly better alloys for tools and weapons than anything this dude will likely accomplish in ironworking. The problem of course is that arsenic fumes are almost as poisonous as those of mercury and arsenical bronze smithing was a high lethality job that most likely crippled the smith at a relatively young age.Also, native copper used to be common and could be picked up from the ground and cold-wrought by hunter-gatherers even in the stone age, although its extreme brittleness would limit such crafting efforts to jewellery only. Naturally all the free-lying copper was the first thing humanity collected once the chalcolithic truly began with the realization that high heat would allow better malleability to make usable tools.
>>17985139Yeah that's pretty much what I was trying to get across, with the correct materials he could do it with what he has but the location makes gathering those materials and making shit out of them nearly impossible.I hate Jared Diamond but the nigga did have a point with how shit Australia is for this kind of thing.
Is there any way he can make iron while sticking to "the rules"?
