Went to D&V's yesterday for another smelting experiment. I thought I was going to be spending my time in the shop, working on my new carving in alabaster, but so few people attended yesterday's event that I was actually able to be part of the team for once -- first as 'charcoal monkey' and then record keeper. It was really exciting to be so close that I could watch everything that was going on and, yet, not be in the way of workers.
Backing up briefly: Two weeks ago I had been at their place in order help with the prep work that had to be done in advance of the smelt. That day, I had mixed the red oxide powder with the stipulated ingredients (as accurately as I could) and water. The red oxide (yes, I was wearing a mask) got into everything. Now, two weeks later, it has only almost disappeared from around my nails -- despite frequent washings performed with great vigour.
The trays with the red oxide compound had been sun dried over the course of the past two weeks and, by the time I arrived on Saturday, had already been broken up and graded into pieces suitable for the smelt.
Shortly after I arrived, the guys got the smelter (which had been built by others on the team two weeks ago, while I was playing with iron oxide) going for the preheating.
The next stage was grading the charcoal. I had volunteered for a dirty job, and that's exactly what I got. There was a wooden stand -- about two feet by three feet -- with a sturdy metal grill set into the top of it. Beneath this grill was a tray that was open at one end. It had a screen for its bottom, and was set into the wooden structure at an angle so that it would be easier to pull out the charcoal that had already fallen through the grill. The screen in the second level allowed the charcoal dust, which wouldn't be much use to us, to fall through into a plastic bin at the bottom. Armed with a mallet, I whacked the charcoal so that it broke into smaller pieces and fell through the grill. This made it an appropriate size for the smelt. What was really weird was that I was going about it all wrong. I hadn't realised that there were correct and incorrect ways to whack charcoal! I was using the same movements that I was taught to use for carving stones, whereas I should have been relaxing the wrists and letting the mallet fall onto the charcoal, aided only a small bit from my arm. I did this for four large bags of charcoal.
Once that was done, our fearless leader asked me to do the record keeping for this smelt. The term 'anal retentive' was bandied about (with many chuckles and guffaws) at this point, but I did it anyway. This activity involved noting the time, elapsed time, and amounts of ore or charcoal being added to the smelter, as well as keeping a running total so that we knew, at a glance, how many kilograms of ore or buckets of charcoal had been used.
They got a very nice bloom (term used for the hunk of iron produced by the smelting process) out of it.
After tidying up the smelting site and putting the tools into the van, we settled down around the cook fire to have a beer. Some of the people went off to try out the glass bead-making oven that had been finished on site that day. My knees were bothering me, however, so I stayed with the beer.
The post-dinner entertainment consisted of holiday snaps from a couple of members of the group who had just returned from a trip to Scotland (including Orkney and Shetland) and Iceland. They were there for the earthquake. There were some great shots of items of historic interest to all of us. They gave us each a stone from Thingvellir.
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