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Historical Inspiration This forum is dedicated to the discussion of historical knife design and its influence on modern custom knife work.

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  #1  
Old 08-18-2009, 12:55 PM
Kevin R. Cashen Kevin R. Cashen is offline
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The Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge

I hope this post is appropriate here as I feel it is very historically inspiring. And I hope it will inspire others to explore the ancient roots of bladesmithing. I spend a lot of time looking into microscopes and reading digital readouts for my knifemaking, this is the coutner balance to that and brings it all full circle.

This past weekend a group of Great Lakes area bladesmiths, and one devoted individual who rode from Syracuse NY on a Harley, (you are hardcore Page), got together to take up a challenge- in three days, starting with nothing but iron ore and charcoal, produce a blade capable of cutting a target in the shape of a bronze age warrior in two. It is an idea I had conceived over a year ago and hosted at my shop. I wanted to see if a finished functional blade could be done in such a time frame and I dubbed it ?The Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge?. The link was here at my web site: Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge

Early in the morning on Friday August 14, I started the fire in the bottom of the bloomery smelter I named the ferrite phantom. The smelter itself was made from a brown clay from my fire chiefs basement, but I found a whole bucket of drywall joint compound in my backroom that was a bit moldy and used it to coat the entire smelter with an eerie white fa?ade that made it look like a ghost and hence the name. The design was entirely inspired by what I learned several years ago from Michael McCarthy at the Ashokan seminar.



By 9:00 a.m. knifemakers started arriving and the challenge was on. As we neared noontime the ore and charcoal was flowing regularly into the furnace. At 2:30 p.m. the bottom was opened and a bloom was extracted for consolidation. Due to the intentional design of my smelter the opening was immediately closed and a second smelt was started without delay to insure that we would have enough material for a large blade.



By 8:30 p.m. on the first day we had one semi solid bar of steel and several well shaped pieces of a second bloom hammered into forgeable sizes.

On Saturday August 15 things got started bright and early. Several makers had pitched tents to camp in my back yard in order to not miss any part of the process. I lit my gas forge and we started folding and welding to redistribute the carbon, that while very high in some areas was very inconsistent, and seal all the voids. When doing this work one can understand where the myth of making steel denser from forging came from, since the amount of voids and blisters that get removed and sealed up does condense the bloom considerably, but once it is solid is forges quite like any other steel.



Through out a very hot and humid Michigan afternoon we folded the steel around 14 times and felt confident enough to go for a blade. We had decided to go with an ancient European theme and make a seax or langseax as our blade. By evening I had lost all of my water weight and most of the electrolytes in my body but we had a forged blade, which after a short refreshing break I proceeded to grind.





At 8:00 p.m. the shop was shut down and the diehards of the group settled down in the cool evening air to participate in a preplanned single malt scotch tasting. The Highlands and Speyside was well represented with the classic Glenlivet, Dalwhinnie, and Cragganmore, but the favorite of the night edging out all the others with it?s bold and complex flavor array was a fantastic cask strength 16 year old Glenlivet called Naddura. Not all present were fans of this power house of a whiskey so it may actually have been a tie when one counts the fans of the subtle and soothing Dalwhinnie. It was surprising that Islay did not even have a representative in the group but I may have been the only fan of the smokey peats.

After a good grilled supper and those delicious spirits we retired to our brass lantern illuminated gazebo and before we knew it we have laughed and chatted until 3:00 a.m. Sunrise and the last part of the challenge would come all too soon.

At 9:00 on Sunday I finished grinding and rolled the edge onto our beautiful seax, and with very tired and achy hands ignited the salt pots. After polishing to a rough 400X finish the blade was heated for 5 minutes in 1475F salts and then quenched into Parks #50 (spine down to prevent our seax from turning into a scythe). The steel formed a beautiful natural hamon (dead straight suguha) ?? from the edge as well as some superficial hardening at the spine.

By noon the blade was in the tempering oven and we were able to take a short rest in the shade. When the temper has done its job I polished and etched the blade to bring out the pattern and hamon. The ferric chloride revealed a subtle random pattern with pool and eye effects from the forging, but also some pin point decarb from my salts being out of neutrality. I had been test firing some new burner all the week before and hand not rectified the salts from that process.



At around 3:00 p.m. on Sunday we successfully completed the challenge when we cut a pool noodle and dowel rod target, topped with the image of the dreaded bronze age warrior Nasticles, in half with a single clean blow.




It was not as easy as it would seem and can physically wipe you out to attempt the entire process in three days, but we did it.
When our group looked back at the pile of iron bearing dirt and rocks from 54 hours before, and at the blade that had just proved itself a formidable weapon, it gave us the feeling that if we could do this, we could do anything.

Last edited by Kevin R. Cashen; 08-18-2009 at 02:13 PM.
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Old 08-18-2009, 03:22 PM
Gabe Newell Gabe Newell is offline
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This is awesome in many dimensions.


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Old 08-18-2009, 04:21 PM
AlanR AlanR is offline
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A great read.

Thanks, and congratulations.

-AlanR
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Old 08-18-2009, 09:17 PM
BDK BDK is offline
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Wow id like to have been apart of that. Awesome job, congrats


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Old 08-19-2009, 01:53 PM
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Alan L Alan L is offline
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Oh, man!

Wish I'd been there. I'd have brought some Islay malts.

Very impressive amount of work, that was an ambitious undertaking and excellent results. I wholeheartedly approve.
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Old 09-03-2009, 06:33 PM
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Don Halter Don Halter is offline
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Nice job! Pretty impressive that ya'll did it all in one weekend!!!

Looks like a scaled down version of the Rievaulx Abby one they did during the English heritage days.

http://www.brad.ac.uk/archsci/depart...2/Rievaulx.htm

What were ya'lls bloom sizes and feed rates of charcoal/ore?

I'll be moving 2300 lbs of commercially pure iron oxide (Fe2O3) off our old property and out to it's new home along with 300 lbs of hardwood charcoal. If TX ever comes out from under a burn ban I might get to do some smelting this Fall! A couple others told me I'd need to add something like crushed limestone to the oxide to have something to form a slag. In central TX, limestone isn't going to be a problem!


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Old 09-03-2009, 09:32 PM
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Great post, Kevin! This was a fun read after a long day.

I'll be looking for smoke signals from west of here to see when Don gets that fire going!!


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  #8  
Old 09-04-2009, 09:03 AM
Kevin R. Cashen Kevin R. Cashen is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Halter
Nice job! Pretty impressive that ya'll did it all in one weekend!!!

Looks like a scaled down version of the Rievaulx Abby one they did during the English heritage days.

http://www.brad.ac.uk/archsci/depart...2/Rievaulx.htm

What were ya'lls bloom sizes and feed rates of charcoal/ore?

I'll be moving 2300 lbs of commercially pure iron oxide (Fe2O3) off our old property and out to it's new home along with 300 lbs of hardwood charcoal. If TX ever comes out from under a burn ban I might get to do some smelting this Fall! A couple others told me I'd need to add something like crushed limestone to the oxide to have something to form a slag. In central TX, limestone isn't going to be a problem!
Sure Don, definitely go for it if you get the chance, it is too much fun not to. If I can help with any information I can feel free to call on me. To be honest I had not seen that link to that smelt before so I find it very interesting how similar things can be with smelts that are completely isolated from each other. But then if you want to tap the slag and extract the bloom all from the same opening without destroying the furnace it does kind of limit the designs possibilities down.

the blooms were around 10 lbs. and we fed around 50 lbs of ore and 100 lbs of charcoal into the thing. Ore that is full of silicates provides its own flux, but the purer the ore the more need for fluxing supplement, I use calcium carbonate in the form of baked and crushed clam shells but limestone would be a lot easier. I am excited to try it again since I found a large deposit of beautiful Lake Superior magnetite sand. I have a shaded lense view port built into my tuyere so I can observe and regulate the process as it happens at the bloom, in accordance with with I feed about two charges of charcoal to 1 charge of ore. the ore is around a cup and a half at a time, but my smelter is much smaller. I work off the philosophy that if I am going to screw up a smelt I want it to be a small screw up, if I want more bloom I just run another smelt.
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Old 09-08-2009, 11:12 AM
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Don Halter Don Halter is offline
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Cool, the viewing window sounds like it would be very helpful. Here in TX we have large amounts of siderite and limonite iron ore out in east TX. It's pretty much just laying around all over. It's not the greatest ore, but it seemed to work for the old-timey iron production out there. I think it'll be a while before I run out of the sacks of oxide, but if it does happen I don't have far to go. I've seen black sands in some of the creekbeds out east, but nothing that would be easy to recover without magnet fishing for entire day!

I moved all my sacks this weekend and got a spot picked out for the furnace. Unfortunately, at Kerrville, TX, you don't hit clay until about 200' deep out where I'm doing it. Our old place at Bryan has some nice smooth white clay I was told was a form of natural porcelain clay and would work nice for a furnace wall. It's within a few feet of the surface in some spots and fairly easy to dig. I'll be back out there next month and can hopefully get most the furnace built.

I figure between the various medeival groups and the TX knifemaking group I should be able to garner a few extra hands to build something. The size of yours looks like a good size, for all the reasons you pointed out! I'd like something that is easy to remove the bloom without destroying the furnace, and that I could operate by myself if needed. I'll eventually do a big one, but I think I need to climb the learning curve a bit before tackling that!


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Old 11-25-2009, 11:30 AM
Kevin R. Cashen Kevin R. Cashen is offline
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In the past I have shared images of smelts I have done using whatever ore I could scrounge from anywhere around the country, but it didn?t take long for me to ask why I was having such a hard time finding raw metal ores in Michigan of all places! For those not familiar with the geology of my state, the Upper Peninsula was once a very mountainous region formed by ancient volcanism, and is thus one of the richest metallic or spots in earth. For a while I used the ubiquitous (in MI) taconite pellets for my ore since one can scoop them up along just about any RR track in the north, but using these preprocessed ore pellets somehow lacked the romance and feel of doing it all from scratch.

In August Karen and I treated the family to a trip into the U.P. for a weekend and it was on the shores of that most forbidding and remote great lake, mighty Superior, that I saw it.



I don?t know how many times in my youth while hiking along those cold barren shores that I saw the blackened sand streaks and dismissed them as concentrations of rotting organic material, but this time I had a keener eye for the inorganic. One feel of the mass of that sand in my hand and I knew I had literally hit pay-dirt! It took great effort of both me and my 16 year old son to drag a bucket of the stuff back to a road, but would it make steel?

I had been chomping at the bit to see if the black sand would make steel but my work in the shop left little time for experimenting. I had told Delbert Ealy and Tim Zowada about my plans and they had caught the same enthusiastic bug and requested to participate in the trial runs to learn my methods, and had collected more of the sand for us to try. Tim set the date for November 12th and on that morning I fired the Ferrite Phantom once again and waited for the guys to arrive. This is where I cannot say how glad I am to have designed the semi-permanent smelter so that not only can I reuse it again later with no hassle but I can also run as many smelts as I please, back to back, in one day.

Since we were working with sand I knew we would have much more slag than my other smelts and I was prepared for that. For those not familiar with the process, slag is good and an essential part of the process, but too much tends to fill the smelter prematurely and interfere with the air blast. The first run that day produced so much slag that it interfered with the air flow, and the greater viscosity, which worked well to make steel with the other ores, made it very difficult to tap off. So our first run was a lesser yield but of very high carbon content, despite the very troublesome abundance of silica.

It took all of five minutes to readjust the tuyere and recalibrate things for what we hoped would compensate for the excess silica and fire the Phantom again. In no time we started seeing differences. The process within the burn chamber (you should know me and realize I would not go without a way to directly monitor the process occurring inside ) looked very active with a very good slag pool and highly active iron particulates. Then when the slag reached the mouth of the tuyere for the first time the moment of truth came- I hammered the rod into the slag tap and was rewarded with a highly liquid stream of the finest slag you have ever seen!


Delbert and I watch the smelt progress into the night:

We worked into the night continually tapping off the excess slag in order to maximize our steel yield until finally we saw a distinct change in the smelter exhaust telling us we had maximized the smelt and could go no further. Eagerly we chiseled open the bottom chamber and cleared the way for what lay hidden inside. Form above I hammered and worked harder than I ever have to remove a bloom, whatever was in there, it was big and very solid!



Now steel is steel and however one can get it from a smelter they should take it and be grateful, we are making steel from dirt after all. But the ideal bloom, showing that everything went just right, should form a large solid ?birds nest? shaped piece caused by the perfect sintering in the slag pool with aggregation around the outside of the air blast. If one gets this configuration they really nailed it.


With certain excitement I reached into the darkly glowing recess of the smelter with my bloom tongs and wiggled a huge single mass out of the opening. It was dark out then and we had to wait until I could get it into the light of the shop. This is what we saw:





We had made a perfect birds nest and then continued to yield steel in arching columns over it! I have made more material in one smelt but never such a solid and beautiful bloom! The sand was a total success! We touched it to the grinder and found wonderful sprays of high carbon sparks, while at the same time able to bend and hammer pieces flat. It wasn't lacking of carbon or saturated with it, but it was a nice carbon steel, pearlitic from the slow cool.

In the end we found we had used around 50 lbs. of charcoal and around ? to 2/3 of a bucket of Lake Superior sand to make it, so the efficiency in my smelts continues to improve beyond what I thought was about as good as I was going to get.

The Matherton Forge Iron Age Challenge in August produced a sword from raw ore in three days time, and I didn?t know if I could top that feeling of accomplishment. This may not seem more impressive, but it really stirs the imagination and fires me up to think that I can drive a few hours north and hike out to some desolate shore of Gitchigumi to hand dig sand that I can make into a blade.
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Old 11-29-2009, 01:12 AM
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Don Halter Don Halter is offline
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Cool! Thanks for sharing the info.

I just dropped off all the materials up at my parent's property. We'll be going out the weekend of the 12th and doing some early matchlock deer hunting as well as smelting furnace building. Hopefully that Sunday we'll get a chance to do a burn.

What are your feed rates running for this?


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Old 11-29-2009, 05:22 PM
Kevin R. Cashen Kevin R. Cashen is offline
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My charge rates are hard to put solid numbers to since it is determined by the burn rate. I prefer to push it as hard as I can on the ore additions due to charcoal actually being my largest expense. I add ore to the burn every other charge of charcoal, with increasing quantities until as long as I see the burn rate progressing at a healthy pace. If the charcoal doesn't need replacing in too long of an interval, obviously I need to back off the ore a bit. I have found I can lay the iron on heavier with the sand than I could with the pea sized ore.
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Old 07-19-2010, 05:12 PM
VaughnT VaughnT is offline
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Another absolutely fascinating read, sir.


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Old 09-11-2010, 08:37 AM
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Good stuff, Kevin.

Certainly inspirational!


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Old 09-11-2010, 08:54 AM
Kevin R. Cashen Kevin R. Cashen is offline
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This summer while taking some time in the U.P. to scout out the richest sand deposits I also found rocky outcroppings of hematite and magnetite ores. With the largest veins located on private mining properties one has to look a little harder for good stuff you can dig out yourself. One also has to be very carful not to dig in any parks or preserves where collecting of minerals or fossils is strictly forbidden.
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