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High-Performance Blades Sharing ideas for getting the most out of our steel.

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  #1  
Old 09-26-2006, 03:25 PM
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B.Finnigan B.Finnigan is offline
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Hematite

Iron and steel both get thier start as iron ore or hematite. This is the base material for smelting and is also referred to as "black sands". You can obtain black sands by buying it from a ceramics/pottery supplier or abrasives/sandblasting supplier. Or you can get it yourself with a magnetic extraction device. The devices can be easily home built for very little money. I will post pics of a couple devices I built. My home computer's hard drive crashed so alot of my photos are in limbo right now.

Not all hematite is the same. When I first started to get into smelting I was using the blacksands from off my property. My first smelt yielded and nice button of black glass. That was neat to see and do but it was not my goal. It turns out that the local black sands are not very high in iron ore, there is alot of silica and quartz impurities fused in with the iron.

It was not until I bought some hematite from a pottery store that I was able to get a button (circular ingot) of iron. A magnifying glass was all that I needed to see the two types of blacks sands were very different.

Here are two pictures of hematite under a 60x digital microscope. To the naked eye they both look similar. Your success in home smelting will be very reliant on the quality of the hematite you use.

Hematite from the local pottery supply store. Lots of black iron particles and not much quartz/silica which is very reflective.



Hematite from off of my place. Not very much black iron specs and way too much quartz/silica and other minerals. The red garnett is a neat gemstone but not when it crowds out the iron you need to make steel.

Last edited by B.Finnigan; 09-28-2006 at 03:11 PM.
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Old 09-26-2006, 06:49 PM
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Would a regular ol run of the mill metal detector do the job of locating hematite, or are the specs of iron ore to small? I guess a man could drag a large magnet through some suspicious areas hoping to pick up something. Good way to find meteorites also.


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Old 09-26-2006, 06:55 PM
Raymond Johnson Raymond Johnson is offline
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My local pottery has black and red iron oxide. Does this do me any good, or does it have to be hematite? I'm not sure about all this.
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Old 09-26-2006, 08:09 PM
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B.Finnigan B.Finnigan is offline
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I have never smelted with iron oxide except for using it in thermite. By using hematite you are actually smelting the iron from raw materials. There is alot of alloying you can do with allready smelted iron and steel to.

Robert, I will get a couple pics of my black sand extractors up real soon. You can drag a magnet throught th sand but it's a bear to get it off of the magnet. The extractors let you dis-engage the magnet after you have picked up some of it.
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Old 09-26-2006, 09:34 PM
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Ok. Seems like also you could put a handkerchief around the magnet, and after it has some "debre" on it, carefully turn the magnet over then remove the cloth. Mine would probably end up with a bunch of specks of pure gold or something, duh!


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Old 09-26-2006, 10:25 PM
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B.Finnigan B.Finnigan is offline
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That is the basic premise of magnetic extraction. You can also use specific gravity since iron is very heavy compared to other mineral elements. A prospecting slucebox will capture the "heavies" such as iron oxide and gold. I use a metal detector to gold prospect to find hematite hotspots since gold and hematite tend to hang out together. Running water (rivers) tends to classify or seperate out minerals just like a giant slucebox does. After running alot of material thru a slucebox you then empty the trapped heavies into a gold pan and further seperate the gold from the hematite. You have two types of black sands, magnetic and non-magnetic.

If you have iron minning going on in your area then chances are your local sands will have a higher concentration of iron oxide (ore). To my knowledge there are no iron mines anywhere in my state which explains the poor concentrations of iron in the sands. They tend to mine in areas that have have a high concentration of the sought after minerals.

Even if you do have access to iron rich sands the extraction process is tedious and it is hard to justify the work when you can buy the hematite for around $5 a pound. But there is a certain primal satisfaction that comes with getting iron right from the ground despite the labor involved. I think that is what drives alot of people to try home smelting. I hope to very soon extract enough black sand off of my property to at least make a small knife. It would be the most difficult knife project I have tackled but I have a very strong urge to give it a shot.
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Old 09-30-2006, 10:11 AM
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B.Finnigan B.Finnigan is offline
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I want to add one more note to this thread.

The quality of the black sand/hematite you use is of paramount importance.

You can be using the best state of the art smelting equipment and if you have dirty hematite/black sands you will not get iron or steel. Different quality blacks sands look the same to the naked eye. A magnifying glass will give you a thumbnail assay of the black sands but to really see the composition you need to either test smelt some or use a microscope.

My first smelt yielded nothing but black glass. I almost gave up thinking I was not even in the ball park. I am not one to give up easy but we all know others who would. I have visited other smelting forums on the internet and not one has ever had a thread regarding the quality of the black sands. I posted these same photo's on another smelting forum and they only got 80-90 page views and no comments. That tells me that alot of people may try smelting iron but are going to hit the same brick wall that I did.

Knowing the quality and composistion of the black sands you will be using will drasticaly shorten the learning curve for you.

A forum is an oppurtunity to learn from other peoples mistakes. My first smelt used up close to ten gallons of propane and three hours of my weekend, all for nothing.

Last edited by B.Finnigan; 09-30-2006 at 10:15 AM.
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