What do you know about smelting? Where would one start learning?

Better off buying whatever steel you want and going from there. It will be better than whatever you can come up with

Unless you just wanna fuck around, in which case there's probably hundreds of channels on youtube about metalworking you could study

>>34208229
Have you tried youtube?

1. Its hard as fuck to do on a low budget
2. Making a knife from a moon rock is bottom of thr iceberg autism
3. Depending on the metal the fumes can posion you or make you retarded.

Mcmastercarr.com
Check them out for steel

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>>34208266
>>34208277
>>34208324
thank you

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Well, I've turned iron ore into iron using traditional methods at one point, so I guess I could cough up a brief overview of the process.

I won't really cover making the furnace, as I didn't do that, but just keep in mind that some furnaces want ready made charcoal, others want suitably sized bits of firewood (it's going to be quite picky about that bit) and turn that into charcoal on its own. Either way the fuel consumption is enormous. Say half a cubic metre of wood to make three pounds of unrefined metal.

While you start chopping wood, start a small fire in the furnace to pre-heat it. You'll want to keep that going for maybe 24h straight to heat and dry it properly before you start smelting.

>>34208229
Most people, even enthusiasts, just get scrap steel out of stuff like automotive parts.

Basic metallurgy is within the grasp of individual hobbyists, but smelting per se is really not.

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Now to roast your ore. You want to heat it with a good air supply. Grab a blowtorch, or built a roasting pyre like this.

You want the ore to turn a deep crimson after roasting. If it starts going off into blue-grey tones you have overheated it, casing a slag layer to form around the grains, which will make it very hard for them to react properly in the furnace later.

As for the ore, if there's too little iron in there you'll get less metal per run, not just in total but as a percentage of what was in the ore. But if there's too much iron in there the ore will be "dry", and the slag won't run off properly, meaning an outright unusable product or one demanding an ungodly amount of refining afterwards (loosing a lot of the metal in the process).

>i want to learn about a complicated subject tangentially related to weapons
>i know, i'll make a thread on /k/ instead of looking in the internet for a website specifically made for my exact question!

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Sweep up your roasted ore, sort out any coal bits from it, and we're good to smelt.

Here's a shaft furnace, basically just a straight shaft with hole at the bottom. You start with the hole partially plugged so you can blow air in, at the end you open it to let slag out.

Fill it with charcoal, start pumping in air (lots of it), when it's hot enough you increase the air flow and layer ore and more charcoal on top at suitable intervals. Once that's done you let it burn down (IIRC with an even further increased air flow).

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The pit furnace has a straight bu shallow shaft in its lower part, the widens like a funnel in the upper half. Stack the lower part with wooden sticks as long as it's high, then line the sides of the funnel with longer sticks, and finally fill the funnel with short bits.

Light it up, have it turn to charcoal, and then start layering coal and ore here too.

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Towards the end, after the period of greatest airflow, open the outlet for the slag. Hopefully most of it will flow out nicely. Whatever doesn't will remain in the bloom, and you're going to have to quite literally beat it out of there.

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When things are about done, reach down in there with some large tongs and lift out the iron bloom. You may need to pry it loose with an iron spit first.

At this point the bloom is extremely porous and full of slag and bits of charcoal. The one here is a pretty bad one, the slag didn't run off properly. Place it on a tree stump, flat rock or similar start beating it together with a wooden mallet. Very gently at first, more pressing than beating, and as this solidifies and strengthens it you can get more vigorous without smashing it.

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Congratulations, you've made a lump of iron. Poor, unrefined iron, but if all went well it'll be forgeable as is at least, which is more than can be said of a modern day blast furnace.

>>34208548

KM can I join your post Apocalypse team? I make a mean peach jam, and I'm an amateur blacksmith, like not a great one but I'm learning.

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Now to refine this (definitely needed if you want to make a cutting tool) you get yet more charcoal, a sledgehammer, and start beating the living daylight out of the billet. If the billet gets too drawn out to be easily handled, fold it over an learn to forge weld. Or just alternate which side you're hitting, that'll kinda work too.

This step is known as primary forging.

In theory you can make steel straight away in these furnaces by getting the process parameters just spot on. In reality expect iron, and learn to carburise that after the refining.

The end result, once you start getting decent at it, will be a metal of poorer quality than most you can buy today, and if you wanted to make a decent living making it you'd have to charge maybe five hundred times the cost of plain, unremarkable carbon steel bought straight up from a smith supply shop.

That'd be a rough overview, any questions?

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>>34208266
This. Been doing blacksmith shit with friends for about a year now with moderate success. First successful forge weld a few days ago on a motorcycle chain billet.

Protips:
>Start looking for an anvil now. Fuckers are expensive and scarce. In the meantime, sections if railroad track and forklift tines make serviceable anvils, especially if you have access to a welder.
>Those blue harbor freight anvils will not work. They are not proper hardening steel, provide a poor working surface, and break under heavy use.
>Do NOT heat anything that has been galvanized. Fucks you up.
>Remove galvanization with acid baths
>Gain access to a welder if at all possible
>Mild steel does not make knives. Do some research on carbon steel; it's both difficult and easy to find if you know where to look. I use a lot of leaf springs, which tend to be ~5160. Serviceable, and good for long, flexible blades like machetes
>In a pinch, various hand tools can provide decently hardening steel. My first was made from a wrench.
>Look into venturi torches. Cheapest way to achieve the necessary heat, though they require some creative machining if you don't have access to a lathe. We made it work with hand tools.

>Pic related, one of my first

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Here's the end result (after a proper blacksmith did some more primary forging with a power hammer). Good run on the left, bad run on the right, and the small bits are slag from the latter's runoff.

>>34208578
Depending on the apocalypse peaches may struggle around here. We'll want your cloudberry jam up to snuff as well to be on the safe side I think.

>>34208663

So the bad one had more slag in it? Is there anything you can do at that point?

>>34208229
This crazy bastard says he started out by ordering fancy fencework pieces: https://www.youtube.com/user/michaelcthulhu

>>34208229
get some old bastard files and a cheap forge. Anvil and hammer away.

>>34208659
How about buying a cheap anvil and putting an AR500 plate on the top?

>>34210347
idk, part of the problem with cheap anvils the get stress fractures and break due to being made from cast iron or pot metal

in essence, what you're doing with the whole process is taking the iron oxide, reducing it with fuck-ton of carbon, and getting ~4-6% carbon in your iron. Now you've got to lower the carbon content to a reasonable amount (0.5%-0.9% for medium to high carbon contents respectively). To do that you burn it off with the bessemer process with air, but you're also putting nitrogen into your steel and making it brittle (the real guys use straight oxygen). The chemistry of your slag and crucible liners are important. The slag essentially grabs all your nasty shit and pulls it out. Getting it molten instead of doing all of it solidstate is really important to get out the inclusions and nasty shit.

If you do it as a backyard style, it'll be cool as fuck but will never compete with industry production quality.

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>>34209315
A lot of primary forging would, eventually, beat the slag out. Ie fold, fold, fold. Plenty of iron would be lost in the process, and if you had managed to make steel straight up here then it'll be wrought iron by the time you're done. For a good knife or so you'd want to fold the good one too, there's plenty of slag in there if you get your microscope, but it is at least good enough for most everyday objects as it is.

One of the main ways used today to find historical iron making sites is the huge piles of slag and heat scale from the primary forging left behind. After a few centuries of working in the same spot, they could become quite immense.

>>34210347
One possible issue is that since AR500 is a hardened steel, welding it in place may screw over the hardness.

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>>34211911
>and getting ~4-6% carbon in your iron

Pig iron form a back yard furnace? Wouldn't hitting those temperatures require something a bit bigger, to get the cooling surface/internal volume ratio down? The Bessemer process certainly seems rather on the ambitious side here.

It's certainly possible not to go there with these, both historically and today most of the material we get here is down in the plain iron to mild steel region.

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>>34213741
(You) do realize that cast iron has a lower melting point than steel right? Eutectic is ~4.3% C by weight.

>>34208229

Do you by any chance live in WA?

>>34208396
So you've recreated the loopy idea of a steel furnace in every backyard that managed to only produce shit-tier pig iron and helped to destroy China's economy during the Great Leap Forward.

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>>34213844
The higher temperature isn't there to melt the pig iron. As we're making "normal" iron in these bloomery furnaces the metal never melts at all, so that's not a necessity in any way. Instead the higher temperature is what creates conditions inside the furnace to drive up the carbon content of the metal. So at lower temperature you're not getting solid pig iron, you're just not getting pig iron at all.

Instead the lower melting temperature of pig iron and the higher temperature necessary to make it taken together ensure that if you make pig iron, it'll come out molten, instead of the solid bloom created by the processes I took part in.

>>34213898
This rather a recreation of medieval metallurgy. Many farmers in the area where I did this would spend autumn and early winter making iron and forging it into trade goods, scythe blades being popular, to supplement their income.

The product also isn't pig iron, as should be quite obvious from both the photos and description.

You can smelt iron in a microwave with special bricks that convert the microwaves into heat.

Right.
you do not "smelt" your own steel. Doing so is pretty much akin to you saying that you want to compete in the indy 500 and you're going to make the car yourself...
KM's summary there is more than adequate to show the complexity - this is not stuff for a total beginner to try.

for making blades, buy yourself good steel stock. I'm going to assume you're US-based, so go to Aldo Bruno, the NJ steel Baron ( newjerseysteelbaron.com/ ). For a beginner, I would recommend you use 1084, as it is the easiest steel to heat-treat effectively.

Making blades consists of 4 primary stages:
1. Rough shaping.
2. Heat-treatment
3. Fine shaping
4. Grip/Hilt fitting.

Rough shaping can be done by a grinder, or with hammer and forge. its simply taking the metal and making it close to the shape of the knife.

Heat treatment is the critical area. It is the conversion of soft steel to hardened steel by quenching the glowing hot steel in oil, making a ultra-hard but brittle blade, followed by tempering, the re-heating of the blade to a lower temperature for 1/2 an hour or more, to soften it a little, making it springy and resilient.

Knowing the composition of the steel you are using is critical in good heat-treatment. This is why using scrap metal is an idiot's game. you do not know if that spring is 1070, 5160, 4130. you dont know if the reclaimed file is 1095, or mild steel with a case-hardened outer. and so on. As a beginner, you should never use a metal you do not know the exact properties of - doing so simply raises more variables and points of failure.

Fine shaping is the process of first grinding the heat-treated blade, carefully removing excess material, and then hand-polishing it to go from rough finish to a polished blade.

Hilting the blade is an art in itself, making grips, picking out wood or the likes, to turn a blade into a knife.

>>34214653
now, where would you start.

well, you can DIY it. but in all honesty, it would be easier to go searching around for something like ABANA (Artist Blacksmith's Association of North America) in the US, Or Owen Bush's Bushfire Forge in the UK, and pay to do a course witha local teacher. a few hundred spent on a weekend course will teach you the skills far faster, and will save you money in the long run, by avoiding all the errors you'll make on your own.

your equipment list should be as follows:

1: Eye protection. At an absolute minimum, safety glasses. Sparks fly, there's grit and dust everywhere.

2: Hearing protection. Anglegrinders scream, hammers are worse. even forges can be loud.

3: Breathing protection. you are producing dust particles. those will get in your lungs and cause silicosis. Do you want to be 25, and breathing like a 60-year old who's smoked 25 a day? No. In England, Sheffield was the #1 blademaking city. in 1900, The average life expectancy of a grinder working in a cutlery shop was 45, and 65% of them died from lung conditions.

I would personally recommend you spend extra and buy a "3M 6800 mask", which has eye and breathing protection combined. you do not want to fuck your health up doing this.

4: Grinder. Even if you forge your blades, you will need to grind them for fine finish. If you do not forge, you will need a grinder to do the shaping (called stock removal). It should be your first dedicated purchase. modern grinders use belts, normally 2x72", (but some use 50x2000mm) with al-ox abrasives. they're efficient and far safer than bench grinders.

5: Heat: you will need a heat source in an enclose area to heat-treat. for tiny blades, firebrick and a MAPP gas torch will just do the job. for bigger, you will want either a coal forge, or a propane burning forge.

>>34210347
I've heard of this being done, but I can't vouch for it myself. My original shitty harbor freight "anvil" fragged entirely.

>>34214698
Trouble is grinders are fucking expensive. It's worth looking into building one, but in that case a welder is a must.

>>34210347
Bit excessive really in price, best bet would be to get a nice thick chunk of 1050-1070 or the like and weld it over the top, then case harden the surface.
Though, getting the heat into the metal is pretty tough!

Anyway, a not entirely terrible vid on making metal from scratch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNuEDtnVdeM

>>34214698
Coal - or more accurately, charcoal, forges are the old traditional method. A big bowl of burning coals, air pumped in to underneath the coals gets them hot, chimney for soot and hot gases above it..
its filthy, dirty work, and it consumes great big bags of charcoal, leaving black soot everywhere. Dont care about mess, its great. you can control heat easily in them by piling up coals or spreading out, or pumping more air.

the alternative are propane burner forges. far more contained, a 1-burner forge can be (almost) the size of a shoebox. they can be made at home easily - a "soup can forge" can be found all over the internet. they can be harder to control the heat. but they are also far more convenient. Take your pick.

If you are forgeworking you'll then need hammers (fairly straightforward) and a striking surface - an anvil.

generally speaking the bigger your work, the bigger an anvil you are needing. for small blades, you could just about get away with an upturned sledgehammer head fixed in concrete. A section of railroad track *can* work, but is generally too light.

New anvils are a crap-shoot. most are shit, cast iron that cracks. you need cast STEEL, or wrought steel antique ones. do not expect a big anvil to be cheap. a good test is to get a 1 inch ball bearing, and drop it on the anvil. it should bounce back up almost as high as you dropped it from. if it goes "dink" and only bounces 1/2 as high, its a cast iron doorstop, not an anvil.

Getting a decent anvil can be the hardest part of getting tools. expect to trawl ebay, or pay a lot for a good anvil. A good tree stump to mount it to is important too - you need to get your anvil at the right height so you're working efficiently, or you'll tire yourself out doing simple stuff.

You'll need sundry tools too - saws, a good hacksaw that takes 10 or 12" blades, maybe an anglegrinder for cutting out bits. A drill, for doing clean holes - essential for pins on handles, or pivots on folders.

>>34214713
>Trouble is grinders are fucking expensive. It's worth looking into building one, but in that case a welder is a must.

I agree entirely. my ginder was my biggest investment, well over £2000.

that said that's a 2.5hp, digital inverter-controlled grinder that can run at 1rpm, or 3000. with replaceable platen arms, multiple contact wheels, etc. its is easily 3 times the price of a DIY'd one, but I use it almost every day.

For simple knifemaking, a fixed-speed (pulley) motor witha flat platen is enough.

a big element is good choice of belts. I use 3M Cubitron II - and they cost me 4x as much as a cheap al-ox belt on ebay. but they last me 10x as long. A lot of beginners simply pick the wrong belts and waste time and energy. I'm getting old and ache, I cant afford to fight the machine. So I use the right belts, use the right speed, and have a toolrest set up that allows me to lean into the cut and work efficiently, and I can do stuff in half the time and 1/4 the effort.

>>34214713
You'd probably be ok getting a cheap 2nd hand stick or mig anyway in the long run, they are handy things to have.
Most of the real fancy grinders are usually in the motor, control and the castors, the latter of which you can buy from various places to DIY your own.

72" belts are generally the better ones in terms of use as they take a bit longer to burn through. Though if you're just doing it part time on smaller blades a 36 or smaller will do the job.

Bumping because I want to ask a question for any bladesmiths in the thread but I am not sure the thread will survive while I type it.

>>34216885

Okay, so I've gotten myself a forge and anvil, and between trying to make my own tools (tongs and stuff) and some decorative stuff (wall hooks, plant hangers) I have been trying to forge some blade blanks (sans bevels) using plain steel just for the practice.

However when it comes to forging the tip I either end up "sandwiching" the end, so it's folded over, or it ends up too long and skinny. Any advice?

>>34216931
If you're determined you can deal with that by striking the tip down against the anvil and then flattening again. This takes some doing though, and if it's already folded up you're SOL. A better method is to hot cut the folded part off, or regular cut if you don't have something to hot cut with. I've never had to cut a foldy bit more than once to get a tip how I want it