Cast Iron in its Native Habitat: Smoothing Rough Iron

hi the mudbrooker here today i'm going to do a video showing you how to smooth up rough cast iron you may have seen this in my other using my live stream last time around this is a big number 14. birmingham stove and range red mountain series skillet and the inside of it is pretty rough and i'm going to show you the right way or at least one of the right ways of smoothing that up it'd also work if you have something like a newer lodge and you don't really like the rough pebbly texture and you want to smooth that out a bit it's the same technique so before we get underway i want to thank my patrons on patreon k's kissed benedict riggers joy jones damien bamer leo theodore engelke valentin thomann rudy vellano kiosby john wheeler cj sarah and jim price in their honor i'm going to have some bourbon a little bulit or boule however you pronounce it here's to you guys your support is greatly appreciated since i started memberships on my channel i have members to thank too the needy homesteader brian's aquatics grampy lobster comfort doll killer miller lance allen dizzy d and concrete sailors and in your honor i'm going to have still more bourbon your support is greatly appreciated and i thank each and every one of you for your continuing support if you'd like to join the channel there's a button down below you can click on or you can go over to patreon and become a patron anyway set this aside move my camera down and we will get underway a little bit there that's good now when you smooth up cast iron you don't want to use a grinder or something of that nature because yeah flip my there we go when you smooth up cast iron you should use a random orbital sander like this if you use a grinder especially with a hard grinding wheel you will gouge the bottom of your pan and you'll end up with thin spots which will are liable to cause cracking or warping you also don't need to get out all of the pitting this has got quite a bit of different kinds of pitting on it there's a lot of light little pitting up in here down here there's some heavier pitting and trying to get out the really deep heavy pits again you'd end up making thin spots it'll make it heat unevenly and it can crack and can warp a lot easier because it doesn't heat evenly it's pretty simple process i have a coarse 50 grit sand pad on this and i'm just going to run this around the inside and get her smoothed out went and tore right into that and forgot something this makes a fair bit of dust and i'm doing this indoors so i have my vacuum cleaner and i'm going to use this to try and control the dust a little bit [Applause] [Music] so this is about a half an hour's worth of work and i went through three sanding discs on the 50 grit course and you can see it's really made quite a bit of difference it's taken out a lot of that real fine pitting there's still quite a bit of the medium pitting and the heavy pitting down here but that's all the farther i need to go because just running my hands over the surface rather than having sharp edged pits all over the place it's taken the edges off of them and it smoothed it out quite a bit so what i'm going to do now is scrub this up get my wood stove going and i'm going to put a couple of coats of seasoning on this just to keep it from rusting and if i have time yet tonight i'll put probably three or four coats on there to help fill in these pits a little bit now if i was doing this with a new lodgepan i would get a much smoother result because with pits you're trying to remove the entire surface and get the surface lowered down to the depth of the bottom of the pits and that's a lot of material to remove which i don't really want to remove all that much with a rough pan like a lodge what you're doing is you're knocking down the high spots and getting those down so there's a lot less material material to remove and it'll uh get a lot smoother finish now i just use the coarse grit discs on this and i'm not going to go any finer because you don't need to get these polished to a mirror finish i've seen a lot of people do that and you just don't need to do that it just makes it more difficult to season and this is plenty smooth and uh i'm real happy with the way this has turned out anyhow i'm going to get my stove going i'm going to scrub this up and i will be back once that's underway okay my oven isn't quite all the way up to temperature yet but before long it'll be screamingly hot i got this warmed up good i'm going to give it a coat of easy beezy i've been using this quite a bit lately a fella here on youtube named steven strawn sells it and it works real nice now any seasoning the process you do in the oven you're really just putting down a base so this will still have to be broken after we get it get it uh seasoned up in the oven but this stuff gives you a real good start on it so i kind of like it i really like it anyway rub some on take a cloth spread it around good wipe off the excess and give it a nice even coat nice thin even caulk get everything coated up good see that looks good get the other side and the outside i like this stick it's really handy for applying it and no this isn't a sponsored video give that a good coat on the back we've got it all there get some on the handle let's touch my stove it's really hot there and down here and in the oven to go for an hour or so [Music] i'll be back and we'll give this probably two or three quotes yet tonight okay you probably see the needle on my heat gauge is pretty much pegged out on the oven and that's where you want it to be for seasoning things we'll get this guy out oh yeah that's looking good set them up here bring it up so you can see there we go and this is going to be way too hot right now that's 410 degrees way too hot to put the next coat on so i'll set this up on my little stands over here i'll let that cool off a bit and then uh come back and put another coat on put it back in the oven this has cooled down to about 250 degrees so i can give it another coat now grab my rags [Music] the color looks a little bit uneven and that's because the uh fitted parts look a little bit darker than where it's really smoothest but that's not really going to be a big deal i don't think we'll see you later but flip it over get the other side build some on [Music] [Music] you want to be careful doing this because it is still pretty hot and you'll burn the hell out of yourself if you touch bare iron with your hand i've also got a bit more on there than what i need right now but i will wipe her all off again with a cleaner cloth this one's got a lot of build up on it from the uh from the easy beezy and you don't need quite that much on there so i'll wipe it off so you got just a thin little layer on there get my handle good [Music] and ready to go back in the oven [Music] i'll give it one more application after this but i probably won't show that and i'll show you what it ends up like when i'm done okay i'm going to take this out for the this is had three coats of the easy peasy now i'm gonna take it out and we'll have a look at her get up here you [Music] it's pretty hot but that looks pretty good it's also a bit too hot for my hot pad but it's looking pretty good i'm going to let this cool off and give it a coat of a clarified butter and let it finish cooling and seeing how it's getting late tomorrow morning we'll fire up the stove again and we'll break this in i'll see you tomorrow here we are the next day and it occurred to me that this might not have been the best demonstration of smoothing up cast iron because i have to leave so much of the old pitting in there because you're really not going to get that out without taking out tons and tons and tons of metal so since most people ask me about smoothing up lodge cast iron i have here a number eight lodge this is a pretty new one this is the uh current style of production this is what you get if you go to the store right now and buy yourself a number eight lodge skillet and i smoothed that up i didn't take the seasoning off i just sanded it out this is about 45 minutes worth of work if you look close you can see there's a few here and there little deeper pits i didn't get out and there's a little bit of pitting around the edges that's not really pitting it's just little bottoms of the pits and i didn't take them out because it's really nice and smooth already and you reach a point of diminishing returns the first 15 or 20 minutes you'll get three fourths of the way to this point you'll really smooth it up a lot and after that it takes longer and longer to get the surface down to the point where you get the really fine little pitting out and uh it's not really worth the time and trouble to get it all out you can if you want but you know might take you a couple more hours actually to get this down to where it's all entirely smooth but anyway what i'm going to do i'm going to fire up the stove i'm going to put one coat of seasoning on this just to show you how this pick takes up seasoning after it's been sanded and while this is in the oven seasoning i'm going to break in this pan this big old bugger here by uh frying up a load of potatoes for breakfast or well it's getting close to lunch time now so i'll be i will be back once everything is heated up in the stove and we're ready to start cooking well my stove is hot my pan is warmed up good take a couple of temperatures here oh yeah heat it up nice and even it's running about 380 375 degrees and load her up with some clarified butter hopefully i have enough because when i do my first my first uh cook in a pan i almost always cook potatoes with a pretty generous amount of oil in there you don't want to deep fry them but you want to have enough to come up the sides and have a pretty good amount in the pan itself so i'll get this here oops splash myself with hot butter that's not good and i think i'll eat a little bit more than that a couple more good sized chunks this isn't enough to have a little cooking oil on hand but that should do her once i get that all melted down get the oil good and hot and i'll throw my potatoes in the reason why i use potatoes for the first time when i'm breaking in the pan is because they shed starch and that starch will get into all the cracks and crevices and it uh will carbonize that's what gives you your nice black surface and it seals up those cracks and crevices so that the surface of the pan is nice and smooth and the food itself isn't in direct contact with the iron that's what makes things non-stick is the fact that you're not quite touching me not quite touching the iron i think i'm hot enough with my oil i slice my potatoes lengthwise so that they cover more area these guys frying along i have that lodge skillet in the oven and that's heating up real good by the time i'm done with these that should be just about ready to have a look at it and see how it's doing i'll try and cover the bottom of the pan as much as you can kind of push these guys around a little bit yeah that'll work set the rest of my potatoes aside i gotta grab my salt and pepper you can keep an eye on these for me little salt [Applause] normal shot of pepper but we'll get these guys going i like to scrub the potatoes around in the bottom of the pan a little bit because that helps to work the starch in and i'll spin my pan around so it heats even all the way around i think i want to be just a little bit hotter so i'll move this a little closer to the fire uh so all righty i'm gonna leave these guys in the pan for a minute i'm gonna take this over here set it up on that cool pan's still hot so they'll keep cooking for a while and i'm gonna come down here grab that little lodge skillet and see how that's doing oh yeah see that took seasoning very well you can tell that it soaked in good it didn't bead up and just sit and just sit on the surface like it would if you had clean that up with a grinder or a wire wheel come spring once i can work outside again i'm going to do some videos showing you the wrong way of smoothing up a pan and what makes it real hard to season and why in the meantime i hope you enjoyed this video if you feel so inclined please hit the join button or check me out over on patreon for my next video i'm going to be doing a live stream for members only i think i'll give you a little bit of a history lesson if you want to know what it is you'll have to join to find out anyway talk to you later see you next time

Channel: TheMudbrooker

Views: 56,103

Keywords: cast iron, restoring cast iron, vintage cast iron, rough cast iron, Lodge cast iron

Id: Op-HBE6pVuk

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021