How To Melt Iron With Nothing But Wood, Leather, and Clay - Townsends Blacksmith Shop

[Music] a few episodes ago we finished up our bellows what a great project they work so well the bellows power the heart of a blacksmith shop and that is a forge this is going to be our forge area this is just this stand to hold up our forge a concentrated heat source so we can heat up iron to 2 000 degrees problem is i can't put 2000 degrees on a wood stand like this even if i made a steel stand 2 000 degrees would melt right through so we need to have some sort of insulating material between our 2000 degree fire and our stand below it that's what we're going to be working on let's look at the materials if we can't use wood and we can't use iron what are we going to use well if you've been on this channel any amount of time at all you've seen us use the same material for our chimney our mud ovens our chinking for our cabin even the floor for the cabin well we're gonna go back to our old friend cobb we've got our local clay comes right out of the ground right here a local sand today's mix will be 50 clay 50 sand we'll mix that up like we usually do with our feet and then take it just like a mud pie put it on top of our stand and form it into a bowl shape with a special hole in the bottom for the air to come in so that fire can breathe this clay material will dry out and as it's heated it'll turn into a ceramic material and make the perfect insulator this is a truly ancient technology and so easy to do even today while john's mixing up this cob i'm working on getting this all level so we want we want the bellows to direct this air to the fire we want to feed the fire not just kind of blow on it now this air right where it comes in that's the important part we want that to be directed right under feeding the fire just a fire on its own will only get half as hot as what we need so the oxygen supplied through here is going to help that get over 2000 degrees which is what we need to get that metal hot enough to work [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hahaha and fail our cobb bowl is done the bowl that's going to hold the fire and you can see down here in the in the bottom quarter is the hole where the air comes through from the bellows the air hole as it goes into the fire pot is called the twi air which is a french term that gets adopted into the english language right about the late 18th century i'm not sure what the english called this little spot right before they adopted that french term maybe they just called it the air hole i don't know but it has to be just right we've actually closed this down a little bit to restrict the airflow from the bellows because the metal nozzle was a little big and but that gives us the chance to actually change this if that hole isn't big enough there's plenty of volume in the metal cone that we can open their our little air hole up to give us more breathing room or more breathing in the fire we've let this dry overnight and i've started a few little fires in it to dry it a little bit faster because we want to heat metal right away because of this sort of speed drying it's got some cracks in it but that is just fine we can repair the cracks with a little bit of clay if we want to and over time this is going to break down anyway and we'll rebuild it so that's really the nice part about this is we can rebuild this part of the forge over and over again it only takes a few hours even if we want to rearrange it we need a bigger one or smaller one for different kinds of projects if we really need to we can totally rebuild the forge in just an hour or two and have it ready the next day we're gonna put some charcoal in this and start getting it hot all right so this frontier forge really is doing the trick so this combination of these bellows it's really giving a lot of air in here that's got a lot of a lot of heat we're going to make an s-hook today just a simple implement that can be used anywhere on the frontier homestead all right we've got a nice little bed of coals in there here's our piece of metal that we're gonna make an s hook out of and just get it right in there right where the coals are the brightest that's going to be the hottest spot and that's going to get us some pretty quick heat so i'm looking for a kind of yellowish orange color really bright there that'll be good enough to work over to the anvil i'll start off by drawing it to a taper [Music] lost its color it's already cooled down so one more heat and we'll do a little curlicue on the end of it so so i need to straighten out this s-hook so i'm going to go over to the post device that's on our new bench right here in our blacksmith shop and straighten it out the forge it's incredible how much heat we can produce right here we can melt iron if we want to but this gets us right up so that we can manipulate any way we need we can make tools for the homestead for neighboring homesteads the rest of the blacksmith shop we've assembled we've got our very sturdy workbench we've got our post vise we've got anvils we've got the quenching bucket an entire blacksmith shop ready to use and we're going to be using it on future episodes so make sure to subscribe so you can see how we're working with the homestead here both equipment and food we're going to have so much fun thanks for watching

Channel: Townsends

Views: 238,547

Rating: 4.9697776 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, blacksmith, forge, blacksmith shop, coals, metal

Id: JgVdZ35MqR4

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LazyTurtleDelta]

Saw this earlier. I absolutely love Townsend's videos and this is just cool to see

[u/SoulCartell117]

One of the best channels on youtube