No wonder alchemy became an obsession of those times. This was an era where people were learning how to make iron out of dirt and copper from green rocks.

Lead into gold must've seemed like a perfectly reasonable goal to ancient people.

I was smelting Iron 15 years ago when Skip was one of a small handful. Now smelting is more common. Every apprentice I have is taught how to make their own steel, charcoal, and tools from essentially nothing.

3 suggestions: Use 2 grates to sort fuel by size.  Secondary containment will protect workers as well as concrete from spall.  Masks to prevent silicosis.

What an incredible job you did capturing this project! Thank you for your great work telling this story from our Blacksmithing Department.

I’ve spent years chasing answers in documentaries, podcasts, even ancient texts—and none of it hit me the way The Obscured Principles book by Dorian Caine did. It’s like it was written for the few who are ready to break the illusion and remember who they really are.

It was actually sphengum moss that we used. Not peet moss. I don't know why I said that

I once got sand out of sand. It was slightly anticlimactic.

Something just so cool about making things from scratch.

I got to forge with Celeste while I was working with the Wounded Warrior Project. The Crucible gave me and 7 other vets the opportunity to come in and taught us how to forge some of our trauma into a new creative outlet 🇺🇸💪🏼🇺🇸💪🏼

5:30 "Beautiful, beautiful thing that happens" Lava looking Slag explodes into the air

Bloom iron is such a rare thing to see these days, and I'm so happy to see you all keeping that process alive while teaching people about it. Thanks for all the hard work!

I just found this channel.... no posts for a year.  Where did everybody go!?!

Please some back....

If and when 💩 hits the fan.  These are the kind of people that will be leading the way in keeping a society going by creating the necessary resources.

That's an awesome community you have there.  If you're part of it, I just want to say that it's really cool that you have people you can really enjoy a passion with for the most basic of human endeavors for the sake of "square one" know-how.  Farming, metal-working, and carpentry are the tools on which civilizations are built and can be REBUILT.

That was great. It’s really interesting to think about those people, so long ago, who had to understand that there was something they could do that they never did before. Smelting iron requires so much more heat than copper alloys, or silver or gold. It was an entirely new technology they invented, from almost scratch. How long did these early efforts take before it was worthwhile and reliable? We have to remember that smelting Bronze Age ores was something that happened by accident, when people found bits of melted metal in their cooking fires, and realized that this was useful, and so deliberately put ore into fires, until they had it working well.

But that doesn’t work with iron, so from the very beginning, they had to figure out that so much more heat was required. Then they had to figure out the principle of blowing air into the fire to heat it up. Even noting that wind heated fires. That’s a big step. But the understanding that iron was so important, and had so many advantages over bronze, brass and copper, spurred on this major revolutionary effort over decades, until it became reliable, with enough quality for a major use category.

We sometimes think we’re so much smarter than these much more primitive people, but we’re not. In many ways, considering where they were starting from, they were so much more advanced in their thinking than we are today.

I can’t imagine going thru this process, life’s depended on the process.

Thank you. For me that was historic and  gave me a sense of understanding what our forbearers  experienced in their pursuit of  iron.

Thank you for this presentation. I discovered my pyromania at an early age and focused on jobs around furnaces and welding. I have never done what I saw you do. You're a keeper. Enjoy

I was worried we'd not get another video

I worked for Valley Mould & Iron back in the 70's . We made moulds for the steel mills.I was at the Cleveland works.