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Japanese Style Smelt

I will be hosting a Japanese Style smelt at my shop on December the 2nd (first Saturday in Dec)

The smelt will take roughly 10 hours to complete so I will plan on having food around dinner time (hambrugers and such)

I am starting around 9 am and the most interesting parts are the first 2 hours and the last 2 hours (go figure)

If I can arrange it I will get Dr. Mike Blue (an excellent smith who has been doing this style of smelting for many years) to come down and point out all the stuff I do wrong :-)

Any and all are welcome, but please let me know if you plan to attend so I can arrange food.

My shop will be open to tinkering and playing all day while I run the smelter and I hope to have my Hydralic Press up and running by then. So we could have some fun.

Stephan Fowler
770-324-4319

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By StephanFowler at 11/26/2006 - 8:23am | Blacksmithing HowTo/Troubleshooting: | Project

Update

Unfortunately I am forced to change the date to the second weekend (Dec 9th)

hope to see everyone there.

"Wisdom and experience are built of bricks made from the mud of failure." (Mike Blue)

By StephanFowler at Mon, 11/06/2006 - 10:47am | login or register to post comments

Japenese Smelt / Intro to Smithing.

Talk about an interesting day.

I took my forge, anvil, and vise to Stephan's for open forge. He broke out his anvils and forge as well.

We had the Smelter running.
10 feet away a bonfire.
20 feet away my coal forge and anvil.
10 feet from these we had a propane forge and two anvils.

We had all systems running wide open with myself and two Knife smith friends of Stephan's. I forged a dozen S hooks and several limbs for a Christmas tree I am working on. The two knife smiths forged a dozen blades before lunch.

Later around lunch several of his friends from his Dojo showed up.

Now things got even more interesting.
We formed a conga line at the forge and started with a large piece of Stock.
Heating the stock each person took one turn at the anvil and then passed the Safety glasses to the next person. After two hours we had a respectable Knife that had been forged by 8-10 people. Many had never even seen a forge in operation.

At the end of the day we ate supper and then broke down the Smelter.
It had been running since about 8 am. Stephan started adding 1.25 pounds of ore every 20 minutes till 7:00 pm. Once it was broken down there were 3 large chunks (roughly 15 pounds each) and dozens of smaller chunks of steel. I believe the total was 65 pounds of ore retrieved.

As soon as the pictures are ready I will post them and a new story.

Torch!

By Torch Mullins at Fri, 12/15/2006 - 10:55pm | login or register to post comments