Subject: making iron

From: niko caspers <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 1996 12:43:41 +0100

Hello my name is Niko blacksmith i live in Sweden on a island in the Baltic sea.
In august-september i am planning a project here of making iron with use of
a medieval oven called masoven.
This i would like to discus with you out there in cyberspace so hopefully
this will be a project which succeed with your help, it will cost a lot of
money but i´ve got help from the local Medieval museum.
In very short the project will be like this:
An oven will be build of bricks and clay (existing examples are available
here) this oven is well documented and tried out since the 11th century.
However a link is missing nowadays it´s like pulling a switch and you have
light but understanding the proces is a different chapter, same here all of
us blacksmith´s buy our iron from the store and work fine with it , but i
like to go the whole way digging the malm (hope you understand the word
basically the stuff that contains iron) to finished product and with the
help of you i think it will work.
The oven size is about 80cm width 3000cm high with a capacity of about 8 to
12 kilos iron.

Proces:
Fill the oven with coal (i don´t know the word in English but it is the kind
of coal used with a barbequegril) and malm in layers burn it theis will
thake about 12-18 hours.
After this the fun starts the iron contains to much coal, when it is still
hot you blow oxygen on it to burn away as much coal as possible this will
happen in a hurry (it will be difficult to warm it up later) after blowing
oxygen on it it will be hot enough to forge not with steel hammars but with
logs. This because the iron will be like casted iron and has to be forged
with wood logs. After forging heating forging the iron will be stable enough
to forge with a hammer.
I know it works we tried it alot of times in smal scale and it is really
satisfying.
I hope you like the idea of discussing making iron with me i have drawings
of the oven for those who is interested keep in touch.

Niko

Remember fire is a good servant but a terrible master to handle