(Flashback) The Ironworks: Of Fire and Alloy - Part 2

by **Bandin Everdance** on May 26th, 2021, 8:54 pm

Timestamp: 1st of Spring, 518 A.V.

"The good thing about working with ore and pellets is that they'll melt on their way down through the furnace chute," Ros said. "A bar takes much, much longer to melt, even over a direct coal bed. Frankly, once an ingot gets too big it's usability becomes less and less realistic. It just takes too long and it's too heavy--the only use of an ingot in the first place is storage and transport, with an emphasis on trade and maybe a little quality insurance somewhere as a priority."

The Isur threw another log into the fire. "Get down here and work the bellows. The way the furnace works is the heat is pumped up through the tuyeres, those are the pipes you can't see that we've installed at the top of the blast oven. The whole thing is separate from the sprue inside and the actual ingot mold it leads too. The bellows take care of getting the heat through the pipes and where it needs to be to do its good."

The Isur put a paid of hands on the bellows and pumped it once for emphasis. "But the only way that heat gets blasted up the furnace is if you pump enough oxygen up through the pipes and into the shaft. You see? You can hear all that hot air pushing through the fire. You know that flames hot--hot enough to break those pellets down into ore and slag right fast."

Bandin got on the bellows, taking the reins from his instructor.

"Keeping the oxygen flowing long enough gets rough if you're working with ingots, but it's not so bad for pellets. Like I said: they burn up fast. Give it a good breathe of air in there. You're going to have to put your back into it to do it right. There's--"

"No shortcuts," Bandin said and squared himself up on the bellows.

A great whooshing came when he put the pressure down and brought the side handles together; the valves opened and forced a great stream of oxygen through the connected nozzle and into the furnace.

"Just right," the Isur replied. "A different count between bellow squeezes might be a reasonable thing for different ores, but you're not to that level of worrying about minuteness yet--and, honestly, at that point you're just playing with your own opinions. Every pellet is different, there's no real way to know the perfect way to do it."

"Give it a breathe of two. It'll be easy to keep the beat in your head. Mostly it'll leave just enough time to relax your forearms and ride the bellows open again," Ros explained.

Bandin counted the two beat. He rode the bellows back out to their width. His forearms weren't doing so bad and relaxing them, as the master smith had instructed, allowed him to feel the blood flowing again.

"Once more," Ros said, right on time with Bandin's second count.

"Alright," Bandin said and gave the bellows another push.

Air shot up the furnace once again. He saw a series of small embers leave the top of the stone construction.

Word Count: 530

by **Bandin Everdance** on May 26th, 2021, 9:13 pm

Bandin was starting to feel just how bellow work could become a job in of itself. He also had a growing suspicion that he might be growing very accustomed to it; he'd be getting stronger, if that were the case, for sure.

The hot sweat that'd beaded on his brow from the starting of the flame, now became one of exertion as he fed what he'd helped bring to life. It was a living thing, hungry and ravenous, ready to do its job, but only at the heavy price of fuel that it all but demanded with its vicious crackling.

Ros threw yet another log into the fire, as if to accentuate Bandin's observations on the nature of the dutiful and scorching flames.

"Another reason why we take apprentices: it's hard to do this work alone, if you're trying to run a big enough operation of any kind, anyway," Ros said. "I know what I said about wood fires, but it's only half-true. Besides taking up more space than coal, even though it's cheaper, the problem with wood is that you have to near constantly keep it fed as you're noticing. Hard to work the bellows, watch the ore, and draw off the slag while you're doing that--not impossible, but definitely not ideal. It's a trade off like most other things. You'll always need some wood on hand to start the whole process, good luck getting coal to catch without an already blazing hot furnace, but if you don't have the manpower to have at least one extra set of hands it might just better for you to switch predominately to coal for your fuel. Anything that wood will smelt coal will too and you'll have to use it anyway for the harder metals. There's a matter of preference in it."

Bandin wiped a bead of sweat off of his head. He used coal when working iron with a hammer, but it damn sure never had to get to this intense of a level of heat to make it malleable. Nor did the lukewarm, in comparison, forgebed of blacksmithing require anywhere near the bellow work as this blast furnace did.

The young smith quickly gave the bellows another breathe. There was no break. His lungs were only tingling, but his arms were getting a bit more sore now.

His Isur instructor took on a slight smile at this.

"Alright, we're getting there," Ros said. "The ore should be dropping through the throat now, melting down more and more. Once it starts it'll happen quickly."

"Working the bellows is somewhere we all started. I'm going to take you through this whole process and you'll be tired at the end, but you'll come back and do it again tomorrow," Ros assured him. "If we don't have work that runs all day you'll learn in the gaps, just like you're doing now. If you are busy during the day, helping me or someone else, then you're going to be staying after with me to get this practice in."

Ros paused. "Every night, until I think you're competent with this. I said it before: this is necessary for my smiths to know--there's no option about it."

Word Count: 536

by **Bandin Everdance** on May 26th, 2021, 9:35 pm

Ros had the immediate advantage of his fame to go on when it came to Bandin's first impression of him. Being arguably the best smith in Syliras had a way of impressing all the others, especially the young and ambitious ones. Now, however, the young smith's respect for the older one was starting to go beyond a mere admiring of his skills alone.

Yes, it was true that nearly every straight-forward, reasonably expectant word from Ros' mouth was all but laced with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of the alloy making process. Bandin had only spent the better part of an hour with the Isur directly and that wasn't really possible to argue.

However, what really impressed upon the young smith was the fact that, even despite already laying out some strenuous and tough expectations, it wasn't like Ros wasn't going to be right alongside him while he went through it. He expected he'd come to hate the days that dragged on into the night; sleep sounded like it might be becoming a luxury soon if, and when, those days came along. Still, Ros had said it himself: he'd be the one staying late to teach him.

To learn from the most famed smith in the capital? That was worth a season or two of no sleep. There was no doubt in Bandin's mind about that, at least not without having gone through it yet. His mood might change later, depending on just how rough it was.

Bottom line, though: the Isur wouldn't ask him to do anything he hadn't done, or wouldn't do, himself. So far he'd demonstrated or explained every bit of what they'd done together. That was leadership--the only kind Bandin was interested in following, anyway.

"Give it a few more," Ros said. "We're there, but I want to make sure."

Bandin inhaled the hot, musty workshop air. His lungs pumped as he pumped the furnace's unliving organs all the same. The fire flared in its burning and so too did his chest.

"Alright. Look beside you," Ros said. "See that plug there, it's called a taphole, and the channel that comes out under it? That's a runner channel. We have the same things in molds. That's where metal pours down into the ingot mold, which is right there."

Sure enough, running along the outside of the furnace was a channel right below what looked like a stone quark.

"Pull it out, the pellets should've melted and sunk down to the bottom of the stack by now. It'll flow, so be quick and watch your fingers. You'll lose em', or some of the skin on them, if you don't move them fast. Make sure to pull the stopper from the taphole as smoothly and as quickly as possible. Don't get held up or you'll make a mess and molten metal burns whatever it makes a mess on--badly, most times."

Bandin reached from the bellows and wrapped his fingers around the stopper.

"Aye, now pull," Ros said.

The young smith did just that.

Word Count: 508 Words

by **Bandin Everdance** on May 26th, 2021, 9:56 pm

"Get your fingers out of there, up and back--don't ride the channel down and away," Ros instructed.

Pulling the stopper from the taphole wasn't as bad as Bandin had interpreted Ros' meaning at it being. The now shiny, but slightly slag despoiled copper dribbled slowly from the taphole at first. Its speed increased as more and more of it left the opening and began to flow down the exposed runner channel.

"That's not too bad," Bandin commented.

"The metal moves slow, usually, but that's not an excuse for bad practice," the Isur confirmed. "Be safe in the small things and you'll be safe in the big things. Big things are just multiple small things put together; you start from the ground up and you never really deal with them at all, because their lesser parts are already handled. If you're smart, anyway."

"Makes sense," Bandin confirmed and gave the bellows another squeeze.

"Back off on the bellows a bit," the Isur said. "We're going to have to let the flames die down just a bit to get the furnace cleaned out before we do the tin smelting."

"You said smelting two metals at once is a messy way of doing it, but wouldn't it be a lot quicker?" Bandin asked.

"It's a little less accurate is what I said," Ros explained. "It'll work find if you know your measurements are right when it comes to the ore content and the ratios of it going into the alloying process."

"We're going to smelt both the copper and tin separately, today, though, because, in theory, once you're a working metalsmith you'll have ingots on hand most times, either through waste recycling or just preference," Ros explained. "I'm going to teach you to work with them from the beginning. And teach you smelting in the same sort of way, from the basics. Giving you a good base to work off of is a lot more important than speed right now. We're not going to want to skip over anything at all if we want you to have all your basic knowledge covered thoroughly."

"Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the practice," Bandin said. "I was just thinking that this was a roundabout way of doing the thing. I guess that's the point right now though."

"Right," Ros confirmed. "Now see how this copper runs down the runner and into the mold basin? I want you to notice how there's another basin after that one. See how it's deeper? That's for the excess. Also, I'm not sure if you noticed before the metal covered it, but there's a deeper portion to the runner channel right before the mold itself. Now there's a reason for that: shrinkage. We don't like waste, but shrinkage can be a little unpredictable. There's a lot of variables that go into that, but bottom line is that when it cools and heats the volume will change, we need there to at least be enough extra metal in the channel dip there to refill whatever shrinks in the ingot mold; it has to be filled to meet weight--uniformity is important, even when you're smelting ingots for in-house use, always knowing what to expect from our tools and raw materials makes our lives a lot easier. We also need the catcher channel after it to grab whatever overflow there might be, in case we miscalculated on the needed overage. Don't worry about it too much, though. Get it close, if you can, but extra ore can be set aside to be melted down and reclaimed."

Words: 599 Words

by **Bandin Everdance** on May 26th, 2021, 10:12 pm

"We've almost got our ingot," Ros said. "Now, while we wait for it to cool, I want you to notice a few things about the way we do things."

"Notice the small indentions along the side of the furnace bricks, where the channel runs?" Ros asked.

"Okay," Bandin confirmed.

The molten copper was trailing itself and slowly filling the ingot mold to the very top. As if to prove Ros' expert measuring skill there was almost no overage at all and only a very little bit of excess filled the riser feeding put that came before the ingot--and Bandin expected that would likely be needed once the shrinkage that Ros had talked about started to set in.

"Well, also notice that the mold there for the ingot doesn't stretch anywhere near the whole length of the furnace wall," Ros said.

Bandin looked a bit more closely upon receiving this revelation. Sure enough it didn't and, actually, there was a seam between the runner channel and the mold itself. He'd barely noticed, but the mold was actually separate from the furnace itself. Instead of stone it was iron, lined with what he'd assume was heat-resistant wax

"These molds can be switched out as we need; they fit into those indentions on the bricks. We're a big production house, we don't usually smelt just one ingot like we're doing today and we have a good many of these iron molds made up for our high-production pieces," Ros went on. "Efficiency is the mother of production. It's an investment, usually, like to have these iron molds made for example, but an investment in speed leads to more work output and, as long as you have the orders, it'll pay for itself eventually. A majority of our molds already have and then some over."

"Hand me that metal rod and that iron cup," Ros said and pointed to the two tools that had been set off; Bandin passed them to his master.

"Slag separation isn't something you're going to want to forget. The impurities in the ore are taken out by the heat, but they'll worm their way back into the finished product if you're lazy and don't remove them," Ros said. "Watch."

The Isur skimmed the top layer of cloudy material off of the top of a portion of the copper ingot and carefully discarded the caught slag into the iron cup.

"Now you," he said and offered the tools to Bandin. "Get the rest of it."

Bandin took the tools back and slowly brought his hand up to the blazing hot ore. He could see the difference between where the slag had been removed, on about one half of the would-be ingot, and where it hadn't. The slag almost looked like a half-cooled gunk sitting on top of the bright, liquid orange of the pure copper.

The young smith was slower in doing what Ros had and he lost a drop or two to the side of the stuff cup, but in the end the remaining slag was pulled away from the cooling ingot.

Words: 517 Words

by **Alric Lysane** on March 20th, 2022, 8:06 pm

Bandin

Hi!

Should you return please update your CS and PM/DM me for your Grade!

~ Alric