 A common trope of many fantasy series is the dramatic forging of a sword. From both the original and remake Conan movies, Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, they always depict an iron sword being cast in a dramatic open-faced mold. So in today's video, we're going to put that to the test and see if we can make castable iron, cast an actual sword and see how great or horrible of a sword that'll make. We've covered sword making several times from both ancient bronze casting and more modern iron forging and even experimented with casting obsidian. But the big thing we've always covered is that bronze swords were always cast and iron is always forged because cast iron doesn't make a good sword, it's going to be too brittle and it's going to break. But I've always wanted to try and put that to the test and see just how good or bad of a sword would actually make. For more practical purposes, within our reset series, I want to be able to make cast iron for more traditional uses like a cast iron skillet and potential for future machining, such as the eventual steam engine I'm hoping to eventually achieve. Historically cast iron was invented in China around the 5th century and was used for plowshares and pots and some occasional tools and weapons. Cast iron is different from standard iron and steel because of its carbon content, containing a higher percentage than 2%. This lowers the melting point to make it easier to cast but also makes the material more brittle. So distinctly cast iron is strong under compression but not tension. So sword is likely going to snap. For some extra help with this project, I made a trip out to Utah to enlist some help from fellow YouTube channels Good and Basic and Nate from the internet, one of the former hosts of T-Core. Back here in Utah with Joseph from Good and Basic. Previously we used this structure here as a smelter to try and actually make iron from raw ore and today we're going to try and repurpose it as a cupola and see if we can primitively make cast iron. We have done tons of smelting projects with this thing. It started out about yay tall and eventually it became this monstrosity to try to get a natural draft. We're shifting gear from trying to make iron and this time we're just trying to melt it. So the real test will be can this thing get hot enough to do that. The temperature for smelting iron from iron ore is around 1750 degrees fahrenheit to 2000 degrees fahrenheit. Cast iron needs an even higher temperature of at least 2200 fahrenheit. So that is going to be the main challenge. You have a whole journey of different iron smelts you've done with this. So be sure to check out a third channel for some of that great content. Then as a backup plan, I'm here with Nate from the internet. So I challenge you to build a furnace that'll be hot enough to actually melt iron and make it so we can actually cast them. We're going to try and do it primitively and this is going to be the backup option. We're going to see how bad of an idea it is to actually cast a sword and then you're going to try and make a cast iron pan as well and that video is going to be on your channel as well as how exactly you made this furnace. Exactly. So be sure to check that out. Hopefully we can get a high enough temperature. So I'm playing in the mud. Work on a mold for the frying pan. This is a mixture of mud and horse dung. I've got the horse poo right over here. Horse poo is really good for making cob for a couple of reasons. It's got a bunch of short little fibers which basically act like rebar in concrete. But the reason why you want to use horse dung instead of just grass clubbings is because a you can use those grass clubbings to feed your horse if you have one and b it's already been kind of fermented and broken down. So it's not going to change size and shape once it's actually in the cob. Historically this is the good stuff when it comes to making your cob. It's kind of like baking bread but no one wants to eat. What I'm going to do is make a big jacket of cob, put it around this 3d printed somewhat more high-tech than my cob frying pan and we're going to use that to make a mold. Don't worry the horse poo burns away and that's actually a good thing. It'll create air holes which will allow the clay not to experience quite so much thermal shock. So we're going to cast the iron into it hopefully it'll hold together a set of cracking and just dumping all of our precious molten iron everywhere. Okay I think that's our mold. I'm just going to heat this up slowly to try to dry it out and then we'll have something to pour iron into. Keep this stuff over-frict. No way this will go out. Boy moment of moments. It actually made a really successful Aristotle hearth. Yeah that's all it that's a bloom. Dang it. I've never been this disappointed to see a bloom before. That's all slag. We've got hot enough to melt dirt and not hot enough to melt iron. Well darn. We've got primitive mold, primitive furnace. We've got advanced mold, advanced furnace. I think the winning combination is probably going to be advanced furnace. Whoa. Hello what are you? Something's just slag. Dirt turning glassy. With a failure at the first attempt we repaired the structure again and strategized for a better solution on the second attempt. So this is slag from the end of my stick of rebar stuck here that has collected every time I've tried to stab through those air inlets to keep them open. Last time the biggest issue that we had yesterday was that the walls of the furnace were melting before the iron did. Which seems backwards to me that we would melt dirt first and not the metal but there you go. So this time the biggest strategy change that we're doing differently is giving it a little bit longer in the furnace to heat up the metal by filling it up more with charcoal. So the metal was sitting on top of a bed of charcoal that gave it a long time to heat up. And the other thing we've been doing is being very much more zealous about keeping those air inlets open. I've basically been going back and forth between these two for most of the day. The charcoal is about here in the furnace right now. If we're going to have a shot to pour iron out of this it's going to be now. So I'm going to clear these out one more time. We'll get some PPE on and I think we're going to give it a go. Let's do this thing. It's time to bust a hole. Please be molten. Please be molten. Please be molten. Oh there's something molten. No that's slag. That is definitely slag. Is that slag? That runny gooey stuff. Yeah I'm feeling a solid lump. What's the diagnosis? I think what we've learned is that our clay is too low fire for this. We know that the inside surface of the furnace was melting multiple times. The temperature I was seeing at the very hottest point of the fire was probably enough. It was the same white hot that we see inside of his furnace when it's fully up to temperature. But I don't think our clay was able to handle it. I wouldn't have thought that was the limiting factor. We melted the dirt. Here's hoping that Nate's work. What kind of result we're going to get? But we poured cast iron. I might have half a frying pan in there. Maybe I've just got to handle. Oh my gosh. We might have an iron mace head. Whatever it was, it isn't. There's some serious bubbling in it. Oh it's on. This is either a frying pan or it is a disappointment. Failure. Anyone want to take bets? What percent of a pan we've got going? I'm getting some quarters. Oh that's not a good sign. Struggling to figure out where the pan part of this even is supposed to be. I think the sand collapsed inside it when I tried to move it. We have the pour spout and this much of the actual mold. That's all. Just that. This is part of the handle yet. So successfully poured iron successfully. Can't really use this for much. But first, thank you to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video. Well we're running into a little bit of a challenge of trying to get a castable iron out of our primitive copula. Today's sponsor has our back and sent us a little kit here as a backup in case we don't end up with a successful cast. All right so we have the over easy kit right here. We got a pancake mix. Got a Vermont maple syrup for a little cocktail with our breakfast. We got a sucker punch Bloody Mary mix. And we have our own cast iron skillet. This will be our backup in case we fail to make our own. So we're going to have some pancakes no matter how this video turns out. The Spokepost is a monthly membership club delivering awesome curated boxes of high quality goods from some pretty sweet brands. It's free to join and shows up right at your door. You like tacos, you like knives, you like socks, you like coffee. Spokepost has you covered. Boxes are screened based on the preference quiz you fill out. The box lineup changes each month so you can always discover something new and unique. These boxes value at $70 but only cost you a fraction at $49 a piece. You can also cancel your subscription at any time. Get 20% off your first box with coupon code htme20 or using link thespokepost.com slash htme20. Should have some more nice molten iron. Same thing. Turn off the furnace, load the lid, lift out, place down, pick up, pour, it's fine. Some of it's liquid. I don't like that. Chunk that isn't melted. I'm concerned that it's not iron. The rest of that looks pretty good and liquid though. We're going to proceed. Tempt a little slag removal and hope is all we can do at that point. And I think more went in. I don't know about enough. More is good. Enough is better. Yeah, that's not going in very much at all. Let's see if we got more of a pan this time. Moment of truth. Oh, I think more but not all. It's identifiable. Not much luck with the cast iron pans. Let's try the iconic open face sword cast. This is vision for our purposes, I think. I know what that is. A hasty wolf job. It's got like pox on it. I'm surprised at the color. One of the things that Lindy beige and others have complained about in movies is that the color they show couldn't be iron. But if you're in a bright environment like this, it looks colder than it is. Yeah, it's pretty orange when it poured in. Yeah, orange, not yellow, not white. It's still orange. You can see it around the edges. Oh, yeah. Oh, shadow. Now it's dark color and now it's shiny and now it's dark and now it's shiny. Wow. Half and a half. But I mean, that's a long piece of iron. You could make a cast iron sword that might hold up to almost a single blow before it broke. Almost. This is either a frying pan or a diss appointment. There we go. Maybe an inch and a half. It's still very... Oh, it did get further than that. Okay. It's like a pie spatula. Yeah, one for, I don't know, elves. I'm guessing at best half a frying pan. Well, we got a significant portion of a pan. Not a whole pan, but a significant portion of one. Part of a pan. I think I could pull off a quail egg on that. Yeah. At an angle. I might be able to cook something in that. Yeah. A quail egg might be too big. I'll see if I can find hummingbird eggs. It's out of use for this. The sand is hot. Here we have the cast iron sword. You're fighting against, you know, the army of little bacon soldiers because, you know, it's part of a frying pan so it scares them. So we got a forged sword. Now we have a cast iron sword. Just like the movies. Yeah. All right, so I'm back from Utah after collaborating with Good and Basic and Nate from the internet. Our iron casting was not the greatest result. Couldn't quite get it with the primitive with the modern technique. Got decent melting, but actually casting it in molds and stuff proved to be a whole other challenge. But we did kind of the easiest way and most dramatic of an open face mold and we really get something crudely sword shaped. Open face molds always look really cool, but not the greatest result. So just in transit, the tang ended up breaking off. Just already a sign that the sword is not going to be the strongest, but because it's so crude, we can just move the tang up a little bit. It'll just be a little bit shorter because the end goal of this is basically to break it and see just how strong or brittle it really is. Just going to use modern tools to clean this up and get something that looks a little bit more swordish and matches our other ones here. We have previously cast bronze, the forged one we did. And we battle test these two and you can barely see the damage on the forged iron. The bronze one has some pretty huge nicks and bends to it now. Cast iron will be an interesting comparison. Honestly, I just expected to do probably worse in both of them, but we'll see. Clean this up, make it look a little bit more sword like and put it to the test. All right. So after quite a bit of grinding, I now have a polished up sword here. I'm very glad I used the modern techniques. This ended up being probably the hardest thing I've had to cut and grind. So the cast iron is actually pretty promising in terms of hardness, but I think that's that hardness is going to be kind of the issue because it comes with a lot of brittleness. But I was really surprised how shiny, kind of steelish. It looks almost exactly the same as the forged iron sword. The chemical composition is going to be a lot different, but visually they look pretty much the same. The pretty thick sword compared to the other ones. And that's partially because we ended up casting it thick, but also because I don't expect it to be too strong. So the thicker, the better. This guy is almost two pounds. Well, this one is almost three pounds. And it's quite a bit bigger. There are a few kind of telltale signs that this was cast and not forged kind of holes in it from air bubbles that formed during the casting. And those are going to be obvious weak points. Don't be surprised if it breaks here or here. But otherwise, it seems pretty promising. It seems really hard, really strong. See how they compare. Alright, so we've got a variety of different objects here to test the sword on and see, well, it cuts basically work from pretty soft to fairly hard. Going up, try and strike them with a decent amount of force and see how far we can get before this actually shatters. And if we get to it and start swinging at it on the bronze and forged iron sword and see how they would do if they ever met in combat against each other. Because it's so far, it's more of a splitting axe than really a blade. So let's start swinging. Not the best cutting edge on it. Smash. That looks pretty good. Cuts. Good keel. Especially cut twigs. Pretty blunt. Let's hold them up against sticks. So that's good. Be very worried if it broke on a small swig of cast iron. Alright, to try to wall the test. Alright, so pretty much what I expected. It snapped almost exactly in half. Definitely a sign that it was probably not any significant single weak point. Definitely tell that's very much cast iron grain. And that's just kind of the reality of cast iron. It's really strong when you compress it. When you bend it at all, it's likely to break. And that's basically what was happening when I was wailing on it. So about what I expected. Just gonna see how it would turn out in a real life battle. See if it can even deflect the shot or if it's just gonna break. It's gonna be a bit shorter now, which might actually improve its odds quite a bit, but give it a shot. Let's give it a whack with bronze. Pretty good. Forge. Yeah. Alright, that took the tip off of it. The cast iron, as kind of expected, did break pretty easily. It was able to take some decent blows and deal some decent blows. It broke relatively quickly compared to everything else I've done. Not the greatest material for a sword. And I think like if you have a choice, you're probably better off sticking to bronze. Bronze is gonna give beat up. It's a little bit softer, but it has that bendability that it's not just gonna snap and break on you. And if you're in battle, this isn't gonna do too much for you. As a cutting wise, it's pretty strong. Probably would cut a lot better if it was a bit thinner. For the strike I did put onto the forge sword. It did leave a pretty big dent in there, much more than any of the bronze ones ever did. So you're gonna get a harder strike with this sword, but it's more likely to break on you. Probably about sticking to using it for pans. A little bit less likely to break that, I think. So this has been a kind of fun experiment to explore some of the alloys of iron and the different characteristics of everything. But next up we're gonna explore more on making actual steel. That kind of depends on a control of the amount of carbon you put into your iron. You get too much in there and you get cast iron and it's gonna be brittle and bright. Get too little and it's gonna be basically mild steel or iron, which is not as hard. So you want an exact percentage of carbon in there and you get a really nice steel. So we'll be exploring that pretty soon here. Thanks again to Good and Basic and Nate from the internet for helping collaborate on this project. Nate's gonna have his video on actually making the more modern propane forge that can melt cast iron on his channel pretty soon. So be sure to subscribe and check that out when it comes out. And lastly, thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.