 In today's video, we're attempting to achieve one of humanity's most substantial and crucial accomplishments. Taking a rock, found in nature, turning it into a raw metal, and forging it into a useful tool. We'll see if we can go from rock to iron knife. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves? And work their way from the Stone Age to today? That's the question we're exploring. Each week I try to take the next step forward in human history. My name is Andy, and this is how to make everything. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey. Today's video is sponsored by Bespoke Post, they're a monthly subscription, every month you get some cool products and other things, so check out what we got today. Alright, so this month we got kombucha making kit. Eventually, we'll get to some kombucha, so this will be a really cool practice, get us kind of familiar with the process before we try and do it all the way from scratch. Inside here, there's a little box, there's a really nice knife, a really sweet Damascus style texture to it, comes with a lifetime warranty, and that cuts pretty good, you never have too many knives. Round off our corners, it's very curated for working on right now, so making a knife today, take a short quiz about what you like and don't, and they take a box based on your preferences. If you don't like what's in your box, you can return it for a different one at no extra cost. There are dozens of box options that change every month, shipping is free and each box costs a link, $45, it's free to join and you can skip a month anytime, so check it out. So this is just one month of activities, click on the link below to get 20% off your first order of a spoke post. Use promo code everything20. Several weeks ago, we started our first attempt at bringing us from the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age with the creation of metallic iron, by building a bloomery and bellows and attempting to reach a temperature hot enough to convert natural iron ore into metal. While succeeding in creating iron, when it came to actually working it into something usable, the result was less than ideal. So just having to find myself in their neck of the woods, I plan to meet up in person with Joseph and Joseph from the YouTube channel Good and Basic. They similarly have a deep interest in primitive technology and they've been working on figuring out the iron smelting process through numerous past attempts. So since my bloomery didn't survive more than two firings, I enlisted the help of their furnace and their expertise. But first, they tip me off to a good location to find some additional iron ore to smelt. Down in southern Utah, there is an old ghost town called Old Iron Town, formed in 1868 as Iron City was attempt by Mormon pioneers to become more self-sufficient in the iron supply through ore mined from the nearby Iron Mountain. Mostly abandoned in 1876, it is still occasionally mined when prices make it profitable. All right. So I'm in southern Utah right now near an old ghost town called Old Iron Town. And also they still occasionally mine at still, but it's mostly dormant right now. And a lot of iron ore tailings are now scattered on the ground here that are just dumped when they do the large scale mining. And all of this is pretty good candidates for smelting. Hello, magnet here, and I can test them out and see that they are, in fact, magnetic, which means they're magnetite and should smell pretty good. So thanks to Good and Basic, they gave me the the suggestion of this area. So I'm going to collect some and you can see if this can be smelted into iron, see if we can make a knife. Now, with the source of the iron ore, I met up with the Josephs. Ready for the Fuego? I'm ready almost for the Fuego. I'm here with the guys from Good and Basic and I did my iron smelt and it wasn't the most successful. I did make iron, but it wasn't very workable. So having to be out here and you guys have your massive one, you built that you've done it at least four or five times now and survived. So far so good, right? I didn't have to tell the tale. So with a smelt like this, what we typically would do is wire it with layers of orange charcoal, just like you did. Two to both of these on, right? Yeah, two to one charcoal or by weight. It doesn't matter which one goes first. I did charcoal first. First major difference is that the furnace is bigger. One advantage the height might give us is it gives it more time for the carbon monoxide to seep into the ore and to strip off the oxygen. The other major thing that we're going to do is poke it with a stick. You really need to come to experts because we'll tell you, we'll give you the answer and you need to poke it with a stick. There's a couple of things that can typically go wrong that we've discovered. One of the key ones is getting enough air to come into the furnace in the first place. Basically, you get the slag that drips down the furnace and it tends to cake around the air inlet and they'll actually physically block that entryway. And so if that happens, you're done. You can't do anymore. There's no more air coming into the furnace. So the solution for that is to jam a stick through the air inlet hole every so often and also you run into another problem, which you can also solve with a stick, which is where the charcoal forms kind of a roof and then there's a void underneath it. And so to fix that, you poke the roof with a stick to make sure that all the ore falls down to where the fire is actually happening. So one other thing that we've done to prep for this smelt is we've done what's called roasting the ore. You literally just take the ore and you put it on a fire and you heat it up. It burns off a lot of the impurities in the ore, like sulfur. Another thing it does is it weakens the ore. It puts tons of micro fractures and stress on it so that it's easier to grind up in little pieces for the smelt. And then that also means that there's more surface area for the carbon monoxide to bond onto, rip off oxygen atoms and leave you with elemental iron. When you're smelting it, you're taking the carbon monoxide that's produced by the fire. It combines with the oxygen, strips it off the rock. So basically, the more you can get sulfur and other impurities out of the way before you start smelting it, the better off it's going to be. So crushing the ore after roasting it, those two steps are also a really important ingredient. We found a really important component of our smelting process. Makes your day so much better. We've done it both ways. We are hoping that the taller furnace will increase the amount of time that that iron ore is being exposed to carbon monoxide so that it can turn from iron ore into elemental iron. We've smelted in all we think 10 plus times and using this furnace, we've probably done four. I think we've done five or six. When we first built it, it was only about four feet tall and it was a little narrower. We wanted to go for a natural draft furnace. We wanted to have a slightly larger capacity and so we just kept on building it up over time. And this has lasted through, you know, winters. It's remarkably durable building material. I think we could run it through another dozen smelts easily. At first, kind of we thought it was just us that like smelting, you know, it should just work. Multiple failures meant that you were doing it wrong. One of the tough things about smelting is what a finicky business it is. So there can actually be multiple good ways to do it and you can kind of like accidentally trip and fall into the right way when even slight variations on that would not have worked. You know, you can run your furnace too hot. You can run it too cold. I mean, there's the variable of the ore type. The weird thing to me about this process is that none of it is intuitive. Oh, I'm just going to spend several weeks making charcoal and then I'm going to spend another few weeks grinding up a particular rock and put it in a furnace which I specially built with the proper ratios of width to height. And then I'm going to spend my entire day not gathering food or making clothing but pumping bellows, which I had to make myself in order to force air into this thing. And at the end I'm left with a black sponge, a black sponge of coral. And I say, great, I did it. So when the different smelts you've done now, do you feel like you've become experts or are you still figuring it out? Very much figuring it out. The trouble is that you're dealing with natural ingredients, so this is a rock and this rock has iron in it. It has oxygen in it, it has, you know, the mineral but it also has unknown quantities of other stuff. And what that means is that even if the method would work perfectly if we were using something more consistent like mug or this stuff, we haven't dialed it in yet. So today will be an interesting experiment. So yeah, I think we'd both consider ourselves more expert than we were before. Let's still learn. I'd say we're sophomores in the process. Eventually we'll graduate. But in the meantime, I'll use that name. Be sure to check out their previous attempts of iron smelts on their channel as well as a bunch of other great videos on primitive technology. We ran the furnace for a little over five hours until the supply of ore and charcoal started to run low. Then we extracted the bloom, a spongy mass of melted impurities called slag and hopefully a large supply of iron metal. While still hot, the bloom is compressed, consolidating all the metal together. In my previous attempt at the iron smelt, this is where mine failed. When compressed, the bloom only shattered due to its low iron content. We've missed the mother load. Yeah, I know it's still in there. That's typically where it forms too, is right under the air inlet. How the heck do we get that out? Very carefully. Okay, be careful. This furnace represents scores of hours of effort and I would really rather not focus on shaking, that's what we're looking for. Yeah. Okay, it's, it's split in two. We can get it. Oh my word. Okay, I'll start gently capping it. So the issue here is that we've pulled something out of the furnace. Yes. Very bloom-like. Very bloom-like. And so now the only question is quality, right? How much of that is slag? How much of that is charcoal? How much of that is elemental iron? This is actually one of the things I find most interesting about this process. That thing does not have a visual way to tell if it's success or failure. I mean, if you're experienced, you can tell. Even if you did it right. Yeah. There's no part of this where you see shiny metal coming up the bottom. Right there, I am very confident is iron. If we hit that with a grinder, it's gonna be shiny. That looks really promising. Next, they set up a primitive forge and we tried working the hunks of metal into an ingot. Because of quantities of impurities and slag intermixed with the metal, it needs to be worked and consolidated heavily, slowly working up the slag. We have a nice little pancake. Oh boy, I'm gonna try to layer a bunch of these pancakes together to make the actual thing. So now let's eat a first one. Awesome. That looks beautiful. I wanna cry. So beautiful. At some point, that could be a problem. At some point. I think we have a great model here. Quality is just gonna cause difficulty in the forging process, but it's not gonna mean that you can't make tools. Or absolutely not. Oh my God. Okay, there you go. Beautiful thing right there. I'm dying. Look, you're hitting it. You're hitting it so relatively hard and it's, ah! Ah! I'm sorry. I'm freaking out. I can die happy. I've had this moment. Lollipin. Yep, little nickel sized pieces of iron. These two pieces layered on top of each other in the forge. We're now gonna layer charcoal gently on top. And ideally, we will find those same two pieces, forge well done together. If we can do that, then we can do this entire process with some time and patience using the primitive method. Is that it right there? It is. They're fused! I get welded! Ha ha ha! This is two pieces of blue. This is the beginnings of hooded steel. We just did a successful forge weld. Got a small ingot. We have a small ingot. We just forge welded effectively in a primitive forge with iron that we made from scratch and we did it without any metal tools. These are wooden tongs made from a split branch and this is literally a rock that I used to forge it into place. And the anvil is also a rock. We've done it. We've made iron from scratch. In Africa, there are some regions that had iron first and just let that sink in for a second. They took this process, they took it far enough to have iron-bladed weapons like spears first. So he's just a piece of very, very large bloom. It's not even close to it. When he enjoyed on time and daylight, I took these very promising ingots home to finish processing into an actual tool. All right, so Utah ended up going pretty late into the night with the good basic guys. So we weren't quite able to fully forge these into something, but we did manage to make some actual pancake metal. We were able to flatten it out, which is where I'd filled with my previous melt where it would just shatter. There we were able to layer and then forge weld together, which proves it is steel, steel and iron, it's a combination of both. I'm back home now in Minnesota where it is quite noticeably a lot colder. But I got the forge going, and we're going to try and finish forging these off and see if I can make something usable like a knife. But the big bloom, we didn't have a chance to fully work on in there right now, heating up, and then we're going to start adding it in the layering, and hopefully make something useful out of it. This is the other one. On pieces of iron, challenge with the charcoal is they look very similar and they're hot. So here it is, the end results. Wait, no, this is the bespoke knife they gave us. Here it is, the knife I made from a rock of iron to an actual iron tool. Admittedly, it's pretty small. We started with a pretty large chunk of bloom, but as I worked it down, all the little pieces came off, got pretty small in the end. After polishing it off and grinding off some of the surface oxidization, it is definitely iron, as you can see the silverness behind it. So there is no doubt that iron has been made and that this is now a tool that has a bit of a cutting edge, although it's very small, probably not the strongest. It is a iron tool. Admittedly, this is probably the worst way to learn how to blacksmith using a very poor iron that has been definitely a challenge. Over two days of blacksmithing, of trying to kind of flatten and pancake and then stack them and layer them, forge weld them together to try and kind of consolidate the iron and compact it together. It's definitely been a lot of work and the result has been very frustrating. It's just how small it warmed up. It really couldn't even forge and shape it too much to what I really wanted. I ended up mostly grinding it to a desired shape. So it's been a big challenge. It's been very frustrating and the end result right now is not that great. Like a more experienced blacksmith could probably produce something better but someone who doesn't really know what they're doing, I don't know how they would have figured out how to actually make high quality steel. This is iron, it cuts, it dices, it is a tool, maybe more of a letter opener but I think we can very confidently say we are now in the iron age. Probably one of the more disappointing things is just how much kind of scraps kind of broke off from the bloom as I worked it. So this isn't waste. In their video with a good and basic which I highly recommend checking out, they build an Aristotle kiln and experiment with kind of salvaging a lot of scrap metals leftovers from blooms and also nails and other scraps like that. So it's kind of a way to reprocess other forms of metal. So my intention is to kind of replicate that myself. All of this scrap, somewhat successful bloom from my first smelt, combine all together, do a bit of an Aristotle furnace, re-consolidate it and hopefully we can get some larger pieces of metal to make some more substantial metal tools. So definitely check that out. And they are also doing an extended video of their primitive 14 using just stone tools. So also check that out. So a huge thank you to them, really great meeting up with them and being able to get their help. Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. If you want to see us continuing this journey of rebuilding civilization, be sure to support us on Patreon. And if nothing else, thank you 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.